Politico features research that casts doubt on Fizziological leaps

A new article on Politicocasts doubt on efforts to predict election results by monitoring social media.

The article features research by Mung Chiang, a professor of electrical engineering, and postdoctoral researchers Soumya Sen and Felix Ming Fai Wong. They recently published a paper analyzing the correlation between postings on Twitter (“tweets”) and box office revenues for popular movies.

And? After scrutinizing 15 million tweets on 34 different major movies they found that “even accounting for the hype and the approval level in Twitter may be insufficient to predict a movie’s rating from the general online population.”

The research has gotten attention elsewhere as well: Technology Review, ClickZ and The Register.

By the way, Chiang just won a big award from the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers and last fall he taught a fascinating undergraduate course on the fundamentals behind the networked life.

Twitter Logo Map 09 courtesy thenextweb via Creative Commons.