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The national debt clock ticks along endlessly, but never fear, your tax dollars are hard at work trying to gauge the accuracy of the Internet using weather balloons. It may sound silly, but the experiment was actually concocted by the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa) in an attempt to learn how much trust they should put in information gathered from social networking channels such as Facebook and Twitter. The test involved launching balloons from 10 undisclosed locations across the United States, and offered prize money to the team that did the best job of reporting on their locations.
Over 4,000 groups competed in the event, but the winner of the contest was the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Mit) which won the $40,000 grand prize. It remains to be seen what the conclusions of the experiment were, but I think we would all be a bit more interested in finding out what exactly this proves to begin with. Maybe the whole Tiger Woods scandal was part 1 of the test. If that's true, I think its safe to say the Internet failed pretty miserably on that one.
Can information gathered from social networks be trusted?
Comments are closed on this article
Who
December 07, 2009 at 6:08am
gage and gauge are both correct; gage was in one of my engineering books last year and I found that really odd, but apparently they both work in terms of measurement.
Digital-Storm
December 06, 2009 at 3:17pm
All this shows, is that a couple of brainiacs at MIT knew how to calculate where a baloon was released from based on its current location, and that the government loves to give 40k dollars to someone for doing such.
Pball1224
December 06, 2009 at 8:12pm
The baloons were not released, they were tethered to the ground and left up for one day, then the race was on to collect and compile the coordinates, while avoiding false information that was also getting circulated.
mattman059
December 07, 2009 at 4:10am
regardless...this was like tying your shoe for an MIT student
