DARPA on Red Balloons: We have a winner!

Posted on December 5, 2009 by JoeDuck

IMMEDIATE RELEASE December 5, 2009
MIT RED BALLOON TEAM WINS DARPA NETWORK CHALLENGE
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has announced that the MIT Red Balloon Challenge Team won the $40,000 cash prize in the DARPA Network Challenge, a competition that required participants to locate 10 large, red balloons at undisclosed locations across the United States. The MIT team received the prize for being the first to identify the locations of all 10 balloons.
“The Challenge has captured the imagination of people around the world, is rich with scientific intrigue, and, we hope, is part of a growing ‘renaissance of wonder’ throughout the nation,” said DARPA director,
Dr. Regina E. Dugan. “DARPA salutes the MIT team for successfully completing this complex task less than 9 hours after balloon launch.”
DARPA announced the Network Challenge to mark the 40th anniversary of the ARPANet, pre-cursor to today’s Internet, to explore how broad-scope problems can be tackled using social networking tools. The Challenge explores basic research issues such as mobilization, collaboration, and trust in diverse social networking constructs and could serve to fuel innovation across a wide spectrum of applications.
DARPA plans to meet with teams to review the approaches and strategies used to build networks, collect information, and participate in the Challenge.
DARPA is the central research and development organization for the Department of Defense (DoD). The Agency manages and directs research and development projects for DoD and pursues research and technology where the risk and payoff are both very high and where success may provide dramatic advances in support of military missions.
“We need a renaissance of wonder. We need to renew, in our hearts and in our souls, the deathless dream, the eternal poetry, the perennial sense that life is miracle and magic.” — E. Merrill Root
-END-
Media with questions, contact Johanna Jones, (571) 218-4512 or johanna.jones@darpa.mil.

John Stewart on ClimateGate

Posted on December 5, 2009 by JoeDuck

This is pretty funny, especially if you know the whole scoop.
NOTE: Stewart correctly points out at the end that this does NOT debunk warming, it just “doesn’t look good”.

Red Balloon Challenge from DARPA

Posted on December 5, 2009 by JoeDuck

DARPA – the advanced technology research wing of the US Military – is always coming up with the most fun research and today’s Red Balloon social media experiment is no exception to that rule.

Ten huge red weather balloons were launched this morning at 10am EST and DARPA will pay 40,000 to the first team or person that can identify all the balloons by number and latitude / longitude.

Now, in my view as a social media expert (aka a web surfer), DARPA’s payout of 40,000 is distorting the experiment in a confusing way, encouraging secretiveness and deception rather than cooperation. That may be intentional, but I think they wanted people to “really try” and wrongly felt this was the best way to do it. All of the serious efforts I’ve seen so far are actually *discouraging* people from using the power of social media to find the balloons, instead asking them to email or phone in sightings and then in some cases share in the proceeds, in other cases promising to give them to charity.

DARPA should consider repeating this experiment as a TWITTER crowdsource where there is NO money offered and each report is posted at Twitter where the crowd can sort the fakes from the real data. I think that task would likely only take minutes rather than the hours the current project appears to need to get a complete result from the secretive teams.

Here are more stories about the DARPA Red Balloons:

Wall Street Journal: Spot 10 Balloons, Win $40,000

Gizmodo: DARPA’s Giant Red Balloons Officially at Large