Related papers: Deciphering the fluctuations of high frequency bir…
In the wake of the influenza pandemic of 1889-1890 Jacques Bertillon, a pioneer of medical statistics, noticed that after the massive death spike there was a dip in birth numbers around 9 months later which was significantly larger than…
We finely describe the "coming down from infinity" for birth and death processes which eventually become extinct. Our biological motivation is to study the decrease of regulated populations which are initially large. Under general…
Consider a supercritical birth and death process where the children acquire mutations. We study the mutation rates along the ancestral lineages in a sample of size $n$ from the population at time $T$. The mutation rate is time-inhomogenous…
After birth setting up an effective immune system is a major challenge for all living organisms. In this paper we show that this process can be explored by using the age-specific infant death rate as a kind of sensor. This is made possible…
Preterm births occur at an alarming rate of 10-15%. Preemies have a higher risk of infant mortality, developmental retardation and long-term disabilities. Predicting preterm birth is difficult, even for the most experienced clinicians. The…
We analyze the dynamic properties of 10^7 words recorded in English, Spanish and Hebrew over the period 1800--2008 in order to gain insight into the coevolution of language and culture. We report language independent patterns useful as…
Understanding the statistical properties of a collection of individuals subject to random displacements and birth-and-death events is key to several applications in physics and life sciences, encompassing the diagnostic of nuclear reactors…
In this paper we study the iterated birth process of which we examine the first-passage time distributions and the hitting probabilities. Furthermore, linear birth processes, linear and sublinear death processes at Poisson times are…
The concept of fitness as a measure for a species's success in natural selection is central to the theory of evolution. We here investigate how reproduction rates which are not constant but vary in response to environmental fluctuations,…
We examine what happens in a population when it experiences an abrupt change in surrounding conditions. Several cases of such "abrupt transitions" for both physical and living social systems are analyzed from which it can be seen that all…
Does bearing children shorten a woman's life expectancy? Several demographic studies, historic and current, have found no such effect. But the Caerphilly cohort study is far the most prominent and frequently-cited, and it answers in the…
The distribution of numbers in human documents is determined by a variety of diverse natural and human factors, whose relative significance can be evaluated by studying the numbers' frequency of occurrence. Although it has been studied…
The dynamics of adaptation is difficult to predict because it is highly stochastic even in large populations. The uncertainty emerges from number fluctuations, called genetic drift, arising in the small number of particularly fit…
Speech is a distinctive complex feature of human capabilities. In order to understand the physics underlying speech production, in this work we empirically analyse the statistics of large human speech datasets ranging several languages. We…
Fertility choices are linked to the different preferences and constraints of individuals and couples, and vary importantly by socio-economic status, as well by cultural and institutional context. The meaning of childbearing and…
This paper is devoted to the problem of statistical mechanics raised by the analysis of an issue of sociological interest: the teen birth phenomenon. It is expected that these data are characterized by correlated fluctuations, reflecting…
Fluctuations of observables as functions of time, or "fluctuation patterns", are studied in a chaotic microscopically reversible system that has irreversibly reached a nonequilibrium stationary state. Supposing that during a certain, long…
Fast radio bursts are extragalactic, sub-millisecond radio impulses of unknown origin [1,2]. Their dispersion measures, which quantify the observed frequency-dependent dispersive delays in terms of free-electron column densities,…
We investigate the dynamics of the voter model in which the population itself changes endogenously via the birth-death process. There are two species of voters, labeled A and B, and the population of each species can grow or shrink by the…
In part 1 we identified a new coupling between death spikes and birth dips that occurs following catastrophic events such as influenza pandemics and earthquakes. Here we seek to characterize some of the key features. We introduce a transfer…