Big data tracks the emotions of people using social media such as Twitter

Q. Here’s one for all you Twitterers out there: On what day of the week and at what time of day are your words likely to be positive? When might they be more negative? A. The answer rests with “big data” and “small science,” that can be done with pen and paper rather than fancy equipment and a big budget, say David G. Myers and C. Nathan Dewall in “Exploring Psychology.” Employing new technologies, such as smart-phone apps, body-worn sensors and social media, researchers use “big data” naturalistic observation to freely track people’s location, activities and opinions. Imagine for a moment the data pouring in from the billions of people on Facebook, Twitter, and Google. “One research team studied the ups and downs of human moods by counting positive and negative words in 504 million Twitter messages from 84 countries.” Perhaps not surprisingly, they found that people seem happier on weekends, shortly after arising and in the evening, with positive posts highest late Saturday night. Positive posts were lowest on Tuesday afternoons.

Interestingly, “another study found that the proportion of negative emotions (especially anger-related words) in 148 million tweets from 1347 U.S. counties predicted the counties’ heart disease rates, and did so even better than other predictors such as smoking and obesity.” Q. The research video shows a shark stalking and then attacking an apparently defenseless hagfish. The shark bites the middle of the eel-like creature’s body, completely flattening it, but immediately relents, spitting out its victim and scurrying away. The hagfish swims away seemingly unfazed and unharmed. How can this be? A. “Hagfish aren’t a typical fish – they have cartilage instead of bones and a primitive skeletal rod… instead of a backbone,” writes Elizabeth Pennisi on the website sciencemag.org. When attacked, they exude copious amounts of slime so unappealing to predators like the shark that they promptly spit the hagfish out.

But how could the hagfish come through the ordeal unscathed? When marine biologist Douglas Fudge carefully reviewed the video, he discovered that the hagfish’s skin is only loosely connected to its muscles and organs. Lab experiments using a guillotine-like machine topped with a shark’s tooth further revealed that a hagfish’s skin just folds around the tooth, giving the internal organs ample room to move out of harm’s way. The loose skin gives the hagfish the ability to slip through narrow openings only half their body width and to tie themselves into knots around rotting carcasses to strip off the flesh, making up for their lack of traditional jaws. Q. Picture the scene, as described by “Discover” magazine: 18-time world champion Go player Lee Sedol was locked into fierce competition when his opponent made a move “so unorthodox, Sedol left the room to regain his composure.” Can you identify this formidable opponent? A. Go, an ancient Chinese board game, is “elegantly simple yet wickedly difficult to master because of the near-infinite number of legal moves on the board’s 19-by-19 grid,” explains the magazine’s Carl Engelking. It was 2016, and Sedol’s opponent was AlphaGo, a program from Google’s AI research company that paired a traditional Monte Carlo tree search with two kinds of neural networks. Using these, AlphaGo analyzed “30 million moves made by human experts and then discovered new strategies by playing itself thousands of times.”

The result? AlphaGo executed Move 37, “a move a professional player would never make,” and went on to defeat Sedol 4-1 in the historic showdown in South Korea.