Fake earthquake disaster drill tests Facebook, Twitter

(CNN) -- If your Facebook page or Twitter feed lights up with news of a tsunami off the California coast, don't get too worried.

At noon ET Friday, a drill was launched by natural disaster experts at San Diego State University to test how social media would be used to respond to a crisis.
Exercise 24 (X24) is being run by the university's Immersive Visualization Center.
Participants from 15 countries, including the United States, organizations such as the United Nations and Red Cross, and other business, nonprofits and individuals will be involved.
The idea is to test the speed and widen the scope of responses to a major disaster, focusing on how social media sites like Facebook and Twitter can be used.
"Ultimately, the goal is to get there faster, respond more effectively to save lives, communities, businesses, etc.," read a written release on the drill.
Organizers said that all messages about the fictional disaster would be marked clearly as fake on the Web.
Shortly after 12:30 p.m. ET, organizers began sending fictional messages from an account on Twitter reporting the disaster.

Social media has become an increasingly important tool in disaster response in recent months, particularly during the Haiti earthquake and Gulf oil disaster.
During the recent wildfires in California, responders used sites such as Facebook and Twitter to track the fires and see what people were saying about them.
Friday's fictional scenario starts with a major earthquake off the coast of Huntington Beach, California, generating a tidal wave and an oil spill. A social media aggregator program will be used to try to bring together all the information about it on social media sites.
On Friday, about 50 members of government and relief groups huddled in the drill's dimly lit, makeshift command center at San Diego State University.
Chris Mayfield, a civilian systems engineer with the U.S. Navy, tapped on his keyboard.
"We have to be ready in case something like this gets to the presidential [federal] disaster level," said Mayfield, who is with the Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command.
SPAWAR helps deploy critical federal response teams and equipment during disasters.
"For example, somebody needs fresh water," Mayfield said. "So we need to find out, how do we get it? Are there troops available who can bring that to them? What's the time line?"
At the center, U.S. and Mexican flags hung on the wall, symbols of the need for both countries to cooperate on logistics if such a massive earthquake hit the area.
While government and relief organizations are the official participants, the public is being asked to help, too.
People were asked to visit the InRelief.org website starting at noon ET to see if the site can handle a huge amount of traffic. They are also being asked to find and follow specifically branded sites on Facebook and Twitter, to help see how easy it will be for people to get information that way.
"Essentially we're challenging the public to teach response groups what they need and want re: social media engagement in a very real sense and then to put it all to work," said a written release. "We'll develop and share the results in a report with everyone afterwards."
As of about 5 p.m. ET on Friday, the InRelief site was performing well, said Google spokesman Dan Martin. The site is built using Google Apps.
Martin said that, at that time, the site had seen 10,000 unique users from 60 different countries.
The drill will last through Saturday.

Make yourself a better person and know who you are before you try and know someone else and expect them to know you

3 Relationships Will Fail If The Following Three Steps Don’t Get Fulfilled Within Your Relationship!

Here are three things you must ensure you focus upon within your relationship, to secure any sort of future and prosperity of the relationship. Let’s look at the three…

Your Partner comes first in your relationship.

In a functional, dedicated, and happy relationship your partner should be your life and you should be theirs. That means that of all of the people in your life, the opinions, needs, desires, and emotions of your partner come supreme to everyone else’s! To further emphasize this, the needs of your partner exceed by far the importance of the need of your parents, siblings, family, and friends. If you take the needs of anybody else over your woman’s/ mans you instantly disrespect their position at your life – at the very forefront. Never ignore the wishes of your partner to follow somebody else’s instructions and desires. Once you do that you lose respect by your partner, and the very cohesion that’s meant to be the very cement to the relationship! Even if your partner seems irrational, controlling (to a degree), and dead set on something (this may be anything in particular), you must go against the whole world if need be, upset everyone you know if need be, to be supportive and co-operating with your partners needs, and wishes. If you don’t follow this one vital point, chances are and I guarantee it, your relationship will never work out!
Ensure your partner feels appreciated.

If your partner is your life, then you should make sure they feel like it each and every day you’re together. Life is just too short for people to fail to ensure their partner feels wanted, needed, loved and appreciated! It’s not brain science; we all want to feel wanted and appreciated, your partner isn’t exempt to this. No matter how long you’ve been together, and no matter how lazy you’ve become in your relationship, don’t think for a moment that your partner doesn’t want to hear how appreciated they are. Just a simple ‘Darling dinner was great’, compliment could make your partners day! Before you go to sleep, and as you wake, it doesn’t hurt to tell your partner you love them and how much they mean to you each and every day of your life! Women and men equally want to feel appreciated the same. Is it so hard to let the one person you share your emotion, body, and soul with that they are the reason you look forward to each waking day. After all if this wasn’t the case you shouldn’t be together to begin with, and may just need to call it quits! Fail to make sure your partner feels loved and appreciated may not end your relationship today or tomorrow, but it all adds up, and like cancer will destroy everything between you!

You must put your partner before yourself.

When you’re single you’re an individual and key component of society, and in this circumstance your interests come first above all. In a relationship between two people in love, this is not so! Your partner comes first in your life. No matter how frustrated, angry, or just upset you get made to feel by your partner, you must cooperate together and take them for who they are, and love and care for them no less! It doesn’t matter how much harder or inconvenient, your partner may make your life, they should always remain the focus and the meaning of your life. Just remember that you were once before them, and you needed them, and upon needing them you obligated to them. Upon any obligation, the consequence may be a lack of freedom, and you gain a thing called responsibility! You chose to be responsible for your partner and them vice versa. This responsibility may come at the cost of a little pain, time, and care on your behalf, but isn’t this just a marginal cost in enjoying the beauty of having another human being in your life, to share your life with? Your partner is your life, and your life is theirs, never forget that. So instead of complaining, take pride in the bonds you share with your loved one, otherwise your relationship is doomed for failure!

I hope the aforementioned three pointers lead you all on the right track in achieving, and maintaining happiness and prosperity in your relationships.


Read more: http://socyberty.com

Falling in love costs you friends

By Jonathan Amos
Science correspondent, BBC New

Sept 15


We probably all know that a passionate new relationship can leave you little time for others, but now science has put some numbers on the observation.

Oxford University researchers asked people about their inner core of friendships and how this number changed when romance entered the equation.

They found the core, which numbers about five people, dropped by two as a new lover came to dominate daily life.

"People who are in romantic relationships - instead of having the typical five [individuals] on average, they only have four in that circle," explained Robin Dunbar, a professor of evolutionary anthropology at Oxford.

"And bearing in mind that one of those is the new person that's come into your life, it means you've had to give up two others."

The research, which has only recently been submitted for publication, was presented to the British Science Festival at Aston University.

Professor Dunbar's group studies social networks and how we manage their size and composition.

He has previously shown that the maximum number of friends it is realistically possible to engage is about 150. On the social networking site Facebook, for example, people will typically have 120-130 friends.

This number can be divided into progressively smaller groups, with an inner clique numbering between four and six.

These are people who we see at least once a week; people we go to at moments of crisis. The next layer out are the people we see about once a month - the "sympathy group". They are all the people who, if they died tomorrow, we would miss and be upset about.

In the latest study, the team questioned 540 participants, aged 18 and over, about their relationships and the strain those relationships came under when a new romantic engagement was started.

The results confirmed the widely held view that love can lead to a smaller support network, with typically one family member and one friend being pushed out to accommodate the new lover.

"The intimacy of a relationship - your emotional engagement with it - correlates very tightly with the frequency of your interactions with those individuals," observed Professor Dunbar.

"If you don't see people, the emotional engagement starts to drop off, and quickly.

"What I suspect happens is that your attention is so wholly focussed on your romantic partner that you just don't get to see the other folks you have a lot to do with, and therefore some of those relationships just start to deteriorate and drop down into the layer below."