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Science & Technology
DARPA balloon hunt tests internet accuracy
2009-12-06
The US defence research agency DARPA has used 10 red balloons in a contest to assess the accuracy with which information spreads on the internet. The giant moored weather balloons were launched on Saturday morning at 10 undisclosed locations across the United States. More than 4,000 groups competed to be the first to pinpoint all 10.

A team from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology won the challenge and a prize of $40,000 (£24,000). Johanna Jones, a spokeswoman for the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, said that beyond the actual contest, the aim was to see whether social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter should be seen as credible sources of information.

Darpa is no stranger to innovative uses of technology. The agency - which is part of the US defence department - played a pivotal role in the creation of the internet itself. That original network was created at the behest of the US government as a way to access and distribute information in the case of a catastrophic event.

Forty years on, with the internet in full swing, the same agency was keen to see if the power of social networking sites - with their tens of millions of users - could be used as a credible source to alert authorities of impending disaster or unrest on US soil.
Fun! But seriously, what's the answer? Irredeemably curious minds neeeeeeeeed to know.
Posted by:Pappy

#3  Shouldn't they have used 99 red balloons?
Posted by: Eric Jablow   2009-12-06 11:24  

#2  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jQYQTFudrqc
Posted by: Uncle Phester   2009-12-06 09:02  

#1  This follows on some previous experiments re: crowd sourcing and social network effects. The original Where's George experiment done by some academics traced the location of dollar bills whose recipients from around the world (including in African villages) were asked to send a dollar to someone they knew, who in turn was asked to send it to someone they knew, in an attempt to get it to a specific destination. It took surprisingly few hops for most of the bills to arrive, underscoring the fact that social proximity isn't limited geographically.

The question of how information and influence spreads has direct national security implications which is why DARPA's investing in this sort of research.
Posted by: lotp   2009-12-06 08:43  

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