I just read about a fantastic project by Eric Fisher who is using Flickr and Picasa to map photos taken by visitors or taken by locals in a city. In Boston, some places are obvious visitor photo ops - the Freedom Trail, and Copley Square. Some are obvious local - Iman Square for example.
It is the details of Eric's data that is truly exciting. For example, looking at the patterns around MIT, one can see very specific location on Mass Ave that are visitor photo op places - mostly in front of the main dome. A few hundred feet down the street, and it becomes local.
I want to look at human emotions in a macroscopic way. For example, are there specific emotional patterns after someone consumes a satisfying meal? One common emotion I am beginning to see is the feeling of serenity. We eat not only to satisfy our hunger, but to calm ourselves down. If this turns out to be true, we might solve childhood obesity very differently - perhaps by finding other ways to give children some serenity rather than shoving 'healthy' alternatives at them.
Many aspects of human emotional responses are predictable and will greatly explain our behaviors. It would be great to have some hard macro data to analyze.
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