This New Scientist article reminds me of a project I worked on about ten years ago. The article talks about analyzing mobile-phone location data to establish patterns of how the users move around. We didn’t analyze predictability rates, but we did look for patterns that foretold other patterns, like this bit from the article:

“Say your routine movement is from home to the coffee shop to work: if you are at home and then go to the coffee shop it’s easy for me to predict that you are going to work,” says co-author Nicholas Blumm.

New Scientist tells us that some of my former IBM Research colleagues have been busy looking at ways to give bloggers inspiration:

Want to get more people to read your blog? A software tool that provides a list of topics for you to write about could help.

You know what I would like? An Internet camera. It would be just like the digital camera I have today: it would take pictures, compress them into JPEG files, and store them on an SD card in the camera. Of course, it would also have a GPS receiver, and it would include the GPS information in the file’s metadata, so the photos would automatically be geotagged. Nothing we aren’t already doing.

Last week, the New York Times published an item about putting wireless Internet on a school bus. Using a $200 router and $60/month for Internet service, a school district in Arizona has equipped a bus, and is allowing students to use the Internet connection on the way to and from school. It’s working wonderfully, not only giving the students a chance to use the dead time, but also making the bus ride more serene:

According to the lede in a recent New Scientist article:

Spammers’ own trickery has been used to develop an “effectively perfect” method for blocking the most common kind of spam, a team of computer scientists claims.

Recently, the New York Times came out with yet another article about how people consistently pick bad passwords. It’s a hackneyed subject by now, but I shouldn’t complain: I cover this sort of old ground repeatedly, myself. But what makes this article remarkable — or, at least, what makes me want to remark on it — is their attempt to explain why.