Bollocks to scrotum ratio

Can predict what? We would like to thank Guardian reader DekeThornton for this starting point.

We lifted this from the comments on the Soldier's faces predict aggression article in The Guardian. The contents of the article is not our main subject, but we do want to say we find this thing pretty awful and were astounded that so many of the social variables were not addressed at all. It took a reader to point out possible class issues -- which was, incidentally the first point the K-landnews editor wanted to make.

What we really want to talk about are readers' comments in general.

The first question: what do people do with them?
Are the sentiment crawling people using readers' comments in the same way as Twitter posts are used to glean the feelings (sentiment) of the world, or is this a fairly untapped resource?
Untapped as in there is an audience but no Big Data mining minds dissecting, cube-ing and what-not-ing these.

The K-landsnews Random Research team spent some quality time looking at readers' comments on articles in various major web publications and found them to be outright enlightening.

Our major finding -- which is at least on the same level of overall credibility as the Soldiers' faces article above -- is: the readers of populist, right-leaning Bild online frequently show more nuanced views than those of supposedly more educated and intellectual Die Welt or Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. Both of them occupy the same political area as Bild.

This came as a surprise to us.

Now, we need a few eggheads to check this and verify whether we got that one hour project right or flopped.

Being masters of speculation, we hereby speculate: "educated" conservatives are much more dangerous to social coherence than the less educated folks. One reason may be that the educated feel more certain about what they think they know, and that they will more aggressively defend their position.