Lesson plan
Hedonometer
A hedonometer or hedonimeter is a device used to gauge happiness or pleasure. Conceived of at least as early as 1880, the term was used in 1881 by the economist Francis Ysidro Edgeworth to describe "an ideally perfect instrument, a psychophysical machine, continually registering the height of pleasure experienced by an individual." More recently, it has been used to refer to a tool developed by Peter Dodds and Chris Danforth to gauge the valence of various corpora, including historical State of the Union addresses, song lyrics, and online tweets and blogs. It is operated out of the University of Vermont (UVM), and has been in use since 2008. A version of the tool is available at hedonometer.org, which they call a sort of "Dow Jones Index of Happiness", and hope will be used by government officials in conjunction with other metrics as a gauge of the population's well-being. Computer scientists trained the hedonometer to recognize the emotion behind data as tweets with sentiment analysis techniques. Danforth preferred a lexicon approach, that measures the weight of a word, due to the energy required for neural nets. As of 2020, the hedonometer at UVM scrapes about 50 million tweets each day. Using sentiment analysis, the hedonometer takes the emotional temperature of the words published by users of various platforms.
Article summary
A hedonometer or hedonimeter is a device used to gauge happiness or pleasure. Conceived of at least as early as 1880, the term was used in 1881 by the economist Francis Ysidro Edgeworth to describe "an ideally perfect instrument, a psychophysical machine, continually registering the height of pleasure experienced by an individual." More recently, it has been used to refer to a tool developed by Peter Dodds and Chris Danforth to gauge the valence of various corpora, including historical State of the Union addresses, song lyrics, and online tweets and blogs. It is operated out of the University of Vermont (UVM), and has been in use since 2008. A version of the tool is available at hedonometer.org, which they call a sort of "Dow Jones Index of Happiness", and hope will be used by government officials in conjunction with other metrics as a gauge of the population's well-being. Computer scientists trained the hedonometer to recognize the emotion behind data as tweets with sentiment analysis techniques. Danforth preferred a lexicon approach, that measures the weight of a word, due to the energy required for neural nets. As of 2020, the hedonometer at UVM scrapes about 50 million tweets each day. Using sentiment analysis, the hedonometer takes the emotional temperature of the words published by users of various platforms.
Key claims
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Discussion questions
- Summarise the article in your own words. Which single claim would you verify first, and why?
- Which claim in this article is most likely to be revised as the sources update? How would you check its current status?
- If two sources disagreed about one of these facts, what would you need in order to trust one over the other?
Bibliography
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Key claims and bibliography are generated from the same tracked claims and sources as the article page.