Techotic

In a research lasting 6 months, involving 100,000 cell phone users in an attempt to map human movements. Researchers at the Northeastern University, Boston, US, has concluded that humans are creatures of habit, mostly visiting the same few spots time and time again.

It also established that people also move less than 10km on a regular basis, the result of the study was published in the journal Nature.

The new work tracked 100,000 individuals selected randomly from a sample of more than six million anonymous phone users.

Each time a participant made or received a call or text message, the location of the mobile base station relaying the data was recorded.

Information was collected for six months. But, according to the researchers, a person’s pattern of movement could be seen in just three.

“The vast majority of people move around over a very short distance - around five to 10km,” explained Professor Albert-Laszlo Barabasi, another member of the team.

“Then there were a few that moved a couple of hundred kilometres on a regular basis.”

The results showed that most people’s movements follow a precise mathematical relationship - known as a power law.

the patterns of people’s movements, over short and long distances, were very similar: people tend to return to the same few places over and over again.

“Why is this good news?” he asked. “If I were to build a model of how everyone moves in society and they were not similar then it would require six billion different models - each person would require a different description.”

Now, modellers had a basic rule book to follow, he said.

[via bbc news]