vIndianz.com (Dec. 06, 2009) — The US defense research agency has made use of 10 red balloons in a competition to evaluate the correctness with which information spreads on the cyberspace.
The giant moored weather balloons were launched on Saturday morning at 10 unrevealed locations across the United States. Over 4,000 groups competed to be the earliest to identify all 10.
A squad from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Mit) won the challenge and a reward of $40,000 (£24,000).
Johanna Jones, a spokeswoman for the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa), said that further than the real contest, the plan was to see whether social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter ought to be seen as trustworthy sources of information. Darpa is no foreigner to ground-breaking uses of technology.
The agency – which is division of the US defense department – played a fundamental role in the formation of the internet itself. Forty years on, with the internet in full swing, the same agency was eager to see if the power of social networking sites – with their tens of millions of users – could be used as a realistic resource to alert authorities of looming tragedy or turbulence on US soil.
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