not only lend your computer but your brain.

one example recently popped up at acm: Foldit, gaming for cure:

Two years ago, University of Washington researchers launched a project to harness the brainpower of computer gamers to solve medical problems. The game, called Foldit, turns difficult molecular biology problems into a game similar to Tetris. The researchers found that human players did better than computers on problems that required radical moves, risks, and long-term vision, all qualities that computers do not possess | technews

others are:

Bossa: middleware for volunteer thinking, brought to you by david p. anderson, the guy who also started the seti movement and boinc.

the citizen cyberscience community meets in london, 2-3 of septembre.

actually an interesting thought:

"you might almost say the story [of the eu grid project egee] is a little bit like the analogy of OSI: struggling, and suddenly something comes which is much better and cleaner and that is 'the cloud'; the cloud allows what the grid dreamed of."

for me the cloud follows the concept of timesharing. now, the internet might have been the new timesharing model, but i am not sure if the cloud should be the new model for the internet. some say it looks like the old ptt telephone model.

a brief history, 2008 | cloud journal

¿who invented virtual computing?

studied by pedro g. lind, luciano r. da silva, josé s. andrade jr., and hans j. herrmann

We study a simple model of information propagation in social networks, where two quantities are introduced: the spread factor, which measures the average maximal fraction of neighbors of a given node that interchange information among each other, and the spreading time needed for the information to reach such fraction of nodes ...

... Further, from the computation of the spreading factor we observed that there is a non- trivial optimal number of friends which minimizes the danger of being gossipped that depends on the size of the network and on total number of acquaintances in it.| spreading gossip in social networks, 2007