WHEN it comes to habitat, human beings are creatures of habit. It has been known for a long time that, whether his habitat is a village, a city or, for real globe-trotters, the planet itself, an individual person generally visits the same places regularly. The details, though, have been surprisingly obscure. Now, thanks to an analysis of data collected from 40,000 smartphone users around the world, a new property of humanity’s locomotive habits has been revealed.
It turns out that someone’s “location capacity”, the number of places which he or she visits regularly, remains constant over periods of months and years. What constitutes a “place” depends on what distance between two places makes them separate. But analysing movement patterns helps illuminate the distinction and the researchers found that the average location capacity was 25. If a new location does make its way into the set of places an individual…Continue reading
Science and technology