"Understanding individual human mobility patterns" (nature article)
(link) Cautionary Note: I'd like to read this article but don't really want to drop $32 for the privilege. Maybe it'd be really cool if the authors, Marta C. González, César A. Hidalgo and Albert-László Barabási could explain why they want to publish such great research behind such a walled garden. Maybe it'd be cool if nature could explain why it needs $32 freaking dollars from me for an electronic version of an article that must have already been paid for by their subscribers and for which the marginal cost is ZERO. So that $32 is pure profit. Honestly, this is just disgusting behavior for people and organizations that PURPORT to be engaged in academic endeavors.
Excerpt: "Despite their importance for urban planning, traffic forecasting and the spread of biological and mobile viruses, our understanding of the basic laws governing human motion remains limited owing to the lack of tools to monitor the time-resolved location of individuals. Here we study the trajectory of 100,000 anonymized mobile phone users whose position is tracked for a six-month period. We find that, in contrast with the random trajectories predicted by the prevailing Lévy flight and random walk models7, human trajectories show a high degree of temporal and spatial regularity, each individual being characterized by a time-independent characteristic travel distance and a significant probability to return to a few highly frequented locations. After correcting for differences in travel distances and the inherent anisotropy of each trajectory, the individual travel patterns collapse into a single spatial probability distribution, indicating that, despite the diversity of their travel history, humans follow simple reproducible patterns. 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 modelling."






