The Ohio Department of Transportation decided to take another precaution this winter in hopes of dwindling down the 44,000 plus accidents it suffered last year – as a result of serve winter weather conditions.

The DOT will now offer winter advisory, Twitter updates for the highways in Cincinnati, Akron, Cleveland, Toledo, Columbus and Dayton.

The updates will be provided from the following twitter profiles:

“Safety is always our top priority… [And] social networking websites such as Twitter are increasingly becoming a very useful tool in sharing information, especially among our younger populations.”

It should also be noted that this is a test project and more areas will be added as the project progresses forward.

As always, I would advise that users check their twitter feeds before leaving the house and not while driving.

For more information please visit: www.BuckeyeTraffic.org/twitter

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)

Twitter, being one of the larger real time communication platforms that can pass message at the speed of thought, laid victim to a terrible hoax today. Apparently a Tweeted message was sent alerting tweeps that a 3 year Girl was taken in Stockton, Ca. The message also stated that an Amber Alert was in effect to assist in her safe return. While fellow tweeps quickly spread the message in good faith, it was unfortunate that this was a ruse.

It should also be noted that this has become quite a common spam alert, that has been spread via the internet and cell phones since 2006. If this had been an actual Amber Alert all news media outlets are immediately notified of the incident. So if you are transversing the twittersverse and find something in similar reference, a quick check to one of your major media sources should confirm or negate the validity of the message.

Employees of Twitter apparently caught on to this message and have since removed it from the list of trending topics.

Several variations of the message can be found at snopes.com

A brief timeline of this type of message can be found here.