I've questioned Santa's moral "north pole". He is interested in either naughty or nice. Santa lives at the Canadian North Pole with the postal code address of HOH 0H0. Is there any relationship between his values and where he lives?
CTV news today has the story of a study published Wednesday in the journal of POS ONE. It says that Canadians on Twitter are 'nicer' than Americans. We use cheerful words like thanks, amazing and please, along with 'an unusual number of smiley emoticons'. Researches had the resulting findings:
"In Canada, those words included great, new, well, good, coffee, shawn, drinking and winter. Several sports-related words made the list, including game, habs, jays, leafs, hockey, playoffs, flames.
Tweets from the U.S. leaned heavily on online slang (lol, lmao, smh), swear words, and words used to express negative feelings (hate, damn, mad, ugly).
Researchers pointed out the obvious pattern: based on word choice, Canadians appear happier.
Happiness may be apparent in the words we use. But researchers are less convinced that the tweets confirm broader stereotypes – namely, that Canadians are nicer.
To date, there is simply not enough evidence to prove this belief. Self-reports of personality profiles of Canadians and Americans have yet to prove that that there is any measurable difference between the two groups."
The article goes on to caution against using aggregates to describe personality.
My own conclusion is that we can lay claim to being 'nice.' And as a result, Santa can reward Canadians greatly with showers of presents.
We had our celebration evening for the Fantasy of Trees yesterday. The hard work is completed. Of course there are many things to finish. I will have to go under the table and behind the table cloths this morning to retrieve various things for our opening at Noon.
