Twitter and the source of real-time news – is it the new emergency broadcast system?

The Washington Post’s Outlook section mentioned that twitter has become the first source of news ahead of the major networks and news organizations. While this is certainly true for many public events, such as the Boston Marathon bombing events, its probably more likely that twitter is the first source of news for certain news area segments. Public events and events where smartphones can operate such as public spaces or urban settings, twitter can be the first to report issues because the witnesses or even the participants can self-report. For other types of news, such as corporate internal news, certain types of business news and government news, finding stories and issues can take time and deeper digging–activities that are not so heavily aligned with twitter’s instant communication model.

Of course, with the power to be real-time comes the responsibility to not use it for fraudulent purposes. Twitter puts significant “power” into the hands of the individual and power can be used for reporting problems and issues but it can also be used to amplify untruths or fraudulent information. All communication channels have this balance to some degree. With Twitter, the amplification effect and balance must be managed much more closely.

Although not everyone has a smartphone or receives twitter alerts many companies and government groups do monitor twitter, in essence, it is now a new socially driven, emergency broadcast system.

Largescale Healthcare sensor networks and BigData

Lately, there have been announcements that could make large-scale, healthcare focused sensor network much more of a reality. A healthcare monitoring network could drive substantial improvements in care and reductions in cost. Today, if you are in a hospital, you are plugged into the sensor network that is relatively stationary and highly controlled (for obvious reasons). But there are many more healthcare, consumer-level networks that could be created. Here’s a mention of the world’s smallest blood monitoring implant and other heart rate monitoring capabilities based on visual monitoring techniques:

Putting together a big data solution here means a solution that can scale out. Batch technologies are not the answer here so frameworks like hadoop directly are not the primary component. Other analytical frameworks like Storm, Dempsy, Apache S4, Esper, OpenMDAO, Stormkeeper or the eclipse m2m framework are needed.

In this case, BigData is about scaling out solutions for sensor networks and piecing together analytical processing nodes to create a workflow that accomplishes the analysis.

But healthcare sensor networks are not without their challenges. Here’s some links that describe the issues in more detail and the research going on in this area