Despite the privacy implications of these neat little study, it does give us some insight into our own habits thanks to our ever-present mobile sidekicks. Conducted by Dr. Marta Gonzalez and a team of researchers, the study tracked the movement of 100, 000 people selected randomly from pool of 6 million cellphone users in a European country. Each time a person made or received a call or text message, the location of the mobile base station relaying the data was recorded. This was done for 6 months and revealed some insight into the nature of human movement. Most of us move only short distances-between 5 and 10 kilometers-and our movements follow a mathematical relationship known as the power law. And most of us return to the same places over and over again. The research team says this new information is useful because it shows that humans as a population tend to follow the same movement patterns. None of us are all that unique, making it easy for the likes of medical researchers studying disease outbreaks and traffic planners to use the data in their work. Measures to ensure participants privacy were taken-in fact participants don’t even know they were participating. Kind of creepy, but an interesting study nonetheless.
via bbc news
