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Twitter Based "Ted" System Warns of Earthquakes Earlier
hypnosec writes "A Twitter-based system managed to detect the earthquake off the Philippines before any other advanced spotting systems being used by Seismologists. The U.S. Geological Survey uses the micro-blogging site to quickly gather information about earthquakes around the globe through the use of a system — Twitter Earthquake Detection (TED) — which beat out USGS's own sensors on Friday when it came to detecting a 7.6 magnitude earthquake off the Philippine coast. The TED system gathers earthquake related messages (Tweets) in real time from Twitter. The system takes into consideration various parameters like place, time, keywords, and photographs of affected places where tremors have been detected. Online information posted by people — Tweets, in this case — can be picked up faster by researchers, compared to scientific alerts that may take up to 20 minutes."
http://xkcd.com/723/
Is that if you get 50k Anonymous, you'll end up with enough false positives to make the system useless.
On the other hand, having idiots tweet prior to taking shelter can only improve the species.
Confusing data and information.
The number of tweets with the word "earthquake" in them is a raw piece of data.
A USGS trained analytical geologists opinion of magnitude / depth / time is much higher level information and is going to take a couple minutes at least to think about it. I suppose if the on duty guy is in the can when a earthquake starts, or even worse if you have two guys who start arguing before one finally calls the boss to resolve the fight....
The standard /. automotive analogy is that a bunch of tweeter twits will always be the first to "report" a car crash. It'll take a couple hours at least for the accident investigation team to gather all the legal evidence, and at least days until a judge / jury convicts. I'm sure the twits are always going to be faster than Judge Dredd or whoever.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Twitter crashes when it's overloaded. Earthquakes, and events like it cause a high enough amount of traffic to bring twitter down. People's lives depend on earthquake information systems. What happens if there's an earthquake at the same time as a Kardashian sex video? Or a Politician saying something stupid at a convention? We're all screwed then.
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It will only report quakes that are already over. News reports, online reporting "Did You Feel It?" pages, etc already do a pretty good job of telling seismologists that something just happened.
Valuable earthquake detection would be detecting the P-Wave from a quake in progress, and automatically broadcasting a SAME Code, combined with some kind of equivilent forcibly pushed to every cell phone connected to a tower. Japan has something like this already. California is kinda, sorta working on it, but I'm pretty sure it's grossly underfunded and not really a priority.
Earthquake models suggest a quake on the northern or southern reaches of the San Andreas fault would reach Los Angeles in about 40 seconds. That's actually a huge chunk of time.
Let's assume:
- 20 seconds to detect a quake / automatically crosscheck with multiple sensors and transmit a warning to a predefined area.
- 5 to 10 seconds for devices to receive, decode and go into alert mode. Weather radios are always listening for SAME transmissions and can decode more or less instantly (assuming the user has programmed in their location). Cell networks could probably get the data there in the time it takes for a regular text message to arrive.
- That gives you 10 to 15 seconds to pull your car over, stop doing delicate surgery, stop fixing your roof, etc and find something to crawl under. It also gives you time to trigger automated fail safes. Gas valves can be set to close, emergency generators can be spun-up, fire pumps can activate, elevators can go to their recall floors and hold their doors open, while fire station doors can roll-up on their own and lock in place.
Yes it is, because Google Trends only analyses the past; connecting it to something useful, like an alert system, is something new. Unless you go extreme, but then every idea is based on something, so no idea is really new.
NB: The message above might reflect my opinion right now, but not necessarily tomorrow or next year.
There is a system in Japan where we get a flash of information on TV even before we feel a strong earthquake. I had a few seconds to brace before many of the hundreds of aftershocks after the large 9 Magnitude quake last March 11. Obviously, the warning time depends on how far you are from the epicenter.