Wow!
Mobile phone data may reveal an underlying mathematical connection between how we move and how we communicate that could make it easier to predict how diseases—and even ideas—spread through a population, according to an international team of researchers.
“This study really deepens our quantitative understanding of human behavior,” said Dashun Wang, assistant professor of information sciences and technology, Penn State. “We would like to think that we control our own behavior and we can do what we want to do. But, what we are starting to see with big data is that there is a very deep regularity underlying much of what we do.”
In a study, location and communication data collected from three international mobile phone carriers showed that people move and communicate in predictable patterns, said Wang.
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