Australian social media expert Laurel Papworth stressed that Twitter and Facebook had also provided people with a powerful tool for good during Sandy.
''They were able to rescue someone who tweeted their location, there was another couple of people who tweeted things like photographs of the exact insulin they needed and they were able to rush insulin over to them. Social media just means people talking to people,'' she said. ''We have to make a judgment call when we get a piece of information … and say 'who's passing the information to me and how trustworthy are they?'''
It is an issue that emergency service organisations such as the Rural Fire Service are battling.
Responsible for 95 per cent of the land mass of NSW, the RFS needs to communicate quickly with vast numbers of people in a disaster.
It has embraced the tools of social media and has 18,300 friends on its Facebook page and 6300 Twitter followers.
The media manager for the RFS, Ben Shepherd, said social media was increasingly important but in no way superceded traditional media, door knocking and community meetings.
''It's really good for spreading the word, and spreading it quickly, but you can't always hit the people you want to target,'' Mr Shepherd said. ''People whose homes are under threat aren't checking Facebook and Twitter.''
And anyone can post a misleading tweet using the hashtag #NSWRFS or set themselves up on Facebook as an unofficial bushfire expert.
The RFS media team does its best to monitor what bushfire information is going out on social media, correct misinformation and get in touch with those spreading it to ask them to stop. However, particularly at times of crisis, it is an impossible task.
Mr Shepherd said the service encouraged its firefighters and the general public to send photos and information to RFS media first to put out on Facebook and Twitter, rather than doing it themselves, ''to make sure operations advice is only given by the service''.
Ms Papworth said emergency services needed to recognise that huge numbers of people now relied on social media for information and had to make sure they had a prominent social media presence.
Williams and colleagues recorded the electrical impulses from the brains of rhesus monkeys trained to remember a sequence of two locations on a computer screen and, after a short pause, move the cursor to those locations.
They found that the two movements could be decoded, using computer algorithms, from separate, small groups of neurones in the premotor cortex – a part of the brain involved in planning and executing limb movements.
“Our results reveal a new functional structure within the premotor cortex that allowed for accurate and concurrent decoding of two planned motor targets across multiple spatial locations,” the authors wrote in the paper.
“Only a small number of neurones was sufficient to accurately predict the location of both targets, making the decoding of such information highly robust.”
The two distinct subpopulations of neurones allowed the two planned targets of the movement to be simultaneously held, without degradation, in the ‘working’ memory – a brain system that provides temporary storage and real-time processing of the information necessary to perform complex tasks.
Exploiting these mechanisms, the team then developed a BMI that could not only predict both of the intended movements simultaneously, but also drive the movements in real time alongside the monkey’s motor response.
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