Twitter is better than police at predicting riots, and it's unsettling

If you always kind of thought that Twitter is faster than authorities in accurately identifying threats, you're not that far from the truth. 

New research from Cardiff University, which analysed 1.6 million tweets from the London 2011 riots, has noticed that the micro-blogging platform can be used to detect dangerous situations up to an hour faster than police reports. 

To do so, researchers created event detection algorithms that use various features of Twitter data — like sentiment, frequency of tweets containing certain words, and geolocation and timing of the tweets — to cluster "similar" content and produce interpretable summaries.  Read more...