No Arabic abstract
This work studies the Zipf Law for cities in Brazil. Data from censuses of 1970, 1980, 1991 and 2000 were used to select a sample containing only cities with 30,000 inhabitants or more. The results show that the population distribution in Brazilian cities does follow a power law similar to the ones found in other countries. Estimates of the power law exponent were found to be 2.22 +/- 0.34 for the 1970 and 1980 censuses, and 2.26 +/- 0.11 for censuses of 1991 and 2000. More accurate results were obtained with the maximum likelihood estimator, showing an exponent equal to 2.41 for 1970 and 2.36 for the other three years.
Long birth time series for Romania are investigated from Benfords law point of view, distinguishing between families with a religious (Orthodox and Non-Orthodox) affiliation. The data extend from Jan. 01, 1905 till Dec. 31, 2001, i.e. over 97 years or 35 429 days. The results point to a drastic breakdown of Benfords law. Some interpretation is proposed, based on the statistical aspects due to population sizes, rather than on human thought constraints when the law breakdown is usually expected. Benfords law breakdown clearly points to natural causes.
The word-frequency distribution provides the fundamental building blocks that generate discourse in language. It is well known, from empirical evidence, that the word-frequency distribution of almost any text is described by Zipfs law, at least approximately. Following Stephens and Bialek [Phys. Rev. E 81, 066119, 2010], we interpret the frequency of any word as arising from the interaction potential between its constituent letters. Indeed, Jaynes maximum-entropy principle, with the constrains given by every empirical two-letter marginal distribution, leads to a Boltzmann distribution for word probabilities, with an energy-like function given by the sum of all pairwise (two-letter) potentials. The improved iterative-scaling algorithm allows us finding the potentials from the empirical two-letter marginals. Appling this formalism to words with up to six letters from the English subset of the recently created Standardized Project Gutenberg Corpus, we find that the model is able to reproduce Zipfs law, but with some limitations: the general Zipfs power-law regime is obtained, but the probability of individual words shows considerable scattering. In this way, a pure statistical-physics framework is used to describe the probabilities of words. As a by-product, we find that both the empirical two-letter marginal distributions and the interaction-potential distributions follow well-defined statistical laws.
Using an exhaustive list of Japanese bankruptcy in 1997, we discover a Zipf law for the distribution of total liabilities of bankrupted firms in high debt range. The life-time of these bankrupted firms has exponential distribution in correlation with entry rate of new firms. We also show that the debt and size are highly correlated, so the Zipf law holds consistently with that for size distribution. In attempt to understand ``physics of bankruptcy, we show that a model of debtor-creditor dynamics of firms and a bank, recently proposed by economists, can reproduce these phenomenological findings.
Cities are centers for the integration of capital and incubators of invention, and attracting venture capital (VC) is of great importance for cities to advance in innovative technology and business models towards a sustainable and prosperous future. Yet we still lack a quantitative understanding of the relationship between urban characteristics and VC activities. In this paper, we find a clear nonlinear scaling relationship between VC activities and the urban population of Chinese cities. In such nonlinear systems, the widely applied linear per capita indicators would be either biased to larger cities or smaller cities depends on whether it is superlinear or sublinear, while the residual of cities relative to the prediction of scaling law is a more objective and scale-invariant metric. %(i.e., independent of the city size). Such a metric can distinguish the effects of local dynamics and scaled growth induced by the change of population size. The spatiotemporal evolution of such metrics on VC activities reveals three distinct groups of cities, two of which stand out with increasing and decreasing trends, respectively. And the taxonomy results together with spatial analysis also signify different development modes between large urban agglomeration regions. Besides, we notice the evolution of scaling exponents on VC activities are of much larger fluctuations than on socioeconomic output of cities, and a conceptual model that focuses on the growth dynamics of different sized cities can well explain it, which we assume would be general to other scenarios.
Phenomena as diverse as breeding bird populations, the size of U.S. firms, money invested in mutual funds, the GDP of individual countries and the scientific output of universities all show unusual but remarkably similar growth fluctuations. The fluctuations display characteristic features, including double exponential scaling in the body of the distribution and power law scaling of the standard deviation as a function of size. To explain this we propose a remarkably simple additive replication model: At each step each individual is replaced by a new number of individuals drawn from the same replication distribution. If the replication distribution is sufficiently heavy tailed then the growth fluctuations are Levy distributed. We analyze the data from bird populations, firms, and mutual funds and show that our predictions match the data well, in several respects: Our theory results in a much better collapse of the individual distributions onto a single curve and also correctly predicts the scaling of the standard deviation with size. To illustrate how this can emerge from a collective microscopic dynamics we propose a model based on stochastic influence dynamics over a scale-free contact network and show that it produces results similar to those observed. We also extend the model to deal with correlations between individual elements. Our main conclusion is that the universality of growth fluctuations is driven by the additivity of growth processes and the action of the generalized central limit theorem.