REAL LIFE NEWS: TWITTER EARTHQUAKE DETECTOR
by Hazed
At last, Twitter proves it’s useful for something other than celebrities showing off and trolls being unpleasant. It turns out it can be used to detect earthquakes.
The US Geographical Survey received information about the Philippines earthquake last week via its Tweet Earthquake Dispatch (TED) just over a minute after it happened. That’s sooner than the official notification from its seismological instruments.
The TED monitors Twitter for “earthquake” posts in various languages, and provides a frequency counter of the number of Tweets that originate from a region prone to earthquakes: the “tweets per minute” rating. This can provide a “heads-up” that an earthquake has happened before seismographs, which could allow vital tsunami warnings to be issued in time to allow people to evacuate.
An impressive use of social media!
Source: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/09/02/usgs_twitter_filipino_earthquake/
