Selena placed her coffee on a tall table and rolled her neck. She was still perplexed by a presentation she’d just witnessed and was torn between approaching the speaker to discuss their study and shying away.

A recently submitted job application to work in the same institute as the presenter was holding her back. She was reasonably certain that critiquing the research of a professor who could well be on the hiring panel would be an ill-judged move. And she was well aware that she had a habit of becoming immersed in a debate, which was fine if the aim was to win an argument and not care about the consequences, but less so if it jeopardized potential employment.

‘Dr Russo?’

She turned to the voice. The professor had found her.

‘Professor Brown! I was just at your talk.’

‘And what did you think?’

She’d set that up just perfectly. A couple of sentences and they’d already reached dangerous ground.

‘It … It was fascinating.’

He tilted his head, sensing her unease. ‘In a good way?’

And now she was trapped. If she answered ‘yes’, she’d have to spin a web of lies to justify the answer. If she said ‘no’ she’d have to explain her discontent. Neither seemed like an attractive option. Instead, she plumbed for: ‘Did you not think of using data from official sources?’

‘The whole point of the project was to try an alternative source.’

‘But why would you use Twitter data to examine fertility?’ There, she’d said it. She’d tipped herself over the edge and there was no going back.

‘Because Twitter’s a really rich set of social data,’ Frank said, smiling. He was still feeling upbeat after the positive feedback in the session. ‘There are 330 million active users globally and they’re tweeting about all kinds of issues, including health and family.’

‘But are they really tweeting about fertility?’ Selena pressed. ‘About children being born?’

‘They tweet about everything!’ Frank laughed. ‘About what they had for lunch, football matches, breaking news, celebrities, fashions, you name it. And about if they had a child.’

‘But you can hardly get a good sense of fertility rates from that, or reasons for the rate,’ Selena persisted.