One Wordcloud A Day

The big news in the technology sector today is that SpaceX, the company owned by Elon Musk, launched a satellite and successfully retrieved the first stage vehicle, which they can now reuse. More details about the story are here: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2016/05/06/a-spacex-rocket-just-stuck-its-landing-on-a-barge/ There was a hashtag trending today but when I started the download, I didn't get many tweets. Then I decided to download the non hashtagged tweets and there I received plenty. The wordcloud is quite interesting because the most commonly occurring word is Mars. This is because SpaceX is planning to send a rocket to Mars in 2018 and it seems that this week there has been some talk about that announcement. Also, with today's successful landing of the first-stage rocket, people are likely speculating the success of a Mars mission in near future. I found it interesting that people didn't have a lot of mentions for Elon Musk himself.

I haven't watched the new Batman Vs Superman movie yet. Not sure when I will get to watch it either. But I saw a lot of people either saying great things about the movie or complaining vociferously. It then made sense to see what people are saying on Twitter. Now before you see the wordcloud and sentiment graph, I must make clear that the movie is a big hit setting records. While it registered the most successful opening in the history with more than $100 million collection, the second weekend saw the largest drop ever recorded for a movie with such a massive opening! Boxofficemojo has more details if you are interested: http://www.boxofficemojo.com/news/?id=4173&p=.htm People are clearly talking about Batman much more than Superman! Similarly, we see that Ben Affleck was mentioned quite frequently. Many frequently occurring words are positive - awesome, better, great, loved, amazing, etc. There are a few negative words as well. But the overall sentiment seems positive, w

Perhaps by now you must have heard about the biggest news of this year. A Panama based company Mossack Fonseca which helped create shell companies to many rich people around the world in order to do legal as well as illegal things (hiding taxable income, corruption money, etc.) sprouted a major leak. More than 11 million documents amounting to 2.6 TB were leaked to journalists. You can read everything about this here: http://panamapapers.sueddeutsche.de/en/ The size of the leak is enormous! Here is a graph for comparison: In light of this #panamapapers hashtag has been trending today. I downloaded more than 200K tweets but only around 34,000 were original and rest were retweets. Here are the wordcloud and sentiment graph

Well, the April Fools day was yesterday in Singapore but when I collected the tweets it was still 31st March in the US. Therefore, the most common word in the tweets was "tomorrow" :)

I don't watch TV so can't comment much about the Fox show Empire . But yesterday #Empire was trending because they had a midseason premiere recap so I analyzed it. This website says that Empire got great ratings and viewed by more than 12 million people yesterday. As it turns out Hakeem Lyon is one of the fictional characters on the show and he got Twitter talking! If you actually watch this show you will enjoy the wordcloud much more.   To my surprise the sentiment was not as positive as I had expected based on what I found about the premiere. With the amazing ratings, the positive sentiment should have been much higher. I suspect that it may have to do with the way this sentiment analysis algorithm works. I am planning to change it soon so I will come back to this hashtag and see whether I get different results.  

If you haven't checked it already, there has been a hijacking of an Egypt Air plane, which was forced to land in Cyprus. The hijacker is now arrested. Read more about this on Bloomberg and there is an interesting video of a hostage climbing out of the plane at Telegraph . Here is the wordcloud accompanied by the sentiment graph.

On Saturday 3 states -- Hawaii, Alaska, and Washington -- had Democratic primaries. In all the three states Bernie Sanders won by a huge margin over Hillary Clinton. This is quite an achievement because so far Clinton has been winning many delegates. When I checked earlier, the hashtag #HIcaucus was tending so I downloaded tweets that included it. There is no surprise how the wordcloud looks. Also the sentiment is quite positive which indicates that Bernie supporters were using this hashtag. The news media was silent for a long period about this news. Some Bernie supporters claimed that this is because media is biased against Bernie.