Yekaterinburg has got a unique street-art object in steam-punk style which allows to get to know its citizens' mood without leaving home! On the 18th of December a Mood Barometer started operating at full capacity monitoring through the people's statuses and posts in social networks and blogs whether are they content with their life, or do they hate everybody around, else they just don’t care about all this mess. The Mood Barometer appears as a giant bulb, sheathed with planks and copper plates and decorated with metal tubes and beams. It is a symbol of a Global Mind – a theme of forthcoming World EXPO-2020 in Yekaterinburg (being one of the candidate cities).
During test run it has appeared that in the beginning of a week people are usually unhappy, then as the week goes on their spiritual mood rises, and on Fridays it springs up especially when it goes closer to the evening. Statistics aggregated by complicated software and calculated by sophisticated algorithms (based on a naïve Bayesian classifier) are converted in a very simple and visual form: lamps in bulb are lit red, yellow, or green. Soon everyone can watch their fellow citizens’ mood virtually – on a special web site or on biggest web portals of Yekaterinburg where small yet highly informative widgets will be embedded.
