A fascinating article in The Economist:
… Carlo Ratti, who heads the Senseable City Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was one of the first to sift through the data produced by telecoms networks. One aim was to find out how a country’s internal borders reflect human connections. In Britain the English and the Scots hardly talk, at least on landlines; west of London, where many of Britain’s high-tech firms are based, a new region is developing. American states such as Georgia and Alabama belong together, whereas California splits three ways. In Portugal, if a city is twice the size of another, people make 12% more phone calls per head…
The Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA) at University College London, another research hotbed, uses data from London’s Oyster cards—used to pay for public transport—and Twitter messages. Tube-travel patterns are regular: entering the system at one station tends to mean leaving it at a particular other one. Twitter messages reveal a city’s structure and its activity. London has one centre, near Piccadilly Circus; New York has several, including near Times Square, City Hall and in Brooklyn. Tweeting correlates negatively with greenery, particularly in Central Park…
Definitely worth a look.,