This article was taken from the June issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content bysubscribing online
Human habits -- what we do, when, where and how often -- are the realm of psychology and economics. But physics? “Good science usually starts with data,” says 43-yearold Albert-László Barabási, a physicist at Northeastern University in Boston. “Whether you study atoms or people, measuring things is the first step to understanding.”
Barabási analyses location data from mobile phone users, mapping the daily movements of millions of people over months. For his most recent study, he and his team studied data from 50,000 people randomly pulled from a research pool of ten million. They concluded that human mobility patterns are very regular -- up to 93 percent predictable.
In his new book, Bursts (Dutton Books), Barabási explores a number of other recent applications of data driven tracking, such as the site wheresgeorge.com, which allows people to record and follow the movement of dollar bills, as well as the use of large-scale email databases to map real-world social networks. “Science evolves through long periods of silence and short bursts of feverish activity,” says Barabási. “Today we are beginning to experience the ‘data burst’. The potential to social science, from epidemic modelling to traffic engineering, is unlimited.”
ProfileName: Albert-László Barabási Job: Physicist and social scientist Location: Boston, US
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
