How does Twitter describe our moods?

As of February 2010, Twitter was getting about 50 million tweets per day. That much data allows social scientists to study human behavior in new ways. Sociologists at Cornell studied a smaller set of tweets looking for indications about how these messages describe our moods. Apparently, moods are similar across cultures. We all seem to dislike Monday mornings, and get cheerier as we move towards the weekend. It may be that Twitter behavior doesn't generalize to all people, but it will be interesting to see over time what other conclusions can be drawn from these short messages.

What is the other 10% of the job?

So, after less than a year Leo Apotheker lost his job as CEO of Hewlett Packard, and was replaced with Meg Whitman, who had great success at eBay, a web company, but never worked in a hardware company. Why?

In an interview, HP Chairman Ray Lane said "The market’s a little confused because we’re in so many different businesses. This is 90 percent about leadership, communications, and operating execution." So, the lesson here is that communication skills are more critical than business knowledge, it seems. The article referenced above calls out four things Meg Whitman does very well that make her a good communicator.