Related papers: From old wars to new wars and global terrorism
We introduce cluster dynamical models of conflicts in which only the largest cluster can be involved in an action. This mimics the situations in which an attack is planned by a central body, and the largest attack force is used. We study…
Recent advances on human dynamics have focused on the normal patterns of human activities, with the quantitative understanding of human behavior under extreme events remaining a crucial missing chapter. This has a wide array of potential…
Terrorist attacks carried out by individuals or single cells have significantly accelerated over the last 20 years. This type of terrorism, defined as lone-actor (LA) terrorism, stands as one of the greatest security threats of our time.…
We recall the historically admitted prerequisites of Economic Freedom (EF). We have examined 908 data points for the Economic Freedom of the World (EFW) index and 1884 points for the Index of Economic Freedom (IEF); the studied periods are…
Floods affected more than 2 billion people worldwide from 1998 to 2017 and their occurrence is expected to increase due to climate warming, population growth and rapid urbanization. Recent approaches for understanding the resilience of…
Many causal processes have spatial and temporal dimensions. Yet the classic causal inference framework is not directly applicable when the treatment and outcome variables are generated by spatio-temporal point processes. We extend the…
The power law distribution is usually used to fit data in the upper tail of the distribution. However, commonly it is not valid to model data in all the range. In this paper, we present a new family of distributions, the so-called…
Bayesian statistical models were developed for the number of tropical cyclones and the rate at which these cyclones became hurricanes in the North Atlantic, North and South Indian, and East and West Pacific Oceans. We find that there is…
The first part of this paper is a brief survey of the approaches to economic inequality based on ideas from statistical physics and kinetic theory. These include the Boltzmann kinetic equation, the time-reversal symmetry, the ergodicity…
The frequency and magnitude of weather extreme events have increased significantly during the past few years in response to anthropogenic climate change. However, global statistical characteristics and underlying physical mechanisms are…
The relevance of the topic is dictated by the fact that in recent decades, the threat to international security emanating from terrorism has increased many times. Terrorist organizations have become full-fledged subjects of politics on a…
A recently proposed unified scaling law for interoccurrence times of earthquakes [P. Bak et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. {\bf 88}, 178501 (2002)] is analyzed, both theoretically and with data from Southern California. We decompose the…
The human society is a very complex system; still, there are several non-trivial, general features. One type of them is the presence of power-law distributed quantities in temporal statistics. In this Letter, we focus on the origin of…
Power-law distributions occur in many situations of scientific interest and have significant consequences for our understanding of natural and man-made phenomena. Unfortunately, the detection and characterization of power laws is…
Elections, specially in countries such as Brazil with an electorate of the order of 100 million people, yield large-scale data-sets embodying valuable information on the dynamics through which individuals influence each other and make…
Colombia's prolonged conflict has made the country one of the most affected by forced internal displacement (FID) in the world. This study examines the impact of the FARC's 2014 unilateral and permanent ceasefire on FID. We use a…
We study the dynamics of cause--specific mortality rates among countries by considering them as compositions of functions. We develop a novel framework for such data structure, with particular attention to functional PCA. The application of…
Many real systems can be described by a set of interacting entities forming a complex network. To some surprise, these have been shown to share a number of structural properties regardless of their type or origin. It is thus of vital…
We study how available data on COVID-19 cases and deaths in different countries are reliable. Our analysis is based on a modification of the law of anomalous numbers, the Newcomb-Benford law, applied to the daily number of deaths and new…
With 70 million dead, World War II remains the most devastating conflict in history. Among the survivors, millions were displaced, returned maimed from the battlefield, or endured years of captivity. We examine the effects of such war…