Sentiment

Newt Gingrich had fallen by the wayside on Twitter . In January, the week after he decisively took South Carolina from assumed GOP front-runner Mitt Romney , the social media universe buzzed with Gingrich talk. The last week? Not so much. MOOD METER: Track political social sentiment San Francisco-based Kanjoya, which tracks social sentiment around the remaining Republican presidential hopefuls, found emotion in nearly 209,000 tweets tied to Gingrich between Jan. 23-29.

The Sinead O'Connor of yore may have scoffed at the passive title of her new album, "How About I Be Me (And You Be You)?" After all, the stormy Irish singer did anything but go with the flow during her reign in the early 1990s. She shaved her head to defy old-school rules about women, incurred the wrath of Madonna by tearing up a photo of the pope on "Saturday Night Live" and refused to perform at a New Jersey venue if the American national anthem was played. Along the way she won a Grammy in 1991 but boycotted the awards show, proclaimed herself a lesbian (then decided she wasn't)

Another morning of rising stock prices, another day of debating whether the recent stock rally has gone too far. Stocks have started the week on an up note thanks to the Greek Parliament's decision to move forward with a plan that will cut more from the budget in order to win the country more aid from the international community. The benchmark Standard & Poor's 500 index is up 0.6% or 7.23 points to 1,349.94 this morning. The rise comes after U.S. markets experienced their worst day of the year to close out last week.

Two years ago, driven by anti-Obama passion, Republicans stormed the polls, punishing Democrats in a rout that delivered control of the House and swept hundreds of GOP candidates to victory across the country. But now that Republicans are picking a candidate to face the president in November, the anti-Obama fervor appears to be cooling. Opinion surveys show the incumbent remains highly unpopular with Republicans and the tea party wing of the GOP. But in virtually every presidential nominating contest so far, Republican turnout has fallen compared with four years ago, suggesting, at the least, a lessening of the intensity that helped fuel the party's midterm landslide.

LOS ANGELES: Social media users are weighing in with their Oscar® picks and pans, according to the University of Southern California Annenberg Innovation Lab, IBM (NYSE: IBM), and the Los Angeles Times who are measuring social media sentiment related to the 84 th Academy Awards. The project relies on new sophisticated analytics and natural language recognition technologies to gauge positive and negative opinions shared in millions of public tweets. Focused on the Best Actor, Best Actress and Best Picture categories, the goal is to establish a model for measuring the volume and tone of worldwide Twitter sentiment to better understand movie goers' opinions.

With all the interest in the analysis of social sentiment - feelings expressed in the ever-expanding public arena online - how much can we really know about what people are feeling? Especially if the work is being done by computer algorithm, rather than human interpretation? As more news outlets incorporate sentiment analysis into coverage of politics, its accuracy and usefulness has been met with skepticism from some who study linguistics and social media. In other cases, the criticism has been more biting.

Darryl Sutter 1, Brent Sutter 0. That would be the Sutter Family result on Saturday night after the brothers met for the first time as opposing coaches in the NHL. The Kings were briskly efficient, putting a strong hold on the game by scoring three times in a 15-minute stretch in the second period on their way to a 4-1 victory over the Flames at the Scotiabank Saddledome. That gift-wrapped a successful homecoming for new Kings Coach Darryl Sutter, who had about an eight-year run in Calgary, first as coach and then as general manager.

In the furry and feathery world of "We Bought a Zoo," starring Matt Damon and Scarlett Johansson, basically everything in sight is in need of saving. Thankfully, it has filmmaker Cameron Crowe heading the rescue mission. In lesser hands, a film so unashamed of its sentiment, so affectionate about its characters, so uplifting in its message would have landed in the maw of mushy that so often devours films like these. Instead we have an intelligent family film, a rarity, and while not quite Crowe at his absolute best, it carries his humanistic imprint and benefits from a strong acting ensemble that keep emotions in check.

As protesters around the world marked a "global day of action," crowds took to the streets of downtown Los Angeles on Saturday to vent frustration over dismal job prospects and the failure of government to get the economy back on track. "I'm one of the 99%," said Walt Metivier of Torrance, referring to the preponderance of Americans who are not among the nation's wealthiest. "I work for a large oil company, and I'm fortunate. But I want to see a future for my grandchildren. " And right now, he said, he doesn't.

My fingers burned with excitement. It was just weeks after Egyptian President Anwar Sadat's dramatic trip to Israel in November 1977 and my boss had just returned from Egypt, the first Israel Defense Forces officer ever to visit that nation. I was a young officer, and the "present" he brought me — a standard tourist postcard — was the most precious one I could imagine. It was something from Egypt, and it was not going to explode. Until Sadat's trip, and the 1979 Israel-Egypt peace treaty that followed, that sort of contact had been as tangible to Israelis as the moon.