Happy City

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Lincoln named as one of the top five happiest cities in the UK

Lincoln has been named as one of the happiest cities in the UK.

Firm Jetpac analysed 100 million photographs posted on the photo-sharing programme Instagram, to find out if the people in the pictures were smiling.

The software used by Jetpac measures the size of people's smiles.

Lincoln is the fifth happiest city with a score of 31.95. Belfast was top, on 34.29.

(continued, pace of life, not done a thing all morning....aside for eating a couple of rounds of toast the wife made me. Same this afternoon hopefully.)


http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2 ... ity-jetpac

Instagram pictures reveal Belfast as the UK's happiest city

The happiest place in the UK? It’s easy to find: all you have to do is analyse the colours, facial expressions and other objects in tens of millions of location-tagged photos posted on Instagram. And it turns out that the happiest city is Belfast - and the happiest place there is a pub called the Parlour Bar in Elmwood Avenue.

Why? Because the people in photos posted from around that location tend to be smiling, and few look grumpy.

The least happy place, meanwhile, turns out to be Salford, which comes below London and Bath in an analysis of 40 cities by Peter Warden, co-founder of the UK startup Jetpac, which provides guides of places to visit around the world based on publicly posted pictures.

Warden analysed 100m photos from Instagram’s public system, as part of the company’s attempt to build a recommendation system built purely on pictures which are “geotagged” - linked to a specific location.
He got software to analyse the faces in the pictures, which first found the mouths of people in the pictures, and then decided - based on colour - whether they were wearing lipstick (which would indicate being “glammed up”, and so likely to be having a good time) and whether they were smiling - which is rated on a scale of 0 to 100.

The software could also identify moustaches - and so could point to the places in cities likely to have the largest concentration of “hipsters” - although, Warden notes, they tend not to smile as much as others. (That could be part of the reason why London rates so lowly on the top 40.)

Using that system, Belfast turns out to be the happiest city - and the Parlour Bar, close by the Methodist College and the Botanical Gardens, is ranked as the ground zero of happy people.

“We get a lot of students,” said John Kennedy, the manager at the bar, when contaced by the Guardian. “They bring a fun element to the bar. And we’ve got a quirky atmosphere. Plus oven-baked pizza.” The 550-capacity location also means that students armed with smartphones are highly likely to take and share photos from there.

Warden’s analysis was made possible because we are generating so many photographs every day. More than a billion photos are taken worldwide on a daily basis. About 55m of those are taken on instagram - and of those, 30% are public, and of those 30% are geotagged, yielding nearly 5m photos every day on Instagram alone which are public and geotagged.

“We’re identifying particular venues (bars, hotels, parks, etc) that we are interested in, and then we query Instagram for public photos at that place over the last year,” explains Warden. “Popular places will have hundreds or thousands of photos, and we’ve looked at over 6 million venues so far, so the numbers add up pretty quickly.”

Even with a few hundred photos from a location he says it’s possible to produce “reasonable data” on gender ratios, popular hours, the moustache density, coffee cup prevalence (indicating whether a place is a coffee bar or bar) and so on.

UK cities' happiness ranking

1 Belfast 34.29
2 Bournemouth 32.88
3 Derby 32.60
4 Exeter 32.34
5 Lincoln 31.95
6 Aberdeen 31.14
7 Glasgow 31.02
8 Colchester 30.68
9 Newcastle upon Tyne 30.43
10 Oxford 29.96
11 Coventry 29.89
12 Cardiff 29.79
13 Wolverhampton 29.65
14 Milton Keynes 28.97
15 Canterbury 28.97
16 Leeds 28.62
17 Liverpool 27.39
18 Cambridge 27.30
19 Manchester 27.20
20 Plymouth 27.18
21 Birmingham 26.95
22 Leicester 26.29
23 Portsmouth 26.20
24 Windsor 26.14
25 Reading 25.94
26 Southampton 25.86
27 Newport 25.09
28 Nottingham 24.91
29 Bristol 24.21
30 Norwich 24.07
31 Blackpool 23.96
32 York 23.44
33 Brighton 23.44
34 Sheffield 23.38
35 Newquay 22.96
36 Edinburgh 22.31
37 Luton 22.22
38 London 20.48
39 Bath 18.32
40 Salford 17.90

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