Social Networks and Earthquakes
There are multiple derived applications of social networks. In addition to providing a means to connect users to their families, friends, and acquaintances, social networks have recently astonished seismologists and emergency responders with their rather unexpected application in gathering information about natural disasters. Recent earthquakes of relatively high magnitudes have often been coupled with many social network users posting about the earthquake almost immediately after the incident. During the 2011 earthquake and tsunami disaster in Japan, many people resorted to social networks like Facebook and Twitter to communicate when other means of communications failed them.
Scientists have noticed that people’s quick status updates and responses on social media about earthquakes could be used to determine the locations areas affected by earthquakes. By exploiting information about locations associated with posts related to an earthquake on social networks, scientists were able to determine the locations of areas most affected by the earthquake. In this case, social networks essentially yielded information about earthquakes comparable to those obtained from seismometers.
Social networks have so much potential in learning more about natural disasters. A mathematical model can be developed so that information about earthquakes that modern seismometers usually measure can be extracted from social networks. To illustrate, one could develop a mapping that correlates the number of people posting or tweeting about an earthquake, coupled with those people’s location range, to the earthquake’s magnitude. Social networks may provide few advantages when compared to seismometers. Information flows in a social network via people. Hence, there is no need to worry about instrumental errors when dealing with social networks. Furthermore, small earthquakes that no human beings can detect, and consequently have little to no significance, are automatically filtered out in social networks.
Social networks that can be used to determine meaningful information about earthquakes are special networks. In addition to having nodes, which are social network users in this case, connected to other nodes, all nodes are connected to one central network, which is a collection of databases of certain social networking services. This unique flow of information from all nodes to one central node allows centralized processing of information, which is very similar to one group of scientists interpreting seismograms and other seismometer measurements.
Resources:
- http://www.livescience.com/45385-earthquake-alerts-from-twitter.html
- http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/twitter/8379101/Japan-earthquake-how-Twitter-and-Facebook-helped.html
- http://www.pcworld.com/article/2030478/japan-quake-and-tsunami-put-social-networks-on-stage.html