Time-dependent economic, technological, and social factors can artificially inflate or deflate quantitative measures for career success. Here we develop and test a statistical method for normalizing career success metrics across time dependent factors. In particular, this method addresses the...

It is well-known that financial asset returns exhibit fat-tailed distributions and long-term memory. These empirical features are the main objectives of modeling efforts using (i) stochastic processes to quantitatively reproduce these features and (ii) agent-based simulations to understand the...

For an intriguing variety of switching processes in nature, the underlying complex system abruptly changes from one state to another in a highly discontinuous fashion. Financial market fluctuations are characterized by many abrupt switchings creating upward trends and downward trends, on time...

We study the annual growth rates of six macroeconomic variables: public debt, public health expenditures, exports of goods, government consumption expenditures, total exports of goods and services, and total imports of goods and services. For each variable, we find (i) that the distribution of...

Understanding correlations in complex systems is crucial in the face of turbulence, such as the ongoing financial crisis. However, in complex systems, such as financial systems, correlations are not constant but instead vary in time. Here we address the question of quantifying state-dependent...

We introduce a future orientation index to quantify the degree to which Internet users worldwide seek more information about years in the future than years in the past. We analyse Google logs and find a striking correlation between the country's GDP and the predisposition of its inhabitants to...

Because financial crises are characterized by dangerous rare events that occur more frequently than those predicted by models with finite variances, we investigate the underlying stochastic process generating these events. In the 1960s Mandelbrot [Mandelbrot B (1963) J Bus 36:394-419] and Fama...

Much research has been conducted arguing that tipping points at which complex systems experience phase transitions are difficult to identify. To test the existence of tipping points in financial markets, based on the alternating offer strategic model we propose a network of bargaining agents who...

We present a dynamic network model of corrupt and noncorrupt employees representing two states in the public and private sector. Corrupt employees are more connected to one another and are less willing to change their attitudes regarding corruption than noncorrupt employees. This behavior...

We study the betweenness centrality of fractal and non-fractal scale-free network models as well as real networks. We show that the correlation between degree and betweenness centrality C of nodes is much weaker in fractal network models compared to non-fractal models. We also show that nodes of...