Everybody thinks they are interesting, spontaneous and fun. According to a recent study of 50,000 cell phone users, that just is not the case.
In fact, a co-writer of the study concluded that everybody is boring in their own special way. Albert-Laszlo Barabasi further concluded that spontaneous individuals are few and far between in the population today.
The research was done at Boston’s Northeastern University and was based on analysis of three months worth of cell phone records. By determining which tower a phone connected to over the course of the day, they were able to calculate location. The data showed that whether a person roamed around or stayed relatively near home, movements were predictable. In some cases the percentage was a whopping 93 percent. This was repeatable week in and week out.
The data also revealed that people are no more or less predictable on the weekends than they are on weekdays. This suggests that human nature, not work patterns are influencing the routine of most people.
Records were processed to figure out which locations a user visited the most during the course of a day. The team of researchers calculated the probability of whether a user could be found at the most visited spots for every hour of the day.
They were able to predict correctly in the 70 percent range if a person was in a most visited location at any hour they chose. The percentage increased for movements made at night but decreased during early evening drive time when most people are on their way home from work and during lunch hours.
When the randomness, or entropy, of the traces was looked at, the team found that theoretically it was possible to predict with 93 percent accuracy, an average person’s location at any given time.
Co-author Nicholas Blumm points out that this is easy when a person is traveling between two locations with a stop in between. If you leave home and stop for a cup of coffee on the way to work, it is easy to predict that the next stop after the coffee shop will be the office.
The team also showed that the predictability did not change significantly with gender, age, or language. It also did not matter whether the person was in an urban or rural setting.
