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Monday, April 25, 2011

Santa Fe Institute Looks at Behavior via Phones

Stan Dyck, colleague and correspondent, sends this along.  The implications for modeling behavior are very great.  Quoted from the WSJ below.  Nathan Eagle was mentioned in MIT Tech Review.

' ... "We can quantify human movement on a scale that wasn't possible before," said Nathan Eagle, a research fellow at the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico who works with 220 mobile-phone companies in 80 countries. "I don't think anyone has a handle on all the ramifications." His largest single research data set encompasses 500 million people in Latin America, Africa and Europe.
Among other things, Mr. Eagle has used the data to determine how slums can be a catalyst for a city's economic vitality. In short, slums provide more opportunities for entrepreneurial activity than previously thought. Slums "are economic springboards," he said.... '

I was corporate connection to the Santa Fe Institute for a number of years.  What they did was always interesting, but often difficult to translate into useful things for the enterprise. 

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