We may all like to consider ourselves free spirits. But a study of the tracks left by 50,000 mobile phone users over three months has finally proved that the truth is otherwise. "We are all in one way or another boring," says Albert-Laszlo Barabasi at the Center for Complex Network Research at Northeastern University in Boston, who co-wrote the study. "Spontaneous individuals are largely absent from the population," Barabasi and colleagues used three months' worth of data from a mobile phone network to track the mobile phone towers each person's phone connected to each hour of the day, showing their general location. They conclude that regardless of whether a person typically remains close to home or wanders far and wide, their movements are probably predictable as much as 93 percent of the time. Surprisingly, the mobile phone data showed that individuals' movements were more or less as predictable at weekends as on weekdays, suggesting that routine  is rooted in human nature rather than being an effect of work patterns. The mobile phone records were handled to make out the most visited locations for each user. Then the probability of finding a given user at his most visited locations at each hour through the day was calculated.  People were to be found in their most visited location for any given hour 70 percent of the time. Not surprisingly, the figure increased at night, and decreased at lunchtime and in the early evening, when most people were returning home from work. The team analyzed the randomness  of people's traces to show it was possible in theory to predict the average person's places as much as 93 percent of the time. "Say your routine movement is from home to the coffee shop to work: if you are at home and then go to the coffee shop it's easy for me to predict that you are going to work," says co-author Nicholas Blumm. This predictability was not much affected by differences in age, gender, language spoken or whether a person lived in a rural or urban setting. A phone user's location is shown by  _  .
which mobile phone network he is connected to the content of his every phone call which mobile phone tower he is connected to how often he uses the phone every day