Related papers: Emergent regularities and scaling in armed conflic…
The scaling relations between city attributes and population are emergent and ubiquitous aspects of urban growth. Quantifying these relations and understanding their theoretical foundation, however, is difficult due to the challenge of…
This study presents a spatiotemporal dual Bayesian model that examines both the occurrence and number of conflict fatalities using event-level data from Ethiopia (1997-2024), sourced from the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data (ACLED)…
Extreme events can come either from point processes, when the size or energy of the events is above a certain threshold, or from time series, when the intensity of a signal surpasses a threshold value. We are particularly concerned by the…
This thesis presents a novel framework for analysing the societal impacts of armed conflict by applying principles from engineering and material science. Building on the idea of a "social fabric", it recasts communities as plates with…
We study avalanches in a model for a planar crack propagating in a disordered medium. Due to long-range interactions, avalanches are formed by a set of spatially disconnected local clusters, the sizes of which are distributed according to a…
Forest-fire waiting times, defined as the time between successive events above a certain size in a given region, are calculated for Italy. The probability densities of the waiting times are found to verify a scaling law, despite that fact…
Historical episodes such as the World War I "live-and-let-live" system and the Christmas Truce of 1914 demonstrate that opposing military units can establish spontaneous, local cooperation even in extreme conflict environments. Such…
The Syrian civil war has been ongoing since 2011 and has already caused thousands of deaths. The analysis of death tolls helps to understand the dynamics of the conflict and to better allocate resources to the affected areas. In this…
Cities are often compared through scaling laws, usually expressed as power-law relations between population size and aggregate urban quantities related to infrastructure, socioeconomic activity, or environmental impacts. These laws are…
Crackling noise, which occurs in a wide range of situations, is characterized by discrete events of various sizes, often correlated in the form of avalanches. We report experimental evidence that the mechanical response of knitted fabric…
This study examine the difference in the size of avalanches among industries triggered by demand shocks, which can be rephrased by control of the economy or fiscal policy, and by using the production-inventory model and observed data. We…
Violence is commonly linked with large urban areas, and as a social phenomenon, it is presumed to scale super-linearly with population size. This study explores the hypothesis that smaller, isolated cities in Africa may experience a…
The severity of war, measured by battle deaths, follows a power-law distribution. Here, we demonstrate that power law also holds in the temporal aspects of interstate conflicts. A critical quantity is the inter-conflict interval (ICI), the…
Information avalanches in social media are typically studied in a similar fashion as avalanches of neuronal activity in the brain. Whereas a large body of literature reveals substantial agreement about the existence of a unique process…
Scale-free power law structure describes complex networks derived from a wide range of real world processes. The extensive literature focuses almost exclusively on networks with power law exponent strictly larger than 2, which can be…
There is strong expectation that cities, across time, culture and level of development, share much in common in terms of their form and function. Recently, attempts to formalize mathematically these expectations have led to the hypothesis…
Ecological communities exhibit pervasive patterns and inter-relationships between size, abundance, and the availability of resources. We use scaling ideas to develop a unified, model-independent framework for understanding the distribution…
Climate change is becoming a widely recognized risk factor of farmer-herder conflict in Africa. Using an 8 year dataset (Jan 2015 to Sep 2022) of detailed weather and terrain data across four African nations, we apply statistical and…
Understanding and predicting uncertain things are the central themes of scientific evolution. Human beings revolve around these fears of uncertainties concerning various aspects like a global pandemic, health, finances, to name but a few.…
In social networks, individuals constantly drop ties and replace them by new ones in a highly unpredictable fashion. This highly dynamical nature of social ties has important implications for processes such as the spread of information or…