afternoonbuzz

Short Friday Afternoon Buzz, January 23rd, 2015

Apparently there are rumors going around that Google might buy Twitter. That actually kind of works, in my mind. But Venture Beat says no… at least not yet. “Here’s the reality. Twitter’s stock may be down to $39.07 from its 52-week high of $62.07. But the company is still valued at a steep $24.43 billion. Google’s largest acquisition to date was Motorola for $12.4 billion, and it promptly sold that company to Lenovo less than two years later.”

Language wonk? Check out this analysis of Barack Obama’s State of the Union address. “Schmidt ana­lyzed the lan­guage of Obama’s pres­i­den­tial address—and that of every SOTU speech dating back to 1790—using Book­worm, a simple and pow­erful way to visu­alize trends in dig­i­tized texts. He and a Har­vard col­league cre­ated the plat­form for text analysis in 2011, and have since used it to examine the lan­guage used in every­thing from news­paper arti­cles to more than 500 episodes of The Simp­sons.”

Los Angeles County (CA) will get an online database for municipal stats and records. “The website would be a ‘one-stop shop’ for information on budgets, crime stats, welfare and the like that could be used and redistributed without any legal, social or technological limitations, according to county officials.”

Researchers are doing EVERYTHING with Twitter. The latest? using it to predict rates of coronary heart disease. “Previous studies have identified many factors that contribute to the risk of heart disease: traditional ones, like low income or smoking but also psychological ones, like stress. The Penn researchers demonstrated that Twitter can capture more information about heart disease risk than many traditional factors combined, as it also characterizes the psychological atmosphere of a community. They found that expressions of negative emotions such as anger, stress and fatigue in a county’s tweets were associated with higher heart disease risk. On the other hand, positive emotions like excitement and optimism were associated with lower risk.”

Windows has a roundup on Windows 10, which will apparently be a free upgrade.

Want to see the Super Bowl ads online as soon as they hit the Super Bowl? Check out Tumblr. Good afternoon, Internet…

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