Cool idea

I'm generally a paranoid defender of privacy and of keeping the government off of my phonelines, car recorder, and other gizmos that note my passing. But somehow the idea of using cellphones as a kind of distributed detector for a range of possible risks -- radiation, say, or some subset of chemical and biological substances -- strikes me as pretty neat. It's in line with the use of GPS cell phones to track traffic slow-downs, and generally makes use of the distributed-wisdom sort of thing that drives Wiki (or investigations over at Talking Points Memo). Plus, using the input from a substantial population means that false positives pretty much get drowned out. Probably technically near-impossible, but a neat concept, very Web 3.0 or whatever...

(via Follow Me Here)