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WSJ Podcasts WSJ Radio

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I ... I ... in the smartphone the new ... multiplied by millions worldwide is giving academic researchers and guns ... a ... almost three quarters of the world's population has a mobile phone for conversation and Internet access ... this is this urban planners and social scientists are eagerly weaving millions of these electronic threats of data ... into patterns of people on the move ... from studies that until now were all but impossible ... by assembling such digital data ... researchers at the sensible City lead that it might be mapped the trails of the Internet information ... flowing between the neighborhoods of New York and the rest were ... that dynamic didn't flow of data ... reveals the invisible nervous system of our information age ... and the Internet economy ... it's one in a wave of ambitious social network experiments under way in the U S and Europe to track the movements ... probe of relationships ... and ultimately ... affect the individual choices we all make ... so far the study scratch to leave the surface of human complex ... but researchers believe their findings hinted that basic rules of human interaction ... such precise positioning data ... automatically collected by cellphone companies and many smartphone applications ... makes privacy advocates nervous ... the worry about so much personal data beyond our control ... but social scientists are dazzled by the research possibilities ... they only work with anonymous phone records but can learn some surprising things about how we influence each other's health ... weight ... mood ... in politics ... this animation turns three hundred million post via Twitter in a day ... into a dynamic national mood map ... that shows how Mark collective emotions ... change during the day moving across the country like the weather front ... the green is a measure of our good feeling ... rig shows our own happiness ... and by this measure ... Americans are happiest in the morning ... and late evening ... unlike the conventional land line ... of mobile phones usually is used by only one person ... who carries throughout the day ... typically ... even a basic phone comes equipped with sensors to record our movements and sends our proximity to other people with phones ... it usually also has a compass the gyroscope and an accelerometer dissents rotation and direction ... using these a company called Sense Networks founded by computer scientists at MIT and Columbia University ... used cellphone data to map trends in urban nightlife ... they can follow the crowds around fashionable restaurants and trendy bars ... this animation shows how people in sentences go ... move from hotspot the hotspot over the course of an evening ... cellphones ... are so much a part of our life ... that they generate the men's commercial databases that the deal the ways we arrange ourselves ... into networks of power ... money ... love and trust ... by exposing lines of social bowlers ... like iron filings aligned around a magnet ... the cellphone patterns ... allow researchers ... to see past our individual differences ... two forms of behavior that shape us income ... the Wall Street Journal ... it's a science writer Robert Lee Woods ... in New York ...