: Bane of employers ... but friend of science? At a scientific meet-up in California this week, researchers with the U.S. Geological Survey proposed that the 140-character micro-blogging site could help to speed up responses to earthquakes.
“Why would such a system work?” asked Paul Earle, a geologist at the USGS, at the American Geophysical Union fall meeting Monday. “Because people like to tweet after an earthquake" [Wired.com]
. While it can take scientists up to 20 minutes to process the wave of information that hits their instruments after an earthquake, Earle says, people start tweeting immediately, often with tags like "#earthquake."
A prototype system aggregates tweets based on key words such as "earthquake" or the equivalent in different languages. It can then send an e-mail listing the cities where the tweets came from and what the tweets said [AP]
. Earle's project isn't the first to suggest that ...
