Whenever a pattern of human behavior is widespread, there is reason to suspect that it might have something to do with our evolutionary history.
Refreshingly, far from being polemicists, the authors are quite curious and investigatory about this pattern of human behavior, and they realize they are pushing at least some of their readers into uncomfortable territory.
They are also focusing on solving business problems and modeling patterns of human behavior, giving their work more of the flavor of social science.
Gail Collins: I took a look at that paper and was once again impressed by your willingness to dive into scholarly essays in which patterns of human behavior are described by complex mathematical formulas.
Like the best books, Mr. Bradley's goes beyond its narrow subject to invite reflection on deeper patterns of human behavior: in this instance, our ability to create a transcendent lie and promote it avidly despite the small voices of those few who know it to be false.
But when Professor Mayer and his co-author, David Genesove, a professor of economics at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, studied the Boston condominium market in the 1990s — scene of one of the biggest real estate busts in recent American memory — the actual patterns of human behavior did not seem to follow the standard rules at all.
Some of these thinkers have gone one step further, arguing that Darwin's scientific theories about the evolution of species can be applied to today's patterns of human behavior, and that natural selection can provide support for many bedrock conservative ideas, like traditional social roles for men and women, free-market capitalism and governmental checks and balances.
The Cornell research, like so much of the data mining on the Web, does raise the issue of whether something is necessarily significant just because it can be measured by a computer — especially when mouse clicks are assumed to represent broad patterns of human behavior.
But evolutionary analyses reflect patterns of human behavior not often included in the pages of history or in the designs of potters.
Nathan Eagle and Alex Pentland from Media Laboratory, MIT coined the term "Reality Mining" which is the collection and analysis of machine-sensed sensor data pertaining to human social behavior, with the goal of identifying predictable patterns of human behavior [1].
They observed that much of the burstiness remained after removing the circadian and weekly patterns, indicating that there is probably another cause of burstiness coming from the mechanisms of correlated patterns of human behavior.
