Phone study confirms people are creatures of habit.The idiots here are whoever funded a study that you could figure out for yourself
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Researchers who tracked 100,000 people using their cell phone signals confirmed on Wednesday that most human beings are indeed creatures of habit.
Most of us go to work, to school and back home in surprisingly predictable patterns, something the researchers said would be useful in city planning and preparing for emergencies.
"Despite the diversity of their travel history, humans follow simple reproducible patterns," Albert-Laszlo Barabasi of Northeastern University in Boston and colleagues wrote in their report, published in the journal Nature. "This inherent similarity in travel patterns could impact all phenomena driven by human mobility, from epidemic prevention to emergency response, urban planning and agent-based modeling," they added.
They used data collected by a European mobile phone carrier for billing and operational purposes. "It contains the date, time and coordinates of the phone tower routing the communication for each phone call and text message sent or received by 6 million customers," they wrote. Their research was done on 100,000 of those users, who were kept anonymous. Journeys of more than 600 miles were not included.
| That would be out of habit ... |
Don't be so quick to dismiss this. In 2005 the National Academies of Science recommended that the US Army take the lead in maturing a new discipline called Network Science. Since then there has been a LOT of direct DOD work & funding in this area. Barabasi is one of the leaders in the field. Rantburgers might be interested to know that one application of this new discipline has been to identify, track and interdict terror networks and the spread of ideology. Another application is to help the Army design and predict the behavior of the very complex communications, information and robotics battlefield networks that are beginning to be deployed. A third application is modeling the spread of bioterror or pandemic flu agents. Barabasi's work is valuable because it establishes a baseline against which to identify anomalous behavior. Where there are anomalies there quite possibly are jihadi networks .... |
| Oh. Okay. Maybe I won't be so quick to dismiss this. |