Category: Advanced Cyber/IO

What Percentage of Tweets Generated During a Crisis Are Relevant for Humanitarian Response?

More than half-a-million tweets were generated during the first three days of Hurricane Sandy and well over 400,000 pictures were shared via Instagram. Last year, over one million tweets were generated every five minutes on the day that Japan was struck by a devastating earthquake and tsunami. Humanitarian organi-zations are ill-equipped to manage this volume and velocity of information. In fact, the lack of analysis of this “Big Data” has spawned all kinds of suppositions about the perceived value—or lack thereof—that social media holds for emer-gency response operations. So just what percentage of tweets are relevant for humanitarian response?

One of the very few rigorous and data-driven studies that addresses this question is Dr. Sarah Vieweg‘s 2012 doctoral dissertation on “Situational Awareness in Mass Emergency: Behavioral and Linguistic Analysis of Disaster Tweets.” After manually analyzing four distinct disaster datasets, Vieweg finds that only 8% to 20% of tweets generated during a crisis provide situational awareness. This implies that the vast majority of tweets generated during a crisis have zero added value vis-à-vis humanitarian response. So critics have good reason to be skeptical about the value of social media for disaster response.

Continue reading “Patrick Meier: What Percentage of Tweets Generated During a Crisis Are Relevant for Humanitarian Response?”

How the Internet of everything will change the world

From the Internet of Things (IoT), where we are today, we are just beginning to enter a new realm: the Internet of Everything (IoE), where things will gain context awareness, increased processing power, and greater sensing abilities, says Cisco in their blog.

Add people and information into the mix and you get a network of networks where billions or even trillions of connections create unprecedented opportunities and give things that were silent a voice.

Cisco says their IoE as bringing together people, process, data, and things to make networked connections more relevant and valuable than ever before — turning information into actions that create new capabilities, richer experiences, and unprecedented economic opportunity for businesses, individuals, and countries.

Phi Beta Iota:  Until true cost information is available for each “thing” or process or service, the network will not be intelligence and will not have integrity in the holistic sense.  At the same time, absent a commitment to open standards, open spectrum, open everything, the “things” will not inter-relate as efficiently as possible.