I just read about a new company called Affectiva, which "grew out of collaborative research at the MIT Media Lab to help people better measure and communicate emotion."
This blog has previously discussed how human behaviour and sentiment is being analysed using data from the web:
(i) Web search volume can can improve forecasts of the current level of activity for a number of different economic time series, including automobile sales, home sales, retail sales, and travel behaviour (Google research paper on "predicting the present").
(ii) What people are searching for today can be predictive of what they will do in the near future (Yahoo! PNAS paper)
(iii) There have been various initiatives to make sense of sentiment data from Twitter
(iv) Facebook are analysing a rich seam of social networking and affect data
(v) Dan Hopkins and Gary King have developed an automated program to gather sentiment from online blogs
What makes Affectiva different to all of the above, is that (through their project Affdex), they have provided a way to collect web-data on physically expressed human emotions, not stated mood or revealed (search) preferences. Data on facial expressions and gestures — while people interact naturally with media, or other online experience — can be collected using Affdex. One could argue that this is closer to the objective truth than self-reported affect or observed behaviour.
Also, Affectiva's Q Sensor project measures galvanic skin response using a wearable, wireless biosensor. The sensor also measures temperature and activity.
Showing posts with label web. Show all posts
Showing posts with label web. Show all posts
Thursday, March 03, 2011
Friday, July 23, 2010
Links: 23rd July. Special Focus: Emigration.
1. Adam Jaffe: Building Program Evaluation Into The Design Of Public Research Support Programs
2. NSF Survey of Federal Funds for Research and Development
3. Greg Mankiw discusses the U.S. Council of Economic Advisers' "impossible job": measuring how many jobs were created by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. Here's a link to the CEA document.
4. Marginal Revolution flags a recent paper by Weber and Castillo from Yahoo! Research: The Demographics of Web Search. "How does the web search behavior of 'rich' and 'poor' people differ? Do men and women tend to click on different results for the same query?"
5. David McWilliams on emigration out of Ireland: "The ESRI predicts that 120,000 will leave the country in the next 18 months, on top of the 100,000 who have already gone in the past 18 months."
6. It was last year that the CSO reported that for the first time since 1995 more people left Ireland than moved here. That is, there was net outward migration.
7. Overall, the ESRI commentary warns that 200,000 people may be forced to emigrate between now and 2015 if unemployment does not abate.
8. In addition, a new Eurobarometer survey shows more than one fifth of Irish people are thinking of moving abroad for work. It also shows that 35% of Irish people feel employment prospects are better in other countries.
9. This Irish Times article states that current statistics show "Irish people are moving to both Canada and Australia in increasing numbers to escape the economic recession but are largely shunning traditional emigration routes to Britain and the US."
10. A companion article by the same journalist (Jamie Smyth) considers whether time abroad could end up as permanent emigration: "...if the Irish economy does not rebound in the next few years and create job opportunities for the next generation of graduates and school-leavers it seems very likely that a year spent working abroad will lead to longer term and more permanent emigration." To quote an old Pogues song, (hundreds of) thousands are "sailing".
2. NSF Survey of Federal Funds for Research and Development
3. Greg Mankiw discusses the U.S. Council of Economic Advisers' "impossible job": measuring how many jobs were created by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. Here's a link to the CEA document.
4. Marginal Revolution flags a recent paper by Weber and Castillo from Yahoo! Research: The Demographics of Web Search. "How does the web search behavior of 'rich' and 'poor' people differ? Do men and women tend to click on different results for the same query?"
5. David McWilliams on emigration out of Ireland: "The ESRI predicts that 120,000 will leave the country in the next 18 months, on top of the 100,000 who have already gone in the past 18 months."
6. It was last year that the CSO reported that for the first time since 1995 more people left Ireland than moved here. That is, there was net outward migration.
7. Overall, the ESRI commentary warns that 200,000 people may be forced to emigrate between now and 2015 if unemployment does not abate.
8. In addition, a new Eurobarometer survey shows more than one fifth of Irish people are thinking of moving abroad for work. It also shows that 35% of Irish people feel employment prospects are better in other countries.
9. This Irish Times article states that current statistics show "Irish people are moving to both Canada and Australia in increasing numbers to escape the economic recession but are largely shunning traditional emigration routes to Britain and the US."
10. A companion article by the same journalist (Jamie Smyth) considers whether time abroad could end up as permanent emigration: "...if the Irish economy does not rebound in the next few years and create job opportunities for the next generation of graduates and school-leavers it seems very likely that a year spent working abroad will lead to longer term and more permanent emigration." To quote an old Pogues song, (hundreds of) thousands are "sailing".
Friday, June 19, 2009
Call for proposals: Time-Sharing Experiments for the Social Sciences
Time-sharing Experiments for the Social Sciences (TESS) is seeking proposals. TESS is an NSF-funded project designed to increase opportunity for conducting innovative, Internet-based experiments on the general United States population. Investigators submit brief (5 page) proposals to TESS; these proposals are peer reviewed; successful proposals are fielded with a nationally representative survey panel at no cost to the investigators. Information about TESS, its new guidelines, and how to submit a proposal can all be found at http://tess.experimentcentral.org/
Sunday, May 10, 2009
Reminder: iQ Prize of €10,000 to Help A Good Idea
I mentioned before that Irish firm iQ Content are offering €10,000 for a good business idea. They are offering the iQ Prize for the country’s best new tech idea. The idea can be anything that’s internet-based; more details are available from www.iqprize.ie (no strings attached). There are 76 entries so far and 3 days to go. The closing date is Tuesday May 12th. See the video below to hear Morgan from iQ Content discuss why the competition was set up.
Monday, April 20, 2009
How To Improve Econometric Analysis Using Data from Google Trends - They Can Predict The Flu
In the current edition of the Economist, there is an article on how data from Google Trends can help predict economic statistics before they become available. For example, using data on searches for trucks and SUVs to predict the monthly sales of motor vehicles reduces the average error by up to 18% compared with the predictions from a model that did not incorporate the search data. These findings are from a new economics paper written Hal Varian, the Chief Economist at Google, with Hyunyoung Choi, also at Google. (There is a link to the Google working paper here on the Google Research Blog).
The authors argue that fluctuations in the frequency with which people search for certain words or phrases online can improve the accuracy of the econometric models used to predict, for example, retail-sales figures or house sales. "Actual numbers for such things are usually available only with a lag. But Google’s search data are updated every day, so they can in theory capture shifts in consumer behaviour before official numbers are released."
These data are available through a site called Google Trends; this software has been discussed on the blog quite a few times: here in relation to predicting economic sentiment from search engine behaviour.
I mentioned Gord Hotchkiss from searchengineland.com, who asked in the middle of 2008 "what if our mood turns to anxiety about the future? We still search, but we search for different things. We search for information needed to help us weather the storm. Or, we search out of a desperate desire need to know just how bad things are." To illustrate, Hotchkiss presents the following Google Trend graph which shows the relative search volume and news coverage volume of "house plans" (blue line) and "foreclosures" (red line) in America over the last few years:
The Varian and Choi paper discusses how for some things, like retail sales, the categories into which Google classifies its search-trend data correspond closely to what people may want to predict, such as the sales of a particular brand of car. For others, like sales of houses, things are less clear. It appears that searches for estate agents work better than those for home financing.
Some experimentation that I have done with with the Trends software has convinced me that the selection of the keyword is a crucial consideration when trying to analyse search volume. For example, the use of "Bush", "George Bush" and "George Bush Jr" produces very different results. So how can this issue be addressed? The answer may be to find the most popular keywords related to a core question, and to aggregate these for analysis. I have yet to find an aggregation function for keywords in Google Trends, but I have discovered a website that provides information about the most popular keywords used in web searches: www.Sitepsych.com
A list of the top 200 search terms that people use, week by week or month by month, is available for free from Sitepsych. A casual inspection of the top 200 list over a 90 day period, quickly tells you that the most popular things that people are looking for on the web are sex, music, games, dogs, golf, the weather and map-directions. Sex and music dominate.
Getting back to the Google Trends software, I noted before that Google lets users get their hands dirty with the secondary data. In fact, Varian and Choi write on the Google Research Blog that they want forecasting wannabes to download some Google Trends data and try to relate it to other economic time series. If you find an interesting pattern, they invite you to post your findings on a website and send a link to econ-forecast@google.com. They will report on the most interesting results in a later blog post.
I'm thinking of putting together something on when the recession entered the public consciousness, with particular reference to Ireland. Was this a slow-burning process or where there shocks? I suspect it was largely the former but with a preliminary shock in August 2007, a subsequent shock in August 2008 and a critical threshold in November 2008. Did it come through media reference first or through search volume? Again, I suspect that it was largely the former but that there was convergence over time. If the temporal evolution is distinct, can I show that one affected the other? This seems tricky. Should I expect non-stationarity in both series? I definitely think so.
For a list of links to all the software mentioned above, and a discussion of how online search statistics may help drive Irish economic recovery, see this post from earlier on the blog: Web-based Technology and the Recovery - What Do Irish Consumers Want?
Finally, below is a video from Google.org which shows that certain search terms are good indicators of flu activity. Google Flu Trends uses aggregated Google search data to estimate flu activity up to two weeks faster than traditional flu surveillance systems. There was an article published about this in Nature during February: Detecting influenza epidemics using search engine query data.
The authors argue that fluctuations in the frequency with which people search for certain words or phrases online can improve the accuracy of the econometric models used to predict, for example, retail-sales figures or house sales. "Actual numbers for such things are usually available only with a lag. But Google’s search data are updated every day, so they can in theory capture shifts in consumer behaviour before official numbers are released."
These data are available through a site called Google Trends; this software has been discussed on the blog quite a few times: here in relation to predicting economic sentiment from search engine behaviour.
I mentioned Gord Hotchkiss from searchengineland.com, who asked in the middle of 2008 "what if our mood turns to anxiety about the future? We still search, but we search for different things. We search for information needed to help us weather the storm. Or, we search out of a desperate desire need to know just how bad things are." To illustrate, Hotchkiss presents the following Google Trend graph which shows the relative search volume and news coverage volume of "house plans" (blue line) and "foreclosures" (red line) in America over the last few years:
The Varian and Choi paper discusses how for some things, like retail sales, the categories into which Google classifies its search-trend data correspond closely to what people may want to predict, such as the sales of a particular brand of car. For others, like sales of houses, things are less clear. It appears that searches for estate agents work better than those for home financing.
Some experimentation that I have done with with the Trends software has convinced me that the selection of the keyword is a crucial consideration when trying to analyse search volume. For example, the use of "Bush", "George Bush" and "George Bush Jr" produces very different results. So how can this issue be addressed? The answer may be to find the most popular keywords related to a core question, and to aggregate these for analysis. I have yet to find an aggregation function for keywords in Google Trends, but I have discovered a website that provides information about the most popular keywords used in web searches: www.Sitepsych.com
A list of the top 200 search terms that people use, week by week or month by month, is available for free from Sitepsych. A casual inspection of the top 200 list over a 90 day period, quickly tells you that the most popular things that people are looking for on the web are sex, music, games, dogs, golf, the weather and map-directions. Sex and music dominate.
Getting back to the Google Trends software, I noted before that Google lets users get their hands dirty with the secondary data. In fact, Varian and Choi write on the Google Research Blog that they want forecasting wannabes to download some Google Trends data and try to relate it to other economic time series. If you find an interesting pattern, they invite you to post your findings on a website and send a link to econ-forecast@google.com. They will report on the most interesting results in a later blog post.
I'm thinking of putting together something on when the recession entered the public consciousness, with particular reference to Ireland. Was this a slow-burning process or where there shocks? I suspect it was largely the former but with a preliminary shock in August 2007, a subsequent shock in August 2008 and a critical threshold in November 2008. Did it come through media reference first or through search volume? Again, I suspect that it was largely the former but that there was convergence over time. If the temporal evolution is distinct, can I show that one affected the other? This seems tricky. Should I expect non-stationarity in both series? I definitely think so.
For a list of links to all the software mentioned above, and a discussion of how online search statistics may help drive Irish economic recovery, see this post from earlier on the blog: Web-based Technology and the Recovery - What Do Irish Consumers Want?
Finally, below is a video from Google.org which shows that certain search terms are good indicators of flu activity. Google Flu Trends uses aggregated Google search data to estimate flu activity up to two weeks faster than traditional flu surveillance systems. There was an article published about this in Nature during February: Detecting influenza epidemics using search engine query data.
Does Facebook Hurt Your Grades? Can Twitter Make You Smarter? What About YouTube?
Does Facebook hurt your grades? This may be the question that parents everywhere will soon be asking their children. There is the argument that students cannot blame Facebook because if Facebook did not exist, they would find another distraction. However, Facebook users under parental supervision will probably have scant praise for the researchers from Ohio State University who have shown that the majority of students who use Facebook every day are underachieving by as much as an entire grade, compared with those who shun the site. See the story in the Times here.
The researchers discovered that students who spend their time accumulating friends, chatting and “poking” others on the site may devote as little as one hour a week to their academic work. “It is the equivalent of the difference between getting an A and a B,” said one of the researchers, Karpinski. Of course, this does not account for selection bias and unobserved characteristics. Also, the researchers have not yet analysed whether a student’s grades continue to deteriorate the longer he or she spends on Facebook. So the same individuals have not been tracked over time.
A new YouTube offering may take up as much of students' time as a Facebook account, though it may help their grades. "YouTube University" has gathered together all the video channels of the universities and colleges it's partnered with over the years and put them under the YouTube EDU banner. One of the videos (below) is from the University of Minnesoata and is about using Twitter, Wikis and instant messaging in the classroom.
Educational researcher Cynthia Lewis says that the use of social media in the classroom serves two purposes. The first is catching the attention of students and increasing their participation in the classroom. The second is preparing them for communicating in tomorrow's new media landscape. She says that "21st century literacies are all about digital media".
While it may be the case that too much Facebook can hurt your grades, doing the right amount of social networking through online platforms can help your career and is also a lot of fun. Plus, it may help learning in the classroom.
The researchers discovered that students who spend their time accumulating friends, chatting and “poking” others on the site may devote as little as one hour a week to their academic work. “It is the equivalent of the difference between getting an A and a B,” said one of the researchers, Karpinski. Of course, this does not account for selection bias and unobserved characteristics. Also, the researchers have not yet analysed whether a student’s grades continue to deteriorate the longer he or she spends on Facebook. So the same individuals have not been tracked over time.
A new YouTube offering may take up as much of students' time as a Facebook account, though it may help their grades. "YouTube University" has gathered together all the video channels of the universities and colleges it's partnered with over the years and put them under the YouTube EDU banner. One of the videos (below) is from the University of Minnesoata and is about using Twitter, Wikis and instant messaging in the classroom.
Educational researcher Cynthia Lewis says that the use of social media in the classroom serves two purposes. The first is catching the attention of students and increasing their participation in the classroom. The second is preparing them for communicating in tomorrow's new media landscape. She says that "21st century literacies are all about digital media".
While it may be the case that too much Facebook can hurt your grades, doing the right amount of social networking through online platforms can help your career and is also a lot of fun. Plus, it may help learning in the classroom.
Tuesday, March 31, 2009
Competition Time
A recent post on the Freakonomics blog links to a competition organised by the Fraser Institute which seeks proposals on what economic or public policy issues should be measured. First prize (sponsored by the R.J. Addington Center for the Study of Measurement) is $1,000 and there are five runners-up prizes of $500. (The closing date is May 15th).
Also, a recent article in the Irish Independent describes how an Irish firm is offering €10,000 for a good business idea. The firm is iQ Content, and they are offering the iQ Prize for the country’s best new tech idea. The idea can be anything that’s internet-based; more details are available from www.iqprize.ie (no strings attached). There are 15 entries so far and 42 days to go.
And don't forget, this Friday is the closing date for the HEA/Irish Independent competition for research students --- to win one of two €2,500 travel awards. What needs to be done? Your research - what difference does it make?
Also, a recent article in the Irish Independent describes how an Irish firm is offering €10,000 for a good business idea. The firm is iQ Content, and they are offering the iQ Prize for the country’s best new tech idea. The idea can be anything that’s internet-based; more details are available from www.iqprize.ie (no strings attached). There are 15 entries so far and 42 days to go.
And don't forget, this Friday is the closing date for the HEA/Irish Independent competition for research students --- to win one of two €2,500 travel awards. What needs to be done? Your research - what difference does it make?
Friday, March 27, 2009
HTML Code and URL's
On a practical note, I've been getting frustrated recently with URL's getting broken in the comments section of the blog. I noticed that Michael was using html to circumvent the problem and it is easily done. Just follow the template below.
You need to have the "http" included and to paste in the URL twice - once in the quotation marks, and then again separately. Some more tips and a template to copy are available here.
While we're on the topic of URL's, I've noticed recently that Steve has been using a truncation service. The two most popular that I've seen are:
(i) http://www.tinyurl.ie/
(ii) http://url.ie/
These truncation services basically generate a short URL in lieu of a long one; people who click on the new one get automatically forwarded to the original URL. This is quite handy for a lot of Web 2.0 platforms, or for email without html where it's not possible to insert a hyperlink. Does anyone know though - how long the truncated URL's generally last for?
You need to have the "http" included and to paste in the URL twice - once in the quotation marks, and then again separately. Some more tips and a template to copy are available here.
While we're on the topic of URL's, I've noticed recently that Steve has been using a truncation service. The two most popular that I've seen are:
(i) http://www.tinyurl.ie/
(ii) http://url.ie/
These truncation services basically generate a short URL in lieu of a long one; people who click on the new one get automatically forwarded to the original URL. This is quite handy for a lot of Web 2.0 platforms, or for email without html where it's not possible to insert a hyperlink. Does anyone know though - how long the truncated URL's generally last for?
Thursday, February 26, 2009
The Datarati
The 'Datarati' refers to "a new generation of data gurus who have emerged on the online advertising scene. The 'Datarati' are responsible for using data to optimise the campaign performance of the world’s largest brand owners." I read about this group on the blog of Will Scully-Power, after discovering this blog-post: "Google’s Chief Economist Hal Varian on the Future of Data".
A quote is as follows:
The blog-post links to an article in the McKinsey Quarterly, which includes an audio-stream. We've mentioned Hal Varian quite a bit on the blog before, including this post with a link to a talk by Varian on the "Economics of Internet Search".
Also worth looking at is the interview with Varian conducted by Kenneth Train. This can be accessed on Kenneth Train's website (here). There are also some very interesting interviews with other Berkeley Economists, including George Akerlof, David Card, Daniel McFadden and Janet Yellen.
A quote is as follows:
“I keep saying the sexy job in the next ten years will be statisticians. People think I’m joking, but who would’ve guessed that computer engineers would’ve been the sexy job of the 1990s?"
The blog-post links to an article in the McKinsey Quarterly, which includes an audio-stream. We've mentioned Hal Varian quite a bit on the blog before, including this post with a link to a talk by Varian on the "Economics of Internet Search".
Also worth looking at is the interview with Varian conducted by Kenneth Train. This can be accessed on Kenneth Train's website (here). There are also some very interesting interviews with other Berkeley Economists, including George Akerlof, David Card, Daniel McFadden and Janet Yellen.
Monday, February 23, 2009
To Tweet, or Not to Tweet
We have discussed the technology developed by Twitter.com before (here), with a particular emphasis on the information that can be generated from the search tool (using applications from Summize Labs). Since then Summize Labs was acquired by Twitter (see the story from the Twitter blog here). One used to be able to enter a topic in the Summize Labs search engine to find up-to-the-second "tweets" about that topic, then automatically analyze the tweeted attitudes. According to the story on the Twitter blog, they said they would add search and its related features to their core offering. So far, all I can see available is a limited search application (here), which also shows some trending topics. if anyone is aware of other features that are currently available, I would be interseted to hear about them.
Besides using Twitter data in novel applications, we have also discussed offline how Twitter might be a useful tool at academic (and other types of) conferences. The essence of Twitter is not to provide data for social scientists; rather - it is about sending a series of thoughts - each of 140 characters or less - to a network of friends (using a laptop or mobile phone). Importantly, anyone can listen in - you can send a universal text message to the whole planet - as James Harkin describes it in a recent Times article. The article also covers an apparent backlash against the use of Twitter. The criticism is "why would anyone want to dedicate time informing everyone in the world what he or she is up to at any given moment?" The answer, is the idea of “being in the loop”.
A Sunday Times article from yesterday (by Andy Pemberton) further develops the criticisms that are being made about the use of Twitter. According to Pemberton, it’s a fair question to ask "what kind of person shares information with the world the minute they get it? And just who are the “followers” willing to tune into this rolling news service of the ego?" Pemberton mentions the suggestion by clinical psychologist Oliver James that “twittering stems from a lack of identity. It’s a constant update of who you are, what you are, where you are. Nobody would Twitter if they had a strong sense of identity.” According to Dr David Lewis, a cognitive neuropsychologist and director of research based at the University of Sussex, “using Twitter suggests a level of insecurity whereby, unless people recognise you, you cease to exist."
The criticisms above may seem somewhat extreme to avid Twitter users - and maybe Twitter is just an added layer of online social capital, or a bit of fun, for most users. I've blogged recently (here and here) about personality and usage of online social networks such as Bebo or Facebook; a similar study on Twitter usage could be illuminating. Alain de Botton (author of Status Anxiety) offers the most sanguine comment in the article by Andy Pemberton: “Perhaps closeness is not always possible, or desirable. Twitter gives us another option. It says: I want to be in contact with you, but not too much. It’s the equivalent of sending a postcard.”
Finally, in terms of how Twitter may be useful for conferences and other activities, the Pemberton artcile mentions that companies such as Starbucks have been quick to recognise the marketing potential of Twitter; even think tanks such as the Institute for Public Policy Research have begun using twitter to publicise their activities.
Despite the criticism from some quarters, Twitter boasts 6m users — small compared to Facebook’s 150m — but its audience has surged by more than 1,000% in the past year. Right now, the San Francisco-based company that owns Twitter is valued at $250m, its inventors recently rejected an offer from Facebook to buy their company for $500m. The article by James Harkin is followed with a short piece by Mike Harvey, which contains five tips for those who wanted to start tweeting.
Besides using Twitter data in novel applications, we have also discussed offline how Twitter might be a useful tool at academic (and other types of) conferences. The essence of Twitter is not to provide data for social scientists; rather - it is about sending a series of thoughts - each of 140 characters or less - to a network of friends (using a laptop or mobile phone). Importantly, anyone can listen in - you can send a universal text message to the whole planet - as James Harkin describes it in a recent Times article. The article also covers an apparent backlash against the use of Twitter. The criticism is "why would anyone want to dedicate time informing everyone in the world what he or she is up to at any given moment?" The answer, is the idea of “being in the loop”.
A Sunday Times article from yesterday (by Andy Pemberton) further develops the criticisms that are being made about the use of Twitter. According to Pemberton, it’s a fair question to ask "what kind of person shares information with the world the minute they get it? And just who are the “followers” willing to tune into this rolling news service of the ego?" Pemberton mentions the suggestion by clinical psychologist Oliver James that “twittering stems from a lack of identity. It’s a constant update of who you are, what you are, where you are. Nobody would Twitter if they had a strong sense of identity.” According to Dr David Lewis, a cognitive neuropsychologist and director of research based at the University of Sussex, “using Twitter suggests a level of insecurity whereby, unless people recognise you, you cease to exist."
The criticisms above may seem somewhat extreme to avid Twitter users - and maybe Twitter is just an added layer of online social capital, or a bit of fun, for most users. I've blogged recently (here and here) about personality and usage of online social networks such as Bebo or Facebook; a similar study on Twitter usage could be illuminating. Alain de Botton (author of Status Anxiety) offers the most sanguine comment in the article by Andy Pemberton: “Perhaps closeness is not always possible, or desirable. Twitter gives us another option. It says: I want to be in contact with you, but not too much. It’s the equivalent of sending a postcard.”
Finally, in terms of how Twitter may be useful for conferences and other activities, the Pemberton artcile mentions that companies such as Starbucks have been quick to recognise the marketing potential of Twitter; even think tanks such as the Institute for Public Policy Research have begun using twitter to publicise their activities.
Despite the criticism from some quarters, Twitter boasts 6m users — small compared to Facebook’s 150m — but its audience has surged by more than 1,000% in the past year. Right now, the San Francisco-based company that owns Twitter is valued at $250m, its inventors recently rejected an offer from Facebook to buy their company for $500m. The article by James Harkin is followed with a short piece by Mike Harvey, which contains five tips for those who wanted to start tweeting.
Thursday, January 22, 2009
Web-based Technology and the Recovery - What Do Irish Consumers Want?
In keeping with the recent theme of Irish economic recovery, I have been wondering how existing (and not-yet-developed) web-based technologies can be geared towards enterprise and the enhancement of existing business activities. In particular I have been thinking about technologies which summarise trends in online search and media covearge - often these are provided for free, in the spirit of open-source software.
Now more than ever, there is a need for market research to find out what Irish people will buy during a recession (Fergal mentioned cosmetics recently). Also, what is it that Irish people really want - what are the new product developments that could be rolled out to re-invigorate consumer spending?
According to Genevieve Carbery in last week's Irish Times, social networking site Bebo was the most searched-for term in Ireland in 2008. But rival Facebook was the fastest-growing search term last year, while Polish social networking site Nasza Klasa topped the rising searches list in Limerick and Galway.
These statistics may change during 2009, but it is possible to keep track of developments using Google’s 'Insight for Search' website (www.google.com/ insights/search/), which provides information on the most popular search terms in different geographical categories and time frames. For the moment, it seems that there is a definite demand for "ambient awareness".
We have discussed the Google Trends software (similar to Search for Insights) quite enthusiastically on this blog before, again here, and also Quantcast Web User Demographics and Alexa.com. The Google Trends software has been enhanced to let users get their hands dirty with the secondary data, which potentially could be extremely useful. Writing here on the Google Research Blog, Heej Hwang from the Google Trends team describes how the Trends data can be downloaded to a .csv file (a common format to import/export data), which can be opened in most spreadsheet applications (or easily converted to do so).
The technology developed by Summize Labs is also worth considering. (Summize was recently acquired by Twitter, which I just discovered here). One used to be able to enter a topic in the Summize Labs search engine to find up-to-the-second "tweets" about that topic, then automatically analyze the attitudes expressed in the "tweets". (As an example, the last time I looked, the overall sentiment on Obama was "swell"). This could prove to be a very powerful tool for political scientists, marketers and all kinds of researchers. Twitter will be adding search and its related features to its core offering in the very near future.
We've also mentioned before that Google's chief economist is predicting that the brightest graduates in economics will seek their fortune in marketing in the years ahead. This will be due to the Internet giving companies the information-rich environment once available only in financial markets (see post here).
In June, searches for the word “recession” peaked at 30 times the 2007 average. There were almost three times as many searches for “recession” as there were for “Celtic Tiger” in 2008. Maybe there will be more searches for "recovery" in 2009?
Now more than ever, there is a need for market research to find out what Irish people will buy during a recession (Fergal mentioned cosmetics recently). Also, what is it that Irish people really want - what are the new product developments that could be rolled out to re-invigorate consumer spending?
According to Genevieve Carbery in last week's Irish Times, social networking site Bebo was the most searched-for term in Ireland in 2008. But rival Facebook was the fastest-growing search term last year, while Polish social networking site Nasza Klasa topped the rising searches list in Limerick and Galway.
These statistics may change during 2009, but it is possible to keep track of developments using Google’s 'Insight for Search' website (www.google.com/ insights/search/), which provides information on the most popular search terms in different geographical categories and time frames. For the moment, it seems that there is a definite demand for "ambient awareness".
We have discussed the Google Trends software (similar to Search for Insights) quite enthusiastically on this blog before, again here, and also Quantcast Web User Demographics and Alexa.com. The Google Trends software has been enhanced to let users get their hands dirty with the secondary data, which potentially could be extremely useful. Writing here on the Google Research Blog, Heej Hwang from the Google Trends team describes how the Trends data can be downloaded to a .csv file (a common format to import/export data), which can be opened in most spreadsheet applications (or easily converted to do so).
The technology developed by Summize Labs is also worth considering. (Summize was recently acquired by Twitter, which I just discovered here). One used to be able to enter a topic in the Summize Labs search engine to find up-to-the-second "tweets" about that topic, then automatically analyze the attitudes expressed in the "tweets". (As an example, the last time I looked, the overall sentiment on Obama was "swell"). This could prove to be a very powerful tool for political scientists, marketers and all kinds of researchers. Twitter will be adding search and its related features to its core offering in the very near future.
We've also mentioned before that Google's chief economist is predicting that the brightest graduates in economics will seek their fortune in marketing in the years ahead. This will be due to the Internet giving companies the information-rich environment once available only in financial markets (see post here).
In June, searches for the word “recession” peaked at 30 times the 2007 average. There were almost three times as many searches for “recession” as there were for “Celtic Tiger” in 2008. Maybe there will be more searches for "recovery" in 2009?
Monday, January 05, 2009
How extraverted is honey.bunny77@hotmail.de?
A recent article in Technimentis explains what our email addresses may reveal about our personalities. (I had problems opening this webpage with Explorer so you may want to use a different browser). The story is based on findings by Back, Schmukle and Egloff (2008): "How extraverted is honey.bunny77@hotmail.de? Inferring personality from e-mail addresses", Journal of Research in Personality, 42 (4), 1116-1122.
Six hundred participants provided their e-mail address and were assessed with a short form of the Big Five Inventory, and the Narcissistic Personality Inventory. Another batch of participants ("observers") rated all of the first groups’ e-mail addresses on 11 personality ratings. The researchers discovered three main results:
1. Observers agreed on their ratings of the e-mail address owners’ personalities.
2. Observers’ ratings were accurate on all personality dimensions except extraversion.
3. E-mail addresses influenced observers, provided valid personality cues, and were utilized fully to make judgments.
The conclusion offered is that individuals could accurately judge the openness level of an individual solely on e-mail address alone; conscientiousness and narcissism are somewhat more difficult to track, and agreeableness and neuroticism slightly more challenging again.
Six hundred participants provided their e-mail address and were assessed with a short form of the Big Five Inventory, and the Narcissistic Personality Inventory. Another batch of participants ("observers") rated all of the first groups’ e-mail addresses on 11 personality ratings. The researchers discovered three main results:
1. Observers agreed on their ratings of the e-mail address owners’ personalities.
2. Observers’ ratings were accurate on all personality dimensions except extraversion.
3. E-mail addresses influenced observers, provided valid personality cues, and were utilized fully to make judgments.
The conclusion offered is that individuals could accurately judge the openness level of an individual solely on e-mail address alone; conscientiousness and narcissism are somewhat more difficult to track, and agreeableness and neuroticism slightly more challenging again.
Wednesday, December 03, 2008
Do Blogs Have Personalities?
According to http://www.typealyzer.com/ they do. Apparently this blog is of the type - ISTJ (The Duty Fulfillers): "The responsible and hardworking type. They are especially attuned to the details of life and are careful about getting the facts right. Conservative by nature they are often reluctant to take any risks whatsoever. The Duty Fulfillers are happy to be let alone and to be able to work int heir own pace. They know what they have to do and how to do it."
The diagram below shows what parts of the brain are dominant during writing on this blog, according to Typealyzer. However, I take all of this with some caution. According to a similar engine (GenderAnalyzer), it is 63% likely that this blog is written by women. That is incorrect. However, some trials with other blogs predict gender correctly.
The diagram below shows what parts of the brain are dominant during writing on this blog, according to Typealyzer. However, I take all of this with some caution. According to a similar engine (GenderAnalyzer), it is 63% likely that this blog is written by women. That is incorrect. However, some trials with other blogs predict gender correctly.
Friday, November 28, 2008
Economics 2.0
"For decades, many of the brightest graduates in economics sought their fortune in finance. In coming years, they will seek it in marketing, as the Internet gives all companies the information-rich environment once available only in financial markets."
That’s the prediction of Hal Varian, Chief Economist at Google, and economist at the University of California at Berkeley. Varian discusses why marketing is the new finance in this Wall Street Journal article from last year.
Below, Varian gives a lecture on the "Economics of Internet Search", from this year's Calit2-sponsored series, "Behavioral, Social, and Computer Sciences Seminar Series" - Friday, May 23, 2008. Following on from the last post about 'The Weather and Work', apparently "it's good for Google if the weather is bad, but not too bad..."
That’s the prediction of Hal Varian, Chief Economist at Google, and economist at the University of California at Berkeley. Varian discusses why marketing is the new finance in this Wall Street Journal article from last year.
Below, Varian gives a lecture on the "Economics of Internet Search", from this year's Calit2-sponsored series, "Behavioral, Social, and Computer Sciences Seminar Series" - Friday, May 23, 2008. Following on from the last post about 'The Weather and Work', apparently "it's good for Google if the weather is bad, but not too bad..."
Friday, October 24, 2008
Do you ever wonder what proportion of email is spam?
Do you ever get frustrated having to delete spam?
A new IZA working paper by Caliendo, Clement, Papies and Scheel-Kopeinig reports that more than 70% of global e-mail traffic consists of unsolicited and commercial direct marketing (also known as "spam"). From an economic point of view, the authors point out that dealing with spam incurs high costs for organisations. The logical response? To reduce spam-related costs by installing spam filters.
Caliendo et al are interested in the selection bias associated with installing a spam filter. Using data from a German university, they measure the (time use) costs associated with spam, and the costs savings of spam filters. Their findings indicate that central IT costs are of little relevance since the majority of spam costs stem from employees who spend working time identifying and deleting spam. Also, the working time lost due to spam is approximately 1,200 minutes per employee per year. Caliendo et al suggest that these costs could be reduced by roughly 35% through the installation of a spam filter mechanism.
As another alternative, people could switch to email providers with inbuilt spam filters (automatic filtering perhaps...). I never get spam in my Gmail inbox; and emails that I want to receive there are never blocked.
A new IZA working paper by Caliendo, Clement, Papies and Scheel-Kopeinig reports that more than 70% of global e-mail traffic consists of unsolicited and commercial direct marketing (also known as "spam"). From an economic point of view, the authors point out that dealing with spam incurs high costs for organisations. The logical response? To reduce spam-related costs by installing spam filters.
Caliendo et al are interested in the selection bias associated with installing a spam filter. Using data from a German university, they measure the (time use) costs associated with spam, and the costs savings of spam filters. Their findings indicate that central IT costs are of little relevance since the majority of spam costs stem from employees who spend working time identifying and deleting spam. Also, the working time lost due to spam is approximately 1,200 minutes per employee per year. Caliendo et al suggest that these costs could be reduced by roughly 35% through the installation of a spam filter mechanism.
As another alternative, people could switch to email providers with inbuilt spam filters (automatic filtering perhaps...). I never get spam in my Gmail inbox; and emails that I want to receive there are never blocked.
Thursday, October 16, 2008
Online Social Networks, Again
Imagine are a creative marketing agency based in the centre of Dublin. In the current edition of the Imagine newsletter, there's a useful reference to a New York Times article about Facebook and it's impact on social interaction. Apparently social scientists have a name for incessant online contact; "they call it “ambient awareness.” It is, they say, very much like being physically near someone and picking up on his mood through the little things he does — body language, sighs, stray comments — out of the corner of your eye." An extract from the article (below) mentions some data-collection tools that people might find interesting.
One of the most popular new tools is Twitter, a ... messaging service that allows its ... users to broadcast to their friends haiku-length updates — limited to 140 characters... — on what they’re doing. There are other services for reporting where you’re traveling (Dopplr)... And there are even tools that give your location. When the new iPhone, with built-in tracking, was introduced in July, one million people began using Loopt, a piece of software that automatically tells all your friends exactly where you are.
Monday, September 15, 2008
Personality on Social Network Sites: An Application of the Five Factor Model
Stefan Wehrli, September 2008, Paper available here
...We use data from an online survey with 1560 respondents from a major Swiss technical university and their corresponding online profiles and friendship networks on a popular Social Network Site (SNS)... we collected survey data on personality traits with a short question inventory of the Five Factor Personality Model. We show how these.. influence participation, adoption time, nodal degree and ego-network growth over a period of 4 months on the networking platform... extraversion (is) a major driving force in the tie formation process. We find a counter-intuitive positive effect for neuroticism, a negative influence for conscientiousness and no effects for openness and agreeableness.
Wednesday, September 10, 2008
We Feel Fine
Gerard O'Neill has flagged an interesting data collection engine on the Amarach Research Blog; its called: "We Feel Fine". Full details are avilable here. The engine automatically scours the Internet every ten minutes, harvesting human feelings from a large number of blogs. Blog data comes from a variety of online sources, including LiveJournal, MSN Spaces, MySpace, Blogger, Flickr, Technorati, Feedster, Ice Rocket, and Google. Blog posts are scanned for occurrences of the phrases "I feel" and "I am feeling".
Once a sentence containing "I feel" or "I am feeling" is found, the system "looks backward to the beginning of the sentence, and forward to the end of the sentence, and then saves the full sentence in a database. Once saved, the sentence is scanned to see if it includes one of about 5,000 pre-identified feelings. Because a high percentage of all blogs are hosted by one of several large blogging companies (Blogger, MySpace, MSN Spaces, LiveJournal, etc), the URL format of many blog posts can be used to extract the username of the post's author.
Given the author's username, it is possible to find the user's profile page; and from the profile page, it is possible to extract the age, gender, country, state, and city of the blog's owner. Given the country, state, and city, information on local weather conditions is also retrieved! This could be a powerfiul tool for understanding cross-cultural variation in self-reported well being, while controlling for geography and weather conditions.
Once a sentence containing "I feel" or "I am feeling" is found, the system "looks backward to the beginning of the sentence, and forward to the end of the sentence, and then saves the full sentence in a database. Once saved, the sentence is scanned to see if it includes one of about 5,000 pre-identified feelings. Because a high percentage of all blogs are hosted by one of several large blogging companies (Blogger, MySpace, MSN Spaces, LiveJournal, etc), the URL format of many blog posts can be used to extract the username of the post's author.
Given the author's username, it is possible to find the user's profile page; and from the profile page, it is possible to extract the age, gender, country, state, and city of the blog's owner. Given the country, state, and city, information on local weather conditions is also retrieved! This could be a powerfiul tool for understanding cross-cultural variation in self-reported well being, while controlling for geography and weather conditions.
Tuesday, June 24, 2008
Do Ads Work?
Also mentioned in the Times article cited below - "Google is expected this week to roll out another tool designed to show how people browsing the web respond to online advertising. By comparing the behaviour of people who are exposed to particular adverts with those who are not, the company hopes to give advertisers feedback about which campaigns are are successful."
This may be one of the first instances where advertising has been evaluated in the spirit of randomised controlled trials. I'm not aware of the literature on advertising evalauation, but I suspect that its very hard to design a (realistic) experiment when most advertising hits the entire population. However, the targeting capabilties of web advertising mean that treatment and control groups can be established far easier. In saying all of that, we stil have to remember that web advertising is a different beast to other forms of commercial campaign.
This may be one of the first instances where advertising has been evaluated in the spirit of randomised controlled trials. I'm not aware of the literature on advertising evalauation, but I suspect that its very hard to design a (realistic) experiment when most advertising hits the entire population. However, the targeting capabilties of web advertising mean that treatment and control groups can be established far easier. In saying all of that, we stil have to remember that web advertising is a different beast to other forms of commercial campaign.
Google to give advertisers web-tracking data
An article in today's Times describes how Google today expanded its offering to advertisers by unveiling a service (AdPlanner) which lets one track which websites target audiences are visiting.
"According to reports in the US, Google is planning to gather information about websites from a range of sources, including its own search engine but also third parties and, possibly, more traditional panels which track consumer behaviour online... One Google source suggested that there would be some overlap between the new service and another recent offering from Google called 'Trends for websites' (Ed- Google Trends, as discussed before on this blog --- here), which allows anyone to measure websites' audiences using a combination of Google search data and other information that web users have opted to share about their behaviour. Google's new tool is thought to be similar to another service called Quantcast (also discussed on this blog before --- here)... In addition, AdPlanner is expected to be free - at least to begin with."
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