Whether there are universal laws or principles in complex systems is a fascinating and important question. Prof. John Casti uses the case of Normal Distribution (\bell curves") to illustrate that such universal principle is perhaps out there waiting to be discovered [1]. He suggests Zipf's law as a candidate for such universal principle. But as the author of one of the three publications to pro...

The number of times, a scientist is cited in other scientific publications is now an important factor in his merit consideration. Normally citation indices of highly cited scientists are available, which in turn give information only about the dynamics of the citation mechanism of this group. In the present work, we studied the statistical distribution of the citation index of Brazilian scienti...

We studied the mathematical relations between species abundance distributions (SADs) and species-area relationships (SARs) and found that a power-law SAR can be generally derived from a power-law SAD without a special assumption such as the “canonical hypothesis”. In the present analysis, an SAR-exponent is obtained as a function of an SAD-exponent for a finite number of species. We also studie...

The purpose of this article is to present a preferential attachment model adjusted to generation of bipartite graphs. The original model is able to produce unipartite graphs with node degree distribution following power law relation. The motivation for extending classic model is the fact that multi-partite graph topologies are becoming more and more popular in social networks. This phenomenon r...

Whether there are universal laws or principles in complex systems is a fascinating and important question. Prof. John Casti uses the case of Normal Distribution (\bell curves") to illustrate that such universal principle is perhaps out there waiting to be discovered [1]. He suggests Zipf's law as a candidate for such universal principle. But as the author of one of the three publications to pro...

The sub-gridscale floe size and thickness distribution (FSTD) is an emerging climate variable, playing a leading-order role in the coupling between sea ice, the ocean, and the atmosphere. The FSTD, however, is difficult to measure given the vast range of horizontal scales of individual floes, leading to the common use of power-law scaling to describe it. The evolution of a coupled mixed-layer-F...

Risk analysis is the first essential step in the risk management process. In order to do an effective risk analysis, is necessary to identify and quantify the threats to information technology assets. Then statistical models of information security threats are required to develop effective risk analysis methodologies. We present experimental evidence suggesting that network intrusion attacks fo...

We show that the tenure lengths for managers of sport teams follow a power law distribution with an exponent between 2 and 3. We develop a simple theoretical model which replicates this result. The model demonstrates that the empirical phenomenon can be understood as the macroscopic outcome of pairwise interactions among managers in a league, threshold effects in managerial performance evaluati...

Self-organized criticality has been proposed to explain complex dynamical systems near their critical points. This experiment examined a monodisperse conical bead pile and how the distribution of avalanches is affected by the pattern of beads glued on a base, by the size or shape of the base, and by the height at which each bead was dropped onto the pile. By measuring the number of avalanches f...

The concept of the long tail has recently been used to explain the phenomenon in e-commerce where the total volume of sales of the items in the tail is comparable to that of the most popular items. In the case of online book sales, the proportion of tail sales has been estimated using regression techniques on the assumption that the data obeys a power-law distribution. Here we propose a differe...