Data Science Knows That Monday Blues Are a Real Thing
It is a universal truth that Monday more often than not are just the worst days of the week. This day that starts the week, means that there is another mountain like load of work waiting for you to sort through at the office. This is why many individuals or professionals face what is known in today’s popular jargon as ‘Monday blues’. These refer to feelings of fatigue, irritation and total and absolute unwillingness to even start off the week because you have to go to the office. Earlier times it was just accepted as popular opinion, but Big Data Science has quite about confirmed it for us all. The University of Vermont Complex Systems Centre has got researchers that analyse the kind of tweets that are posted by people on a daily basis. The purpose of this exercise is to find out the happiness sentiment, think of it like more of a mood calculator, but for everyone. And according to these experts it is believed that Monday happens to be the worst day of the entire week while the mood slowly increases and becomes more and more normal and lively, thus peaking on Saturdays and then following the crash and burn cycle again. All of us have watched those cat cartoons where these cats get up with drooping eyelids and irritated faces and have to go about their day. But the amount of data that seems to be generated on a daily basis today and is more so developed quite on the level of the general public coupled with the improved and advanced mechanisms of analytics, could offer various new insights on how exactly the society as a whole works. A treat for all those sociologists and anthropologists who are always ready for some or the other new findings in to the psyche of the human mind. This university’s team of researches has tried to dabble in quite the impossible by trying to pin point the happiness quotient in the human population. While trying to calculate the wealth and productivity among people is quite easy but at the same time it is quite difficult to land on the calculation of the happiness level. What this team of researchers does is they take a sample of about close to 50 million twitter posts a day which is supposed to be roughly 10% of the website’s traffic.
Then they give scores from 1–9 to certain words out of the 10,000 commonly used words on Twitter and then draw a graphical analysis. Once they are done with that they come to various conclusions regarding how the map tilts or what is shown on the graphs. This technique is also used for various other days like for instance the day of the shooting at Las Vegas was supposedly the saddest day on Twitter. Such are the various possibilities and avenues opened up by the field of Data Science and with more and more professional training institutes like Imarticus Learning coming into the picture, the dream is soon becoming a reality for many.