How do we move and movement in social science

We move reasonably differently from albatrosses and monkeys. An impressive work on Nature this month uses a trace of a very large number (6 million) of cell phone users to model patterns in the mobility of human beings. The following is an excerpt from the abstract of it("Understanding individual human mobility patterns", by Golzález, Hidalgo and Barabási) and to the side is a link to one of their graphs just because it looks cool:

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.

Most interesting, Nature published on the same issue an editorial which, although praises this paper, discusses an interesting aspect of the modelling approach it takes:

To some extent this 'physicalization' of the social sciences is healthy for the field; it has already brought in many new ideas and perspectives. But it also needs to be regarded with some caution.

As many social scientists have pointed out, the goal of their discipline is not simply to understand how people behave in large groups, but to understand what motivates individuals to behave the way they do. The field cannot lose focus on that — even as it moves to exploit the power of these new technological tools, and the mathematical regularities they reveal. Comprehending capricious and uncertain human events at every level remains one of the most challenging questions in science.