The grass is always greener...
Spying on the citizens. That is what some are calling a study that tracked 100,000 people via their cell phone.
Seth Borenstein, an AP Science Writer gives us the details.
Researchers secretly tracked the locations of 100,000 people outside the United States through their cell phone use ...
The scientists would not say where the study was done, only describing the location as an industrialized nation.
The first-of-its-kind study by Northeastern University raises privacy and ethical questions for its monitoring methods, which would be illegal in the United States.
So, what did this study find?
The study found that nearly half of the people in the study pretty much keep to a circle little more than six miles wide and that 83 percent of the people tracked mostly stay within a 37-mile wide circle.
The results also tell us something new about ourselves, including that we tend to go to the same places repeatedly... (That is news...Duh?)
Nearly 3 percent of the population regularly go beyond a 200-mile wide circle. Less than 1 percent of people travel often out of a 621-mile circle.
I bring this issue up because I have long said that many of the loudest critics of local government are those citizens that never go anywhere else.
They have no comparison of the quality of services provided by their local government...they just know things must be better elsewhere. The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence theory.
If people with cell phones travel these short distances from home, those without cell phones probably travel even less.
That is a large pool of potential critics to quiet!
No wonder the job of being a local official is so tough.
Al Arnold
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