Lower Your Exposure to Cell Phone Radiation

amro — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 08:27:30 -0800

Reality Mining

tractorfeed — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 01:19:44 -0800

"Reality mining is just like data mining... except instead of being applied to text and web pages... we're trying to find patterns in real life." MIT students "swap their privacy for smartphones that generate digital trails." Alex "Sandy" Pentland tracks how humans interact by looking at the trails left by the devices they use. This movie (.mov file) shows a little of what he's up to. Could the accelerometer in your iPhone detect a change in your gait, which can be an early indicator of Parkinson's? Maybe cell phone data could be used to track the spread of diseases like SARS. Thomas Malone, another researcher at MIT, thinks we might be overly-focused on privacy: “For most of human history, people have lived in small tribes where everything they did was known by everyone they knew,” Dr. Malone said. “In some sense we’re becoming a global village. Privacy may turn out to have become an anomaly.”