The Best of Larry List

After not checking my mail.com account for a few months, I was shocked to find over 3000 emails from Dr. Larry Gross as a subscriber to his infamous "Larry List". These emails are all fascinating and interesting articles that Dr. Gross shares to this email list and can number in the dozens per day. Going through them all finally, I wanted to share my favorite articles. There is really no rhyme or reason to them besides that I found them interesting. Enjoy!

Atmosphere of Distortion
This article discusses the relationship between climate change and daily temperatures. Though climate change  is reflective of long term changes and patterns, skeptics often point to snow and cold weather as arguments against climate change.

DOLLY Data
This map represents aggregated Twitter data on the presence of "beer" (blue) and "church" (red) by frequency and quantity. This is an interesting use of Twitter which echoes my involvement with the Twitter sentiment project at the Annenberg Innovation Lab. Twitter is still a new arena for communication scholars, so I find these endeavors into how to operationalize the data fascinating.

Infinity
This article interests me because of the interesting connection math has between sciences and humanities. Theoretical math has inextricable ties to both physics and philosophy, which this article explores. Especially when one thinks about why we are here, where did we come from, and how do things function, areas such as physics, communication, religion, mathematics, and philosophy all find space to explore the answers.

Sky Monsters
These images are not interesting from a research perspective, but simply because they are beautiful representations of what might otherwise be a normal storm cloud.

Movies in Miniatures
This portfolio of pictures represents (as the artist describes) an intersection between Eastern art with Western film. My interests in narrative make these photographs interesting. Without captioning or explaining, viewers can instantly recognize the scene and thus, the film that the pictures are representatives and icons of the narratives themselves. Despite the difference in style and presentation, the image above is instantly recognizable as the scene from Alien where the creature emerges from the character's chest.

Singapore Airport Art
There have been many attempts at airport art, as a distraction from the banality of airport travel and inevitable delays and lost baggage. This one might be the most successful. It is reminiscent of a lava lamp, with its simple shapes and movements, but hypnotizing and enticing.

Prius Features
This video is just hilarious. The irony in adopting environmentally friendly policies is that you can never truly offset the carbon one produces from being alive. Massive deaths (a la Soylent Green) could be advocated for on behalf of the environment. Funny and philosophical, the perfect Onion piece.


*Images retrieved from websites listed

Netvibes: Research tools for students and scholars

Netvibes is a great research tool for scholars and a news tool for people alike. There are various types of RSS feed dashboards, but this one has the features and ease of use that works for me. Coupling this tool with the PagetoRSS functionality, creates a one-stop research location.

I have the Netvibes dashboard load as one of my homepages, making sure that I see the headlines in my research areas of interest. Because the dashboard is full of RSS feeds (as well as other widgets), it automatically updates, making my research time more efficient and easy. As opposed to an iGoogle homepage, the Netvibes dashboard allows for tabbed feeds, where dozens of tabs organize feeds by topic area. The set-up and organize of each tab can be changed in terms of columns and how many headlines the feeds draw. The site advertises "limitless personalization" from background art to widgets and apps, custom layouts, and RSS feed options.

This is the homepage of my dashboard, which has a weather app, general news feeds, a to-do list, and notepad. Each tab has a different research interest and toggling between tabs brings up new feeds and apps that I've loaded to the page. Adding the feeds are as easy as copying the link to the RSS feed on a website and pasting it in the "Add Content" tab at the top left corner of the dashboard. This adds a box to the page that updates with headlines and articles. I primarily use GoogleNews, JSTOR updates, and professional blogs to populate my tabs. My background is a nice, relaxing beach as a personal touch to the dashboard. 

The benefits of this tool (similar to other dashboards) are multiple. I find Netvibes the most convenient and intuitive to use, but the salient point is that these dashboard and RSS feeds can deliver relevant news and journal articles in various topics to one location.

• With minimal set-up, the RSS feeds automatically pull in information
• Dashboard can be accesses anywhere with an internet connection
• Apps and widgets, such as weather, notepads, and to-do lists (with hundreds of others) are easily added through the "add content" link
• Tabs organize and separate different research topics with no limit in the number of tabs
• Adding content is as easy as copying and pasting links
• Easily delete and modify feeds
• PagetoRSS makes sites without RSS feeds easily accessible on a dashboard

The Netvibes's dashboards are automatically private, but people can publish their dashboards or share them with others. Additionally, premium features are available for those who are willing or for some reason need extra features and functionality.

There is an overwhelming amount of information online. Checking one location instead of multiple locations helps save time and sanity for scholars of any discipline. Whichever dashboard works best for you, make sure to update it and routinely check it, so you will always be up-to-date on timely, important, and relevant news for your research interests.

The Power of Online Sentiment Data: Article Review

An article in the April 2012 issue of Human Communication Research entitled, “Emotions, public opinion, and US presidential approval rates” argues that emotions in online discussion forums can be directly linked to approval ratings of the president. Not only does this article find an application for aggregated data from online sources, but it also uses the emotional content of the forums to create conclusions about the state of public opinion. If people, especially youth, are becoming more cynical and skeptical of political activities, they pull away from the system, but still need an outlet to express their emotions. Gonzalez-Bailon, Banchs, Kaltenbrunner (2012) separate out emotionally-charged words from online discussion forms labeled “politics” using the ANEW (Affective Norms for English Language Words) list. These words are rated based on three types of emotional factors: valence, arousal, and dominance. Valence indicates strong feelings, whether positive or negative (e.g., happiness or sadness), arousal indicates physical changes (e.g., excitement, anger), and dominance indicates response or actions (e.g., submission, awe). The conclusions were that the invasion of Iraq used the most words associated with a high arousal and that this use of arousal words helped emotions “crystallize into generalized sentiment” (Gonzalez-Bailon, et al., 2012). Thus, important events and the effects on public opinion can be assessed through online forums where “public officials can use it to respond faster to issues of public concern, and ultimately improve the channels for democratic governance” (Gonzalez-Bailon, et al., 2012).

This article has important implications for researchers that are attempting to create coherent narratives for public opinion from online spaces such as discussion forums and social media sites. The current issues regarding such data is how to code and make sense of the information and how (if possible) to generalize this data to the general public as these populations tend to be extremely narrow and race, gender, and age specific. The Gonzales-Bailon et al. article is an important step in understanding online information by using emotions as the tool to glean political views and opinions and also the validity of using such skewed online populations to make conclusions about the public. Using emotions as a standard is complicated, but the ANEW list creates a formalized standard for the comparison. It would be interesting to see if these emotions corresponded to other important political events besides presidential approval ratings and what other emotion-charged online discussions could be analyzed using this same method.

A current example of this type of data analysis is being performed in the Annenberg Innovation Lab on the Twitter Sentiment Team to determine how tweets regarding republican primary candidates can predict success and overall popularity among the candidates. Take a look at their real time dashboard to learn more: AIL Twitter Sentiment Dashboard.

As people become more withdrawn from traditional methods of participating in politics, perhaps the solution is to assess opinions online instead of hoping for a reversion to traditional practices.