The oldest answered question in the social sciences is ‘Why do societies collapse?’. I advance a theory of the collapse of societies that is based on self-organized criticality, which is a nonlinear process that produces sudden shifts and fractal patterns in historical time series....

In this paper we define some stochastic perturbations of the BTW model which make it into Manna model. These models have a continuous parameter p, where p=0 and 1 correspond to the BTW and Manna models respectively. We have investigated the properties of the statistical observables of the waves...

Self-organized criticality (SOC) has been claimed to play an important role in many natural and social systems. In the present work we empirically investigate the relevance of this theory to stock-market dynamics. Avalanches in stock-market indices are identified using a multi-scale...

Recently, Peters et al. (Phys. Rev. Lett. 88 (2002) 018701)) have found power-law behaviour in the distribution of rain events. Here it is shown that the observed self-similar features in both the reservoir level and the distribution of rain events, can quantitatively be reproduced from an...

We report an experiment on a granular packing: a box filled with glass beads is tilted very slowly up to the maximum angle of stability where a big avalanche is produced. During the build-up period many rearrangements occur on the free surface of the packing. Digital imaging was used to study...

We explore a simple lattice field model intended to describe statistical properties of high-frequency financial markets. The model is relevant in the cross-disciplinary area of econophysics. Its signature feature is the emergence of a self-organized critical state. This implies scale invariance...

The major factor that drives a protein toward collapse and folding is the hydrophobic effect. At the folding process a hydrophobic core is shielded by the solvent-accessible surface area of the protein. We study the fractal behavior of 5526 protein structures present in the Brookhaven Protein...

In this paper, we investigate the data of industries in China and find that the frequency distributions of fixed assets and fixed-assets’ investment of industries obey power laws. We show that these power-law modes can be explained by the rules of the Simon Model, rather than the existing...

The power law sensitivity to initial conditions is investigated for self-organized critical (SOC) models within the damage spreading framework. A class of two-dimensional abelian directed models are analyzed. Results for the time evolution of the normalized squared euclidian distance indicate...

The Barkhausen jumps or avalanches in magnetic domain-walls motion between successive pinned configurations, due the competition among magnetic external driving force and substrum quenched disorder, appear in bulk materials and thin films. We introduce a model based in rules for the domain wall...