Dirk Brockmann

Talk title

Feel Sick? Follow the Money! –The Scaling Laws of Human Travel

Abstract

In the light of increasing international trade and intensified human mobility the knowledge of dynamical and statistical properties of human travel is of fundamental importance. I will report onourrecent discovery of universal scaling laws in global human movement patterns. Based on the idea that the geographic circulation of money is an excellent proxy fo r human travel, we analyzed the movement patterns of over half a million individual dollar bills registered at the popular online bill-tracking website www.wheresgeorge.com. We were thus able to assess the statistical properties of human travel with a high precision. We found that the dispersal of money is reminiscent of scale free random walks knownas Levy flights which has important implications for the spread of modern human infectious diseases.