词汇大师-- Getting a Read on World Happiness

　　AA: I'm Avi Arditti with Rosanne Skirble, and this week on WORDMASTER: using bloggers as a measure of the world's happiness. How does that add up? Just ask Chris Danforth, an applied¹ mathematician² at the University of Vermont.

　　CHRIS DANFORTH: "A colleague of mine, Peter Dodds at the University of Vermont, we started thinking that now would be a great time to start looking at the Internet as a source of information about how people influence each other. So traditionally it's very difficult to measure how one person influences another in a controlled environment. And so we got in touch with the folks at wefeelfine.org, which is this beautiful Web site put together by Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar, who are computer scientists and artists.
"And what they've been doing for the last five years or so is, they wrote a program to crawl over all the blogs around the world that they had access to, and search for sentences that have the words 'I feel' or 'I am feeling in them' along with any demographic information available about the person who wrote the sentence. So typically that's age and sex and latitude³ and longitude⁴. And over the last four years they were able to get roughly ten million human feelings from over two million individuals."
AA: "These were all English language blogs? Or other languages."
CHRIS DANFORTH: "Yeah, that's right. These are all English language blogs."
RS: "And what did you do with that information? Why were you interested in their site?"
CHRIS DANFORTH: "Well, we thought it would be a great opportunity to try and develop what we're calling a hedonometer or a real-time measure of happiness around the globe. So we took all those sentences and we searched in those sentences for particular words that are known to be substantive⁵.
"We have emotional happy-sad scores for roughly a thousand words from a psychology⁶ study at the University of Florida."
AA: "Which has a great name, the Affective Norms for English Words, ANEW, study."
CHRIS DANFORTH: "Yeah, yeah, it was great! So they took, you know, a typical psych experiment. They took intro college freshmen⁷ in a Psych 101 class and they showed them some of these substantive words and asked them on a scale of one to nine, sad to happy, how they felt when they read that word."
RS: "Give us some of these words. I'm sure our audience would be interested to know what are the happy words, what are the ones that scored high?"
CHRIS DANFORTH: "Sure, so words like triumphant⁸ and paradise and love, those scored all the way up near nine. Words like luxury, glory, those words score in the seven to eight range. There are some words right in the middle like street, paper, engine, those words don't mean particularly -- they don't have a ... "
AA: "They're neutral words."
CHRIS DANFORTH: "Yeah, they're fairly neutral words. So then words like disgusted and hostage and trauma⁹, those are words that end up near the bottom, and suicide, rape¹⁰, funeral. These words are very sad. So there's a selection of one thousand thirty-four of these words that we then, every time we see those words in a blog, we can attach the score to it."
AA: "So you've got these ten million sentences all beginning with the words 'I feel' or 'I am feeling' gleaned¹¹ from various English language blogs worldwide, and what did you discover?"
CHRIS DANFORTH: "Well, we found some things that we certainly weren't expecting. First of all, we found that happiness has been actually growing in blogs over the last four years at a fairly steady clip. I guess what I would have anticipated was that it would sort of oscillate around the average value and there would be happy days and sad days, but I didn't expect it to be growing.
"There were certain days on which happiness was spiking¹², days like Valentine's Day and Christmas. Turns out that the election of Barack Obama on November fourth, two thousand eight, that was the happiest day by a long shot that we looked at. And we have a way of measuring which words are responsible from the deviation¹³ from the typical day, and for that day it was the word proud. So there were a number of people who were saying 'I feel proud' or something like that on that day, enough to make it the happiest day in our study.
"And there were some other days that were particularly sad, there were dips. So the fifth anniversary of 9/11 was a fairly big dip, and the death of Michael Jackson last month was one of the bigger dips as well."
AA: "And yet you say -- so you've noted¹⁴ that happiness has been growing over the last four years, and yet we had [gone] into the depths of a recession and a financial crisis and the wars and all, and yet even so, English language bloggers were showing themselves to be happier than from four years ago?"
CHRIS DANFORTH: "Yeah, there were dips last year in the fall due to the economy, we think, but as a trend it's still going up."
AA: Next week, more with Chris Danforth from the University of Vermont. And that's WORDMASTER for now. Archives are at voanews.com/wordmaster. With Rosanne Skirble, I'm Avi Arditti.

1 applied   

adj.应用的；v.应用，适用

参考例句：

• She plans to take a course in applied linguistics.她打算学习应用语言学课程。
• This cream is best applied to the face at night.这种乳霜最好晚上擦脸用。

2 mathematician   

n.数学家

参考例句：

• The man with his back to the camera is a mathematician.背对着照相机的人是位数学家。
• The mathematician analyzed his figures again.这位数学家再次分析研究了他的这些数字。

3 latitude   

n.纬度，行动或言论的自由(范围)，(pl.)地区

参考例句：

• The latitude of the island is 20 degrees south.该岛的纬度是南纬20度。
• The two cities are at approximately the same latitude.这两个城市差不多位于同一纬度上。

4 longitude   

n.经线，经度

参考例句：

• The city is at longitude 21°east.这个城市位于东经21度。
• He noted the latitude and longitude,then made a mark on the admiralty chart.他记下纬度和经度，然后在航海图上做了个标记。

5 substantive   

adj.表示实在的；本质的、实质性的；独立的；n.实词，实名词；独立存在的实体

参考例句：

• They plan to meet again in Rome very soon to begin substantive negotiations.他们计划不久在罗马再次会晤以开始实质性的谈判。
• A president needs substantive advice,but he also requires emotional succor. 一个总统需要实质性的建议，但也需要感情上的支持。

6 psychology   

n.心理，心理学，心理状态

参考例句：

• She has a background in child psychology.她受过儿童心理学的教育。
• He studied philosophy and psychology at Cambridge.他在剑桥大学学习哲学和心理学。

7 freshmen   

n.（中学或大学的）一年级学生( freshman的名词复数 )

参考例句：

• We are freshmen and they are sophomores. 我们是一年级学生，他们是二年级学生。 来自《简明英汉词典》
• University freshmen get lots of razzing, but they like the initiation. 大一新生受各种嘲弄，但是他们对这种入门经验甘之如饴。 来自辞典例句

8 triumphant   

adj.胜利的，成功的；狂欢的，喜悦的

参考例句：

• The army made a triumphant entry into the enemy's capital.部队胜利地进入了敌方首都。
• There was a positively triumphant note in her voice.她的声音里带有一种极为得意的语气。

9 trauma   

n.外伤，精神创伤

参考例句：

• Counselling is helping him work through this trauma.心理辅导正帮助他面对痛苦。
• The phobia may have its root in a childhood trauma.恐惧症可能源于童年时期的创伤。

10 rape   

n.抢夺，掠夺，强奸；vt.掠夺，抢夺，强奸

参考例句：

• The rape of the countryside had a profound ravage on them.对乡村的掠夺给他们造成严重创伤。
• He was brought to court and charged with rape.他被带到法庭并被指控犯有强奸罪。

11 gleaned   

v.一点点地收集（资料、事实）( glean的过去式和过去分词 )；（收割后）拾穗

参考例句：

• These figures have been gleaned from a number of studies. 这些数据是通过多次研究收集得来的。
• A valuable lesson may be gleaned from it by those who have eyes to see. 明眼人可从中记取宝贵的教训。 来自《现代汉英综合大词典》

12 spiking   

n.尖峰形成v.加烈酒于( spike的现在分词 )；偷偷地给某人的饮料加入（更多）酒精（ 或药物）；把尖状物钉入；打乱某人的计划

参考例句：

• High spiking fever with chills is suggestive of a complicating pylephlebitis. 伴有寒战的高热，暗示合并门静脉炎。 来自辞典例句
• We could be spiking our own guns. 我们可能要遭到失败。 来自辞典例句

13 deviation   

n.背离，偏离；偏差，偏向；离题

参考例句：

• Deviation from this rule are very rare.很少有违反这条规则的。
• Any deviation from the party's faith is seen as betrayal.任何对党的信仰的偏离被视作背叛。

14 noted   

adj.著名的，知名的

参考例句：

• The local hotel is noted for its good table.当地的那家酒店以餐食精美而著称。
• Jim is noted for arriving late for work.吉姆上班迟到出了名。