From the University of Warwick, and the ultra-short baseline department comes this study of ridiculous proportions. I don’t have the words to accurately describe this utter waste of time and money. I can just see future NOAA bulletins:
HURRICANE WHOPPER FORECAST/ADVISORY NUMBER 18
NWS TPC/NATIONAL HURRICANE CENTER MIAMI FL AL122005
2100Z SAT AUG 27 2015
AT 4 PM CDT…2100Z…THE HURRICANE WATCH IS EXTENDED WESTWARD TO
INTRACOASTAL CITY LOUISIANA AND EASTWARD TO THE FLORIDA-ALABAMA BORDER. A HURRICANE WATCH IS NOW IN EFFECT ALONG THE NORTHERN GULF COAST FROM INTRACOASTAL CITY TO THE ALABAMA-FLORIDA BORDER.
GIVEN THE ACTIVITY MEASURED ON FACEBOOK, TWITTER, AND FLICKR A HURRICANE WARNING WILL LIKELY BE REQUIRED FOR PORTIONS OF THE
NORTHERN GULF COAST LATER TONIGHT OR SUNDAY. INTERESTS IN THIS AREA SHOULD MONITOR THE PROGRESS OF WHOPPER AND POST PICTURES OF ANY OBSERVED STORM ACTIVITY TO HELP NHC GAUGE CENTRAL PRESSURE.
Hurricane Sandy’s impact measured by millions of Flickr pictures
A new study has discovered a striking connection between the number of pictures of Hurricane Sandy posted on Flickr and the atmospheric pressure in New Jersey as the hurricane crashed through the US state in 2012.
Hurricane Sandy was the second-costliest hurricane to hit the US, hitting 24 states in late October last year, with New Jersey one of the worst affected.
In 2012 32 million photos were posted on image hosting website Flickr and by counting the number of pictures tagged either ‘Hurricane Sandy’, ‘hurricane’ or ‘sandy’ between October 20 and November 20 2012, a team of researchers led by two Warwick Business School academics, Tobias Preis, Associate Professor of Behavioural Science and Finance, and Suzy Moat, Assistant Professor of Behavioural Science, found a strong link to atmospheric pressure dropping in New Jersey.
In fact, the highest number of pictures posted were taken in the same hour in which Hurricane Sandy made landfall in New Jersey. In Quantifying the Digital Traces of Hurricane Sandy on Flickr, to be published in Scientific Reports today (Tuesday November 5), Tobias Preis and Suzy Moat, of Warwick Business School, Steven Bishop and Philip Treleaven, of UCL, and H. Eugene Stanley, of Boston University, suggest that using such online indicators could help governments measure the impact of disasters.
Preis and Moat’s work has previously uncovered a range of intriguing links between what people look for online and their behaviour in the real world. Recent results revealed that changes in how frequently people searched for financial information on Google and Wikipedia could be interpreted as early signs of stock market moves, and that internet users in countries with a higher per capita GDP search for more information about the future.
“Our steadily increasing use of digital technology is opening up new and fruitful ways to document and follow human actions,” said Dr Preis. “Building on our recent work, we asked whether data from photos uploaded to Flickr could have been used to measure the impact of Hurricane Sandy.
“Our new results show that the greatest number of photos taken with Flickr titles, descriptions or tags including the words ‘hurricane’, ‘sandy’ or ‘Hurricane Sandy’ were taken in exactly the hour which Hurricane Sandy made landfall in New Jersey.
“Examination of the number of Hurricane Sandy related photos taken before and after landfall reveals a striking correlation with environmental measurements of the development of the hurricane.” Dr Moat added: “As the severity of a hurricane in a given area increases, atmospheric pressure drops. We found that as atmospheric pressure in New Jersey fell the number of photos taken rose and as atmospheric pressure climbed again the number of photos taken fell. (See graphs attached)
“Plotting the data revealed that the number of photos taken increased continuously while ‘Sandy’ was moving towards the coast of the US. This study would suggest that in cases where no external sensors are available, it may be possible to use the number of Flickr photos relating to a topic to gauge the current level of this category of problems.
“Flickr can be considered as a system of large scale real-time sensors, documenting collective human attention. Increases in Flickr photo counts with particular labels may reveal notable increases in attention to a particular issue, which in some cases may merit further investigation for policy makers.
“Appropriate leverage of such online indicators of large disasters could be useful to policy makers and others charged with emergency crisis management: in particular if no secondary environmental measures are available.”
Quantifying the Digital Traces of Hurricane Sandy on Flickr is published in Nature Publishing Group’s Scientific Reports today, at http://www.nature.com/srep/2013/131105/srep03141/full/srep03141.html
This URL will become live when the embargo lifts at 2pm UK time on November 5 2013. Copies of the paper ahead of the embargo can also be requested from Tobias.Preis@wbs.ac.uk.
That’s it. Words have finally failed me. #ifthesearebusinessschoolacademicsweareallupshitcreek
I’ve been asleep for months and now it is the first of April.
Wow, what a load of useless b*llocks. These people have no clue about cause and effect. Next, they’ll be predicting extreme weather events using the Kardashian metric. Idiots.
Positive feedback? Big storm. Big media hype.Big response.Maybe all these pictures caused Sandy./sarc.
If they found that online searches increased by the millions for SUV’s, I assume this would predict that people will be buying more SUV’s, and thus, global warming will increase to catastrophic levels. Ok, I got it now.
Wow is right, elftone. What a waste of taxpayer dollars.
National Centre for Environmetal prediction forecasts are amazingly accurate up to 7 days in advance. One good bit of news for the modelers (which I am guessing are mostly meteorologists). I have been observing these maps closely for about a year now.
http://wxmaps.org/pix/sa.850.html
Basically you can be about 100% sure if it will rain next sunday or not. Congrats to the NCEP!
Ok, this is two absurdities in one day. We’ve seen it before. What’s the record, six/day?
Did I just accidentally stumble upon “The Onion” instead of WUWT?
I think Michael Mann may have a new proxy…
So, in cases where no external sensors are available, we’ll rely on individuals having internet connections in order to gauge the severity of the event. Sounds like a plan…
Flickr is a site for photographers — people who work on their pictures before posting them. I’m still posting my 2008′ photos, with several thousands in the pipeline.
I may be an outlier, but the typical delay between taking a picture and posting it on Flickr is several days. So much for advance warnings.
Post normal science
Post on Flickr
Post hoc ergo propter hoc
The climate is gonna go postal!
You may consider this to be an “utter waste of time and money”, but there are a number of groups in the Washington DC area, including DARPA and various news agencies, actively investigating how to use social media on the web to obtain information that is otherwise difficult to obtain.
So they aren’t doing no proper education in universities if they can’t even teach the basics of science such as correlation does not mean causation. init.
Or more likely, the short attention span, smart phone society has imposed itself into research efforts and popular science.
The warmists obviously have no need for Ex-lax being they can pull stuff like this out of their asses!
Robert Clemenzi says:
November 5, 2013 at 8:46 am
“You may consider this to be an “utter waste of time and money”, but there are a number of groups in the Washington DC area, including DARPA and various news agencies, actively investigating how to use social media on the web to obtain information that is otherwise difficult to obtain.”
So you’re implying that atmospheric pressure is difficult to obtain without social media. I disagree. In my opinion, a barometer excels at obtaining atmospheric pressure, and beats the NSA in this regard. A big problem in obtaining correct atmospheric pressure readings from social media that still awaits a solution is for instance sarcasm; a topic that the barometer elegantly sidesteps by direct measurement of atmospheric pressure.
Whoa up folks.
They aren’t claiming that their methodology predicts the hurricane. They’re claiming that their methodology may be of value in terms of understanding extent and extreme of an event in real-time. While I think this study is rather narrow in that it looks only at Flickr, leveraging the enormous amount of data the arrives in real-time from social media such as Flickr, Twitter, Facebook and others has merit.
Not only does this technique work, it is already in use for other purposes. When a major consumer goods manufacturer makes an announcement of, for an example, a price increase, they can scrape an enormous amount of information from social media in a matter of hours to learn how much or little that price increase is affecting them in the market. When a new product (say a new whiz bang cell phone) has an unexpected problem, the manufacturer will know within hours, perhaps minutes, how extensive the problem is, if it is constrained to a specific geography, it it appears only in combination with something else (ie only a specific telco) and many other things.
Leveraging social media to understand in real-time which areas are most heavily hit, and by what (fallen trees, flooding, fire, what?) could be of immense value in emergency response.
We have a propensity to dismiss out of hand studies like this as useful predictors of anything, and correctly so. But applied to what is happening and where it is happening, and what should be done about it has merit.
New study shows victoria secret models wear less than at any time in
History. Must be getting warmer…..sorry
Bob Tinsdale says at 8.43
‘what awaste of taxpayers dollars’ .
Unfortunately for we Brits Bob, they are probably taxpayers Pounds on this occasion!
@ur momisugly Gary Hladik –
Bravo, Sir.
We have been arguing for years about the surface temperatures record because we can not quantify the small ways in which any given temperature recorder might be inaccurate or not a true representation of what has actually occurred. So how can a completely unregulated, variable laden metric like Flickr photos be anything but a blank canvas on which to draw any conclusion one desires?
I need to know the weather tomorro ,should I turn on the weather channel or facebook?
Tomorrow …..