happiness

Being a long-suffering admirer of research, I am always delighted when a new piece of academic thought comes along to subvert my idiosyncratic suspicions.

This is not one of those times.

For my excitement is slightly muted on hearing that people in Hawaii are happier than those anywhere else in the U.S.

This quite astounding conclusion comes from an analysis of 10 million geotagged tweets from 2011, pored over by squinting eyes and expanded brains at the University of Vermont.

As CNN reports it, Hawaii is a ha-ha-happy place, while the greatest volume of the most miserable people in America is to be found in Louisiana. … Read more

"Happy birthday! Have a great day!"

Perhaps you're a bit more creative than the above greeting, but even the most clever among us have probably run out of ways to wish friends a happy birthday on Facebook.

Thankfully, an enterprising Reddit user whose handle I do not wish to repeat in this space offered a handy and simple tip: search YouTube for "happy birthday" and your friend's name. You will be surprised by the volume and variety of videos available.

Sure, your friend will be sung happy birthday wishes by a random stranger or … Read more

Academia and Silicon Valley are in a race to see who can solve life's most important problems first.

Currently, the Valley is ahead, having shown you how to make pictures that look like they were taken 40 years ago.

However, academia is catching up, by bringing conclusions to life's most pressing questions.

I am, therefore, moved beyond safe levels of self-expression on hearing of a piece of research from the University of Canterbury in New Zealand.… Read more

Taiwanese PC maker Asustek said that its shipments will increase in the second quarter as it bets on a "Happiness 2.0" strategy that aims to create so-called hero products that are must-haves.

The company reported first-quarter net income of NT$5.01 billion, up from NT$3.42 billion a year ago. Revenue was NT$90.91 billion, up 23 percent from a year ago.

By product line, Asustek moved 4.1 million Asus notebooks, 900,000 Eee PCs, and 600,000 Eee Pads. For the second quarter, Asustek projects that it will ship 4.4 million … Read more

Peter Ha takes a cab straight to our studio from the airport, so we'll forgive him if he drops a few expletives during today's recording. He also received an invite to an Apple event in San Francisco next week, so it looks like the West Coast can't wait to welcome him back!

Peter deals in tech news everyday at The Daily so we'll start things off with an offbeat chat about the 2011 Razzie nominations, an awards tribute to the year's worst movies.

No surprise here, but Adam Sandler broke the record with 11 nominations for his "performance" in "Jack and Jill."… Read more

A recent neuroimaging experiment apparently showed that the sounds an iPhone makes can trigger feelings of love in the gadget's user.

Well, such emotional connections are nothing new for Apple. Anyone who owned a Macintosh back in the day can probably remember the feeling of, if not love, then at least affection engendered when the machine booted up, the startup chime sounded, and the Happy Mac icon smiled forth. The device was functioning as it should, another session of satisfying and "user friendly" computing was about to begin, and all was right with the world.… Read more

'Tis the season to be jolly. And a lot of us are during the holidays, if statistical analyses of our tweets provide sufficient measure.

But overall happiness appears to be on a gradual decline since 2009, according to a University of Vermont analysis of some 46 billion words tweeted by 63 million users since 2009.

The team compared a wide range of words and phrases--including hahaha and lol--to "happiness scores" of the 10,000 most common English words. Words such as happy and laughter appear at the top of the 1-to-9 scale, while terrorist gets 1.30.

Not … Read more

What it lacks in modern elite-precision engineering it more than makes up for in good old nostalgia. And now it can be yours. Fonzie's motorcycle is going up for auction in Los Angeles next month.

Henry Winkler played The Fonz on the classic 1970s sitcom "Happy Days," which looked back on a carefree 1950s in the Midwestern blue collar stronghold of Milwaukee. On the show, the leather-jacket-clad Fonzie rode around town in a 1949 Triumph Trophy TR5 Scrambler Custom--usually with a poodle skirt-clad passenger clinging to his waist. Auction house Bonham's and The Petersen Automotive Museum in Los Angeles will play host to the Classic California Sale on November 12, where the bike is expected to sell well north of $50,000, according to the auctioneers. … Read more