We question the claim that the largest US cities are Pareto distributed. We show that results of multiple tests on real data are similar to those obtained when the true distribution is lognormal, and largely depend on sample sizes.

Empirical evidence on the distributional characteristics of common stock returns indicates: (1) A power-law tail index close to three describes the behavior of the positive tail of the survivor function of returns (pr(r x) ~ x^-\alpha), a reflection of fat tails; (2) general linear and...

For a number of researchers a number of publications for each author is simulated using the zeta distribution and then for each publication a number of citations per publication simulated. Bootstrap confidence intervals indicate that the difference between the average of ratios and the ratio of...

The asset size distribution of US banks is viewed as the result of a scale-free coagulation process. When two banks merge, the assets of the combined institution equals the sum of the assets of the constituent banks. Analysis of the Smoluchowski coagulation equation suggests the emergence of a...

The increasing number of crimes in areas with large concentrations of people have made cities one of the main sources of violence. Understanding characteristics of how crime rate expands and its relations with the cities size goes beyond an academic question, being a central issue for...

Determining the likelihood of a disaster is a key component of any comprehensive hazard assessment. This is particularly true for tsunamis, even though most tsunami hazard assessments have in the past relied on scenario or deterministic type models. We discuss probabilistic tsunami hazard...

A modular attachment mechanism of software network evolution is presented in this paper. Compared with the previous models, our treatment of object-oriented software system as a network of modularity is inherently more realistic. To acquire incoming and outgoing links in directed networks when...

We empirically study the activity pattern of individual blog-posting and observe the interevent time distributions decay as power-laws at both individual and population level. As different from previous studies, we find significant short-term memory in it. Moreover, the memory coefficient first...

One- and two-dimensional lattices of points are connected with long-range links, whose lengths are distributed according to P(r)∼r-μ. By changing the decay exponent μ one can go from d-dimensional short-range networks to ∞-dimensional networks topologically similar to random graphs. An...

This study examines the extent to which network formation processes in international relations parallel models that characterize the formation processes of physical, biological, and social networks. I introduce two influential models from networks sciences: Preferential Attachment (PA) models...