BT data predicts that dumping Scotland would be easier than Wales - 17/12/2010
Posted by Kevin Box on Fri, Dec 17, 2010 @ 09:20 AM
If the results of a recent study are to be believed then allowing
Scotland to become independent would be twice as easy as Wales.
This is one of the results of study carried out in America using data provided by BT. Researchers tried to answer the question about economics using telephone data. The researchers at MIT who included Cornell and BT published a paper in December 8 in the journal PLoS ONE.
By analysing information about 12 billion phone calls made in August 2005, 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.
Defining regions by the wrong criteria in the wrong place could be expensive. It could distort commerce, services and transport. And worse badly drawn borders cause wars.
The study guessed that the more and the longer people in two people talk on the telephone, the more the places belong to the same region. They measured how strongly these were connected in terms of "talk time" and used several algorithms to group the pixels into larger regions.
It turned out that the regions based on human interaction coincide largely with administrative ones. Two differences stand out parts of Wales seem more connected to the West and East Midlands regions than to other parts of Wales and west of London, where many of Britain's high-tech firms are based, a new region is developing.
To measure how thoroughly a region is integrated with other parts of the country, the researchers also calculated a "call-time ratio", defined as the percentage of phone time a region spends talking to itself. By this measure, Scotland is least connected to the rest of Britain, with a call time ratio of nearly 77%. In Wales, in contrast, the ratio is less than 60%. So if phone calls are any guide, independence would be much less disruptive in Scotland than in Wales. The researchers interpret this as meaning that giving Wales independence would be twice as disruptive for the human network as allowing Scotland independence.
One does have to question why they bothered? Trying to measure economic activity using telephone calls is rather like trying to measure the popularity of TV programmes based on electricity use. Why not simply look at the data already available?
The money wasted was given by the National Science Foundation, the AT&T Foundation, the MIT SMART program, GE, Audi Volkswagen, SNCF, ENEL and the members of the MIT Senseable City Lab Consortium. Thanks guys
Written by David Hill, Chairman, Cloudnet
Cloudnet supplies business phone systems and services to SMEs and start-ups. Its Cloudnet Connect system offers the advantages of no capital expenditure necessary to run a professional PBX and dramatically lower running costs. Cloudnet has developed a dedicated voice over IP (VoIP) network providing free calls within its network and cheap rate calls outside of the Cloudnet network. The company also offers CLASS, a live answering service and has introduced mobile VoIP solutions. Cloudnet is privately financed and started trading in March 2009.