User:Cassieng28/sandbox

Cognitive Surplus: the actual Wikipedia article which I inserted this contribution

The Earthquake Hazards Program is an open source and social platform that applies the idea of cognitive surplus, launched by the United States Geological Survey (USGS, formerly simply Geological Survey). The program allows people from all over the globe who experience an earthquake to report it online immediately. By sharing live time information and the effects of the earthquake, this information helps to create a map of shaking intensities and damage. It also contributes greatly toward the quick assessment of the earthquake activities and provides valuable data for earthquake research.

The USGS has the lead federal responsibility to monitor and provide notification of earthquakes in the United States and worldwide, and it is a real-time earthquake information system operated by the USGS together with state and university partners.

A section called "Did You Feel It?" (DYFI) is intended to create an abundant online information resource about earthquake. This section contains earthquake's magnitude, location, and event time. For each earthquake, the website will automatically generate an event ID and allow public to respond to the event. By collecting all of the earthquake's events from the field, this data generates archives and allows the public to search different earthquake events. When the public contributes their experience of the earthquake, either immediately or afterward, it reflects a civic value of cognitive surplus. Its value is created by individual participants but shared with the society as a whole. DYFI is a public contribution to earthquake science. The USGS is working to improve in monitoring earthquake activities and reporting capabilities through DYFI. Besides public contribution, it also provides a function called volunteer monitoring; it is an opportunity for individual to host a seismometer in a private home, business, public building or school. With cooperating from individual to public contribution to gather information, the information will ensure the scientists at USGS are getting the latest and most accurate data in order to evaluate and develop different researches according to earthquake activities from all over the world. DYFI is not only beneficial for scientists, but it is also helping individual to learn more about how other communities fared and develop a deeper understanding of the effects and consequences of earthquakes.

Besides the social communicate platform for the public to share live time earthquake information, the Earthquake Hazards Program also has serves as education purpose, including teaching and doing research. The dataset can be used to teach different topics, such as natural hazards, solid earth, plate tectonics, etc. in geophysics and structural geology. Stanford University has done a research based on the Earthquake Hazards Program, which is using tweets to add more accurate real time information to ShakeMaps, a map that is created by the USGS Earthquake Hazards Program to track earthquakes.

Although the Earthquake Hazards Program is being used for sharing live time earthquake information and supposed to provide accurate information, Bloomberg Businessweek points out that the data may not be reliable. According to a news article, USGS has added an alert on the website in October 15, 2013. "Due to a lapse in Federal funding, the USGS Earthquake Hazards Program has suspended most of its operations, the accuracy or timeliness of some earthquake information products, as well as the availability or functionality of some web pages, could be affected by our reduced level of operation."