Kepler L's Library tagged engineering → View Popular

05 Sep 09

provide windows on the social structure of communities, information that can lead to better public-policy decisions, and unexpected sources of income for people in poor countries.
he strips all identifying information from call logs and looks for patterns in where people go and how they use their phones--patterns that can reveal how social networks are affected by outside forces
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- working with city planners in Kenya and Rwanda to understand how slums grow and change in response to events such as natural disasters and declines in crop prices. And earlier this year, Eagle began using phone-derived data to build a more accurate model of the spread of malaria in Africa. Previous models had relied on spotty information about people's movements, collected in sporadic surveys. With a better picture of how the disease spreads, governments can improve the policies designed to fight it.

22 Aug 09

What???
"Without such a system, it would be nearly impossible to gather the necessary data to find a safe landing site or to properly understand the environmental characteristics relavent (sic) to future human missions"

Tell that to the Apollo guys.