Related papers: Dragon-kings: mechanisms, statistical methods and …
We develop the concept of ``dragon-kings'' corresponding to meaningful outliers, which are found to coexist with power laws in the distributions of event sizes under a broad range of conditions in a large variety of systems. These…
We develop a simple test for deviations from power law tails, which is based on the asymptotic properties of the empirical distribution function. We use this test to answer the question whether great natural disasters, financial crashes or…
We ask the question whether it is possible to diagnose the existence of "Dragon-Kings" (DK), namely anomalous observations compared to a power law background distribution of event sizes. We present two new statistical tests, the U-test and…
The enterprise of trying to explain different social and economic phenomena using concepts and ideas drawn from physics has a long history. Statistical mechanics, in particular, has been often seen as most likely to provide the means to…
The molecular biology revolution of the last seventy five years has transformed our view of living systems. Scientific explanations of biological phenomena are now synonymous with the identification of the genes, proteins, and signaling…
Complex systems are characterized by specific time-dependent interactions among their many constituents. As a consequence they often manifest rich, non-trivial and unexpected behavior. Examples arise both in the physical and non-physical…
We review briefly the concepts underlying complex systems and probability distributions. The later are often taken as the first quantitative characteristics of complex systems, allowing one to detect the possible occurrence of regularities…
The article summarizes the observational evidence for the existence of massive black holes, as well as the current knowledge about their abundance, their mass and spin distributions, and their cosmic evolution within and together with their…
This paper deals with the modeling of social competition, possibly resulting in the onset of extreme conflicts. More precisely, we discuss models describing the interplay between individual competition for wealth distribution that, when…
Statistical mechanics is one of the most powerful and elegant tools in the quantitative sciences. One key virtue of statistical mechanics is that it is designed to examine large systems with many interacting degrees of freedom, providing a…
Many animals live in societies where individuals frequently interact socially with each other. The social structures of these systems can be studied in depth by means of network analysis. A large number of studies on animal social networks…
Advances in science are being sought in newly available opportunities to collect massive quantities of data about complex systems. While key advances are being made in detailed mapping of systems, how to relate this data to solving many of…
Statistical physics has proven to be a very fruitful framework to describe phenomena outside the realm of traditional physics. The last years have witnessed the attempt by physicists to study collective phenomena emerging from the…
Many of life's most fascinating phenomena emerge from interactions among many elements--many amino acids determine the structure of a single protein, many genes determine the fate of a cell, many neurons are involved in shaping our thoughts…
Scholars have long hypothesized that democratic forms of government are more compatible with scientific advancement. However, empirical analysis testing the democracy-science compatibility hypothesis remains underdeveloped. This article…
Nearing a century since its inception, quantum mechanics is as lively as ever. Its signature manifestations, such as superposition, wave-particle duality, uncertainty principle, entanglement and nonlocality, were long confronted as weird…
The mechanisms underlying cascading failures are often modeled via the paradigm of self-organized criticality. Here we introduce a simple model where nodes self-organize to be either weak or strong to failure which captures the trade-off…
The quest for historically impactful science and technology provides invaluable insight into the innovation dynamics of human society, yet many studies are limited to qualitative and small-scale approaches. Here, we investigate scientific…
"Evidence and Evolution: the Logic behind the Science" was published in 2008 by Elliott Sober. It examines the philosophical foundations of the statistical arguments used to evaluate hypotheses in evolutionary biology, based on simple…
Time evolution of number of species (genera, families, and others), population of them, and size distribution of present ones and life times are studied in terms of a new model, where population of each genetic taxon increases by a (random)…