It’s what most people say they want. So how do we know how happy people are? You can’t improve or understand what you can’t measure. In a blow to happiness, we’re very good at measuring economic indices and this means we tend to focus on them. With hedonometer.org we’ve created an instrument that measures the happiness of large populations in real time.

Our hedonometer is based on people’s online expressions, capitalizing on data-rich social media, and we’re measuring how people present themselves to the outside world. For our first version of hedonometer.org, we’re using Twitter as a source but in principle we can expand to any data source in any language (more below). We’ll also be adding an API soon.

So this is just a start — we invite you to explore the Twitter time series and let us know what you think.

Santiago Chile announced they’re going to become a “smart city” in 2013. Santiago is just one example of a growing number of areas around the globe preparing and modernizing for the future, in fact demographers have long predicted the mass urbanization of metropolitan areas across the world. According to the United Nations, by the year 2050, 80% of the world will be living in urban areas. The equivalent of seven Manhattan size cities will be built each year until 2050. For these cities to thrive they must use smart technology to its fullest. Let’s take a look at what’s available now and what’s coming down the pipe.

Small game developer adopts a creative anti-piracy strategy, released their own crack copy of Game Dev tycoon in which all games end in bankrupcy due to piracy.

There’s a sea of interesting public data out there just waiting to be tapped into, but there’s a problem — most people have no earthly idea how to access it. And even if they’re able to make some headway, there’s still an untold number of connections between that data and even more data tucked away in another silo.

That’s where New York startup Enigma comes into play — founded by Hicham Oudghiri and Marc Dacosta and helmed by CEO Jeremy Bronfmann, Enigma taps into over 100,000 public data sources from state and federal records to SEC filings to lists of frozen assets in the United Kingdom all the way to Crunchbase. The end result is an incredibly simple, incredibly smart way to sift through and find connections in publicly available data

Conor McGarrigle’s insight:
The first ever website at its orignal URL to mark the 20th anniversary of the public domain www

The Art of Walking: a field guide is the first extensive survey of walking in contemporary art. Combining short texts on the subject with a variety of artists work, The Art of Walking provides a new way of looking at this everyday subject.

The introduction relates peripatetic art now to a wide range of historic precedents, and is followed by a series of visually led ‘Walks’ dealing with seven overlapping themes: footprints and lines; writers and philosophers; marches and processions; aliens, dandies and drifters; slapstick; studios, museums and biennales; and dog walkers.

The guide includes newly commissioned art and writing, and many artists have been actively involved in the design of their respective pages. Contributors include Marina Abramović and Ulay, Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Francis Alÿs, And While London Burns, Keith Arnatt, Franko B, David Bate, Dara Birnbaum, Rut Blees Luxemburg, Janet Cardiff, Marcus Coates, Jeremy Deller, Tim Edgar, Christian Edwardes, Jan Estep, Simon Faithfull, Alec Finlay, Hamish Fulton, Regina José Galindo, Al Gebra, Mona Hatoum, Akira Kanayama, Oleg Kulik, Peter Liversidge, Long March Project, Richard Long, Melanie Manchot, Conor McGarrigle, Bruce Nauman, Hans-Ulrich Obrist, Ingrid Pollard, Simon Pope, Chloé Regan, Sophy Rickett, Fiona Robinson, Matthias Sperling and Siobhan Davies Studios, Susan Stockwell, Krzysztof Wodiczko and Catherine Yass.

David Evans is a writer and picture editor, based in Bournemouth, England. Recent works include Appropriation (The Whitechapel Gallery and The MIT Press, 2009), László Moholy-Nagy: 60 Fotos(Errata Editions, 2011) and Critical Dictionary (Black Dog Publishing, 2011).

Harvard medical School study finds that the obesity rate is 27.5 percent higher in New York City neighborhoods where the greatest proportion of people “like” television on Facebook.

MIT researchers have built a wearable sensor system that automatically creates a digital map of the environment through which the wearer is moving. The prototype system, described in a paper slated for the Intelligent Robots and Systems conference in Portugal next month, is envisioned as a tool to help emergency responders coordinate disaster response..

Visualizing bus traffic in San Francisco, Geneva and Zurich with D3.js, Cloudmade and Leaflet.js

atNight project maps night time taxi and bike share traffic with twitter and instagram photos, and shares the code and data