Can telecom data help redraw political boundaries?
Economics, political science, and geography all have subdisciplines specifically concerned with the drawing of boundaries. What’s the best way to split a government into administrative regions? How do you identify a center of economic activity? In a paper published in Dec. 8 in the journal PLoS ONE, researchers at MIT, Cornell and British Telecom turn to a new source for answers to such questions: telecommunications data.By analyzing anonymized information about billions of telecommunications records, the researchers assembled a map depicting the strength of the connections between different parts of Great Britain, based on the amount of information they exchanged. They then developed an algorithm that partitioned the map into ever-smaller regions, with the requirement that the connections within regions be stronger than those between regions. They found that, to a large extent, their partitioning agreed with existing administrative, geographical and historical boundaries. But there were a few notable exceptions: Some...