「经济学人」人通常只去25个地方？
你是“死宅”还是爱外出活动的人？
一项联合研究显示，一天中任何时间，人经常造访的去处至多不超过25个。
Human behaviour
At any given time in their lives, people have two dozen regular haunts
Oh, the places you’ll go!
WHEN it comes to habitat, human beings are creatures of habit. It has been known for a long time that, whether his habitat is a village, a city or, for real globe-trotters*, the planet itself, an individual person generally visits the same places regularly. The details, though, have been surprisingly obscure*. Now, thanks to an analysis of data collected from 40,000 smartphone users around the world, a new property of humanity’s locomotive habits has been revealed.
globe-trotter: a person who travels widely 环球旅行者
obscure: 费解的，模糊的，难以捉摸的(not clear and difficult to understand or see)；鲜为人知的(not known to many people)
It turns out that someone’s “location capacity”, the number of places which he or she visits regularly, remains constant over periods of months and years. What constitutes a “place” depends on what distance between two places makes them separate. But analysing movement patterns helps illuminate the distinction and the researchers found that the average location capacity was 25. If a new location does make its way into the set of places an individual tends to visit, an old one drops out in response. People do not, in other words, gather places like collector cards. Rather, they cycle through them. Their geographical behaviour is limited and predictable, not footloose and fancy-free*.
footloose and fancy-free: 自由自在，无拘无束的
英国伦敦城市大学、丹麦技术大学和索尼移动通信的研究团队经由4个不同数据库提取4万人的移动轨迹进行分析，以期探索人的流动性是否有规律。
研究人员首先分析了大约1000名大学生的移动轨迹，结果发现，无论是在哪个给定时间，尽管研究对象常去的地方会有变化，但他们至多常去25个地方。
这一发现让研究人员感到意外，于是决定分析这个规律是否存在于更大范围人群。当他们把研究样本扩大到4万人后发现，世界各地性别不同、生活作息习惯不同的人，即便可能会去“开发”新的餐厅、酒吧、健身房等去处，但经常造访的去处至多25个。
如果“常去目的地目录”上有了一个新增项，那么相应地会有一个“老地点”从目录上消失。即便研究人员按逗留时间和逗留地点给这些去处分类，依然呈现同样结果。
The study demonstrating this, just published in Nature Human Behaviour, does not offer any explanation for the limited location capacity it measures. But a statistical analysis carried out by the authors shows that it cannot be explained solely by constraints on time. Some other factor is at work. One of the researchers, Sune Lehmann of the Technical University of Denmark, draws an analogy. He suggests that people’s cognitive capacity limits the number of places they can visit routinely, just as it limits the number of other people an individual can routinely socialise with. That socialisation figure, about 150 for most people, is known as the Dunbar number*, after its discoverer, Robin Dunbar.
研究人员在英国《自然·人类行为》上发表论文说，这项研究与牛津大学进化人类学教授罗宾·邓巴关于人类社交极限的研究有关联。邓巴的研究结果显示，人类大脑认知能力决定一个人只能维持与大约150人的稳定人际关系。上述联合研究则显示，爱外出活动的人更爱交朋友。“我们的研究首次在人的流动性与社会认知之间建立了正式关联，”
Dunbar number: “邓巴数字”，由英国牛津大学的人类学家罗宾·邓巴（Robin Dunbar）在20世纪90年代提出。该定律根据猿猴的智力与社交网络推断出：人类智力将允许人类拥有稳定社交网络的人数是148人，四舍五入大约是150人。
Dr Lehmann says he expects that the group’s finding will inform urban planning and be useful in predicting human behaviour more generally. Understanding the nature of restricted location capacity might be of particular use to advertisers. On seeing someone start to spend a lot of time in a new place, an advertiser might reasonably assume that the person in question was now in the market for new services in that area. Dr Lehmann says he is unsure whether Facebook and Google, the most obvious beneficiaries of this insight, are, as yet, aware of it.
研究牵头人之一、伦敦城市大学的安德烈亚·巴龙凯利博士说，“弄清这一关联将帮助我们设计更好的公共空间和更便利的交通系统”
The group’s findings also show the importance of a new scientific instrument: in this case, the smartphone. Such phones, now ubiquitous in the rich world, mean many human beings have, in essence, voluntarily radio-collared themselves. That gives social scientists (who might reasonably relabel themselves as “human zoologists” in this case) a new and affordable lens through which to study their subjects.
The bulk* of the data Dr Lehmann used came from an app called Lifelog, a phone-based activity tracker developed by Sony, an electronics firm. About 36,000 people contributed in this way. The other 4,000 were monitored through behaviour-tracking programmes at several universities. All these sets of data show the same pattern of 25 preferred locations.
the bulk of: most of something 大部分
In fact, the bulk of the book is taken up with criticizing other works.
事实上，这本书大部分篇幅都是在批评其他作品。
As with Dr Dunbar’s work, which showed predictable, nested circles of acquaintances, so Dr Lehmann and his colleagues found several levels of location capacity—meaning that the number of places where people spend just a few minutes a week is just as predictable as the number where they spend dozens of hours. Dr Lehmann says his group is now in search of similar data from other primates*, in an attempt to work out where human patterns of mobility have their roots. For those, though, they will have to rely on old-fashioned methods of zoological observation—unless they can work out a way to get chimpanzees to carry smartphones.
primate: a member of the most developed and intelligent group of mammals, including humans, monkeys, and apes 灵长类动物
This article appeared in the Science and technology section of the print edition under the headline "Oh, the places you’ll go!" （Jun 28th, 2018）