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Fig. 1 | Journal of Big Data

Fig. 1

From: The sleep loss insult of Spring Daylight Savings in the US is observable in Twitter activity

Fig. 1

Diurnal collective attention to meals quantified by normalized usage of the words ‘breakfast’, ‘lunch’, and ‘dinner’ for states observing Eastern Time (top) and Pacific Time (bottom), for the weeks before (solid) and of (dashed) Spring Forward. The x-axis represents the interval between 6 a.m. Sunday and 9 p.m. Monday local time. Counts for tweets containing each individual word were tallied in 15 min increments, normalized by the total number of tweets mentioning that word, and smoothed using Gaussian Process Regression to create a “Normalized Activity” curve. Each day has a clear pattern for frequency of meal name appearance in tweets, with the peak for breakfast, lunch, and dinner occurring in the respective order of the meals themselves. For each of the meals, we observe a slight forward shift in the peak following Spring Forward, suggesting that meals are taking place later than usual on the corresponding Sunday. By Monday, the peak for each meal name appears to be aligned with the week before, with the exception of ’dinner’ on the west coast, which is still a bit later

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