QuickByte: Scientists now use Twitter to Track Earthquakes?
The U.S. Geological Survey have come up with a new way to track earthquakes via tweets. Normally Scientists have the tedious task of sorting through large quantities of data through recording stations, prior to finding out where exactly an earthquake has struck. Now Scientists can use filtering software to sort through tweets to help them get a rough idea, as to where the earth quake happened and how large it was.
Typically people begin to tweet there experience a few seconds after an earthquake to tell others what they experienced. Scientist realize this and have created a project based on this information.
Scientists have dubbed the effort TED for Twitter Earthquake Detection, which scans tweets in several different languages for the word earthquake. The software is said to filter out all variations of the word that may be misleading. Such examples word include words that refer to the Quake video game.
According to reports from the BBC News Dr. Paul Earle from the USGS explained that this is in no way hard scientific data but rather “It is a speed versus accuracy issue”.
“Because there is a lot of noise in this data and we don’t believe this system could ever be used to initiate a critical response such as shutting down a nuclear power plant, but what it may do is give us an initial heads-up in a region which doesn’t have a dense seismic network that further scientific evaluation is needed,” said Dr Earle.
(source: BBC)
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It would appear that this is a good way to get the big picture fast, but I have to wonder how effective the filters are that they use.
There’s no stopping the twitter machine, it keeps going and going.
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