I had to get a beeper ’cause my phone is tapped
The whereabouts of more than 100,000 mobile phone users have been tracked in an attempt to build a comprehensive picture of human movements.
The study concludes that humans are creatures of habit, mostly visiting the same few spots time and time again.
Most people also move less than 10km on a regular basis, according to the study published in the journal Nature.
The results could be used to help prevent outbreaks of disease or forecast traffic, the scientists said. (…)
Each time a participant made or received a call or text message, the location of the mobile base station relaying the data was recorded. (…)
The results showed that most people’s movements follow a precise mathematical relationship - known as a power law. (…) The second surprise was that 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.”
Last week, three prominent neurosurgeons told the CNN interviewer Larry King that they did not hold cellphones next to their ears. “I think the safe practice,” said Dr. Keith Black, a surgeon at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, “is to use an earpiece so you keep the microwave antenna away from your brain.”
