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August 9, 2013

Strange But True!

Q. What is the happiest day of the week and day of the year? What about the saddest? How might such questions ever be answered?

A. By consulting the hedonometer at hedonometer.org (from the Greek “hedon” meaning “pleasure”), which uses the continuous flood of words “tweeted” over the social networking service Twitter to extract day-by-day happiness scores for the connected world, answer Peter Dodds et al. in “PLoS ONE” journal. More than 10,000 of the most common English words were assigned happiness scores from 1 for “sad” to 9 for “happy.”


 
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