Just another use (Score 2, Interesting)

The Cline Center for Democracy at UIUC has been running a data mining project, scanning archives and contents of newspapers around the world for reports of political disturbances such as riots &tc. The project, a collaboration between the center and the UIUC CS department, is meant to facilitate research on domestic stability and the like. Currently it's focused primarily on English papers, but efficiency and completeness will dictate searches in other languages sooner or later.

Information can be suppressed or 'spun', but at least this will ensure that the data's available for such evaluations instead of paying some graduate student peanuts for years and years to put it together.

Of course it does mean that I'm sort of out of a job...