Related papers: Comment on Barabasi, Nature 435, 207 (2005)
Human behaviors are often driven by human interests. Despite intense recent efforts in exploring the dynamics of human behaviors, little is known about human-interest dynamics, partly due to the extreme difficulty in accessing the human…
Stochastic models, based on random processes, may lead to power law distributions, which provide long range correlations. The observation of power law behavior and the presence of long range correlations in biological systems has been…
In this study we aim for a deeper understanding of the power law slope, $\alpha$, of waiting time distributions. Statistically independent events with linear behavior can be characterized by binomial, Gaussian, exponential, or Poissonian…
The statistics of natural catastrophes contains very counter-intuitive results. Using earthquakes as a working example, we show that the energy radiated by such events follows a power-law or Pareto distribution. This means, in theory, that…
Quantitative understanding of human behaviors provides elementary comprehension of the complexity of many human-initiated systems. In this paper, we investigate the behavior of people on the $BBS$ forum by the statistical analysis of the…
Understanding the properties of response time distributions is a long-standing problem in cognitive science. We provide a tutorial overview of several contemporary models that assume power law scaling is a plausible description of the…
The temporal communication patterns of human individuals are known to be inhomogeneous or bursty, which is reflected as the heavy tail behavior in the inter-event time distribution. As the cause of such bursty behavior two main mechanisms…
For the study of information propagation, one fundamental problem is uncovering universal laws governing the dynamics of information propagation. This problem, from the microscopic perspective, is formulated as estimating the propagation…
Identifying and modeling patterns of human activity has important ramifications in applications ranging from predicting disease spread to optimizing resource allocation. Because of its relevance and availability, written correspondence…
Apparently random events in nature often reveal hidden patterns when analysed using diverse and robust statistical tools. Power-law distributions, for example, project diverse natural phenomenon, ranging from earthquakes1 to heartbeat…
To explore large-scale population indoor interactions, we analyze 18,715 users' WiFi access logs recorded in a Chinese university campus during 3 months, and define two categories of human interactions, the event interaction (EI) and the…
Inhomogeneous temporal processes, like those appearing in human communications, neuron spike trains, and seismic signals, consist of high-activity bursty intervals alternating with long low-activity periods. In recent studies such bursty…
This paper focuses on the problem of modeling the correspondence pattern for ordinary people. Suppose that letters arrive at a rate $\lambda$ and are answered at a rate $\mu$. Furthermore, we assume that, for a constant $T$, a letter is…
Scale-free networks constitute a fast-developing field that has already provided us with important tools to understand natural and social phenomena. From biological systems to environmental modifications, from quantum fields to high energy…
Neural synchronisation plays a critical role in information processing, storage and transmission. Characterising the pattern of synchronisation is therefore of great interest. It has recently been suggested that the brain displays broadband…
We investigate the temporal patterns of human communication and its influence on the spreading of information in social networks. The analysis of mobile phone calls of 20 million people in one country shows that human communication is…
In a previous study, we investigated the frequency distribution of the email size in the system log data of the main email server for the staff on a campus network. We found that the frequencies of email sizes followed a power-law…
Large-scale interacting human activities underlie all social and economic phenomena, but quantitative understanding of regular patterns and mechanism is very challenging and still rare. Self-organized online collaborative activities with…
Email is a ubiquitous communications tool in the workplace and plays an important role in social interactions. Previous studies of email were largely based on surveys and limited to relatively small populations of email users within…
We report an empirical determination of the probability density functions P(r) of the number r of earthquakes in finite space-time windows for the California catalog, over fixed spatial boxes 5 x 5 km^2 and time intervals dt =1, 10, 100 and…