Comment on Barabasi, Nature 435, 207 (2005)
Abstract
In a recent letter, Barabasi claims that the dynamics of a number of human activities are scale-free [1]. He specifically reports that the probability distribution of time intervals tau between consecutive e-mails sent by a single user and time delays for e-mail replies follow a power-law with an exponent -1, and proposes a priority-queuing process as an explanation of the bursty nature of human activity. Here, we quantitatively demonstrate that the reported power-law distributions are solely an artifact of the analysis of the empirical data and that the proposed model is not representative of e-mail communication patterns.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.physics/0510216,
title = {Comment on Barabasi, Nature 435, 207 (2005)},
author = {Daniel B. Stouffer and R. Dean Malmgren and Luis A. N. Amaral},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:physics/0510216},
year = {2007}
}
Comments
This manuscript re-analizes data from Barabasi's paper in Nature, "The origins of bursts and heavy tails in human dynamics", but it should be clear that the same problems are to be found in physics/0510117 and the upcoming Nature advertised in Barabasi's web site concerning the correspondence of Einstein and Darwin