US Agency Uses Weather Balloons to Gauge the Accuracy of the Internet

Posted 12/06/2009 at 11:23am | by Justin Kerr

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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?