The Arudino is set up to respond to the tweets that the entire community of twitter is posting. The program is designed so that whenever anyone in the world tweets the term “emergency”, the red LED’s flash. The Arduino is scanning twitter every twelve seconds, the maximum number of requests that twitter allows in an hour, for the term emergency. Important to recognize is that the lights flash every time the Arduino searches for the word emergency, and more importantly, if the delay of 12 seconds was removed, the light would be constantly flashing or remain constantly on. The idea was to represent the prevalence of the emergency concept in modern society. People seem to be under the impression that either the state of the world or the state of one’s own life is in disarray or emergency always. Society has become fixated on the idea that every problem earns the right to be an emergency- be it a real or imagined one.

Also demonstrated by this real world example:
http://content.usatoday.com/communities/ondeadline/post/2011/11/fema-to-test-nationwide-emergency-alert-system-at-2-pm-et/1?csp=34news