The fossil record of life has been shown to provide evidence for scaling laws in both time series and in some statistical features. This evidence was suggested to be linked with a self-organized critical phenomenon by several authors. In this paper we review some of these models and their...

Recently, it has been shown that the power spectrum of extinction intensity during the Phanerozoic takes a power-law form, which, it is suggested, may indicate the presence of critical phenomena in the dynamics underlying the extinction process. In this paper we reproduce these results using the...

Recent Fourier analyses of fossil extinction data have indicated that the power spectrum of extinction during the Phanerozoic may take the form of 1/f noise, a result which, it has been suggested, could be indicative of the presence of "critical dynamics" in the processes giving rise to...

Recent studies on the fossil record time series has shown that there is consistent evidence for self-similarity i.e., long-range correlations with power-law behavior. The existence of such fractal structures means that, when looking at a given time frame, some basic properties remain the same if...

We show that the decline in the extinction rate during the Phanerozoic can be accurately parameterized by a logarithmic fit to the cumulative total extinction. This implies that extinction intensity is falling off approximately as the reciprocal of time. We demonstrate that this observation...

This paper presents an overview of an approach to address complexity issues and real-life engineering problems in large, urban transportation systems. In this context we discuss the fundamental problem of designing a metropolitan transportation system which is both efficient and controlable.

In a recent paper, we analysed the dynamics of traffic flow in a simple, square lattice architecture. It was shown that a phase transition takes place between a free and a congested phase. The transition point was shown to exhibit optimal information transfer and wide fluctuations in time, with...

A number of authors have in recent years proposed that the processes of macroevolution may give rise to self-organized critical phenomena which could have a significant effect on the dynamics of ecosystems. In particular, it has been suggested that mass extinction may arise through a purely...

We introduce a new class of models in which a large number of "agents" organize under the influence of an externally imposed coherent noise. The model shows reorganization events whose size distribution closely follows a power-law over many decades, even in the case where the agents do not...