We propose and develop a Lexicocalorimeter: an online, interactive instrument for measuring the caloric content of social media and other large-scale texts. We do so by constructing extensive yet improvable tables of food and activity related phrases
, and respectively assigning them with sourced estimates of caloric intake and expenditure. We show that for Twitter, our naive measures of caloric input, caloric output, and the ratio of these measures are all strong correlates with health and well-being measures for the contiguous United States. Our caloric balance measure in many cases outperforms both its constituent quantities, is tunable to specific health and well-being measures such as diabetes rates, has the capability of providing a real-time signal reflecting a populations health, and has the potential to be used alongside traditional survey data in the development of public policy and collective self-awareness. Because our Lexicocalorimeter is a linear superposition of principled phrase scores, we also show we can move beyond correlations to explore what people talk about in collective detail, and assist in the understanding and explanation of how population-scale conditions vary, a capacity unavailable to black-box type methods.
Sports are spontaneous generators of stories. Through skill and chance, the script of each game is dynamically written in real time by players acting out possible trajectories allowed by a sports rules. By properly characterizing a given sports ecolo
gy of `game stories, we are able to capture the sports capacity for unfolding interesting narratives, in part by contrasting them with random walks. Here, we explore the game story space afforded by a data set of 1,310 Australian Football League (AFL) score lines. We find that AFL games exhibit a continuous spectrum of stories rather than distinct clusters. We show how coarse-graining reveals identifiable motifs ranging from last minute comeback wins to one-sided blowouts. Through an extensive comparison with biased random walks, we show that real AFL games deliver a broader array of motifs than null models, and we provide consequent insights into the narrative appeal of real games.
