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Cell Phones Predict the Future
An anonymous reader writes "Wired News reports that cell phones were used in a recent project at MIT to both document and predict the lives of 100 MIT faculty and staff members. During the Reality Mining Project at MIT, Researcher Nathan Eagle logged 350,000 hours of data over nine months about the location, proximity, activity and communication of volunteers through cell phones carried by the participants.
From the article, "Given enough data, Eagle's algorithms were able to predict what people -- especially professors and Media Lab employees -- would do next and be right up to 85 percent of the time."
In metheorology it is a fact, that if you predict the next day weather to be excactly the same that it is today, you end up with 85% average.
Or, as a sane alternative, you could keep carrying a cell phone and just forget about the possibility that someone might spy on you because chances are very, very good that you're not important enough for this to happen. Even if it did, it's still possible to track a person's movements and listen to their conversations when they don't own a cell phone.
Check out the findings in a video at http://garage.sims.berkeley.edu/ especially the first video on the home page that describes what the best way to predict photo sharing is (surprisingly, time is better than where you are, who is around you, or anything else)
Very cool base platform on the phone, built on the Symbian OS, does a great job of logging data passively as you use the camera and sharing. Specifics on the phone side are at http://garage.sims.berkeley.edu/research.cfm#MMM