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Critical states are sometimes identified experimentally through power-law statistics or universal scaling functions. We show here that such features naturally emerge from networks in self-sustained irregular regimes away from criticality.…

Forecasting failure events is one of the most important problems in fracture mechanics and related sciences. In this paper, we use the Molchan scheme to investigate the error diagrams in a fracture model which has the notable advantage of…

Many outputs of cities scale in universal ways, including infrastructure, crime, and economic activity. Through a mathematical model, this study investigates the interplay between such scaling laws in human organization and governmental…

We report on a quantitative analysis of relationships between the number of homicides, population size and other ten urban metrics. By using data from Brazilian cities, we show that well defined average scaling laws with the population size…

Online social networks are increasingly being utilized for collective sense making and information processing in disasters. However, the underlying mechanisms that shape the dynamics of collective intelligence in online social networks…

A spatial avalanche model is introduced, in which avalanches increase stability in the regions where they occur. Instability is driven globally by a driving process that contains shocks. The system is typically subcritical, but the shocks…

The success of an on-line movement could be defined in terms of the shift to large-scale and the later off-line massive street actions of protests. The role of social media in this process is to facilitate the transformation from small or…

Cascading large-amplitude bursts in neural activity, termed avalanches, are thought to provide insight into the complex spatially distributed interactions in neural systems. In human neuroimaging, for example, avalanches occurring during…

Understanding how conflict events spread over time and space is crucial for predicting and mitigating future violence. However, progress in this area has been limited by the lack of methods capable of capturing the intricate, dynamic…

In an increasingly interconnected world, a key scientific challenge is to examine mechanisms that lead to the widespread propagation of contagions, such as misinformation and pathogens, and identify risk factors that can trigger large-scale…

Climate change is increasing the frequency and severity of natural disasters worldwide. Media coverage of these events may be vital to generate empathy and mobilize global populations to address the common threat posed by climate change.…

It is a common belief that power-law distributed avalanches are inherently unpredictable. This idea affects phenomena as diverse as evolution, earthquakes, superconducting vortices, stock markets, etc; from atomic to social scales. It…

In a critically self--organized model of punctuated equilibrium, boundaries determine peculiar scaling of the size distribution of evolutionary avalanches. This is derived by an inhomogeneous generalization of standard branching processes,…

An important challenge in several disciplines is to understand how sudden changes can propagate among coupled systems. Examples include the synchronization of business cycles, population collapse in patchy ecosystems, markets shifting to a…

The twentieth century was a period of outstanding economic growth together with an unequal income distribution. This paper analyses the international distribution of growth rates and its dynamics during the twentieth century. We show that…

This paper investigates the origins of Islamist insurgencies as a form of cultural revival in West Africa. Exploiting variation in access to ancient water sources, which have largely disappeared, as an instrument, we show that the decline…

Understanding quantitative relationships between urban elements is crucial for a wide range of applications. The observation at the macroscopic level demonstrates that the aggregated urban quantities (e.g., gross domestic product) scale…

Urban outputs often scale superlinearly with city population. A difficulty in understanding the mechanism of this phenomenon is that different outputs differ considerably in their scaling behaviors. Here, we formulate a physics-based model…

Country instability is a global issue, with unpredictably high levels of instability thwarting socio-economic growth and possibly causing a slew of negative consequences. As a result, uncertainty prediction models for a country are becoming…

The dynamics of ``vicious'', continuously growing civilizations (domains), which engage in ``war'' whenever two domains meet, is investigated. In the war event, the smaller domain is annihilated, while the larger domain is reduced in size…