Power laws, Pareto distributions and Zipf's law

When the probability of measuring a particular value of some quantity varies inversely as a power of that value, the quantity is said to follow a power law, also known variously as Zipf's law or the Pareto distribution. Power laws appear widely in physics, biology, earth and planetary sciences, economics and finance, computer science, demography and the social sciences. For instance, the distributions of the sizes of cities, earthquakes, solar flares, moon craters, wars and people's personal fortunes all appear to follow power laws. The origin of power-law behaviour has been a topic of debate in the scientific community for more than a century. Here we review some of the empirical evidence for the existence of power-law forms and the theories proposed to explain them.Comment: 28 pages, 16 figures, minor corrections and additions in this versio

Cognitive modelling of language acquisition with complex networks

ABSTRACT Cognitive modelling is a well-established computational intelligence tool, which is very useful for studying cognitive phenomena, such as young children's first language acquisition. Specifically, linguistic modelling has recently benefited greatly from complex network theory by modelling large sets of empirical linguistic data as complex networks, thereby illuminating interesting new patterns and trends. In this chapter, we show how simple network analysis techniques can be applied to the study of language acquisition, and we argue that they reveal otherwise hidden information. We also note that a key network parameter -the ranked frequency distribution of the links -provides useful knowledge about the data, even though it had been previously neglected in this domain

The quantum Loschmidt echo on flat tori

The Quantum Loschmidt Echo is a measurement of the sensitivity of a quantum system to perturbations of the Hamiltonian. In the case of the standard 2-torus, we derive some explicit formulae for this quantity in the transition regime where it is expected to decay in the semiclassical limit. The expression involves both a two-microlocal defect measure of the initial data and the form of the perturbation. As an application, we exhibit a non-concentration criterium on the sequence of initial data under which one does not observe a macroscopic decay of the Quantum Loschmidt Echo. We also apply our results to several examples of physically relevant initial data such as coherent states and plane waves.Comment: 34 page

Nuclear forward scattering in particulate matter: dependence of lineshape on particle size distribution

In synchrotron Moessbauer spectroscopy, the nuclear exciton polariton manifests itself in the lineshape of the spectra of nuclear forward scattering (NFS) Fourier-transformed from time domain to frequency domain. This lineshape is generally described by the convolution of two intensity factors. One of them is Lorentzian related to free decay. We derived the expressions for the second factor related to Frenkel exciton polariton effects at propagation of synchrotron radiation in Moessbauer media. Parameters of this Frenkelian shape depend on the spatial configuration of Moessbauer media. In a layer of uniform thickness, this factor is found to be a simple hypergeometric function. Next, we consider the particles spread over a 2D surface or diluted in non-Moessbauer media to exclude an overlap of ray shadows by different particles. Deconvolving the purely polaritonic component of linewidths is suggested as a simple procedure sharpening the experimental NFS spectra in frequency domain. The lineshapes in these sharpened spectra are theoretically expressed via the parameters of the particle size distributions (PSD). Then, these parameters are determined through least-squares fitting of the line shapes.Comment: 13 pages, 12 figure

Adaptive Filtering Enhances Information Transmission in Visual Cortex

Sensory neuroscience seeks to understand how the brain encodes natural environments. However, neural coding has largely been studied using simplified stimuli. In order to assess whether the brain's coding strategy depend on the stimulus ensemble, we apply a new information-theoretic method that allows unbiased calculation of neural filters (receptive fields) from responses to natural scenes or other complex signals with strong multipoint correlations. In the cat primary visual cortex we compare responses to natural inputs with those to noise inputs matched for luminance and contrast. We find that neural filters adaptively change with the input ensemble so as to increase the information carried by the neural response about the filtered stimulus. Adaptation affects the spatial frequency composition of the filter, enhancing sensitivity to under-represented frequencies in agreement with optimal encoding arguments. Adaptation occurs over 40 s to many minutes, longer than most previously reported forms of adaptation.Comment: 20 pages, 11 figures, includes supplementary informatio

Tsallis Distribution Decorated With Log-Periodic Oscillation

In many situations, in all branches of physics, one encounters power-like behavior of some variables which are best described by a Tsallis distribution characterized by a nonextensivity parameter $q$ and scale parameter $T$. However, there exist experimental results which can be described only by a Tsallis distributions which are additionally decorated by some log-periodic oscillating factor. We argue that such a factor can originate from allowing for a complex nonextensivity parameter $q$. The possible information conveyed by such an approach (like the occurrence of complex heat capacity, the notion of complex probability or complex multiplicative noise) will also be discussed.Comment: 17 pages, 1 figure. The content of this article was presented by Z. Wlodarczyk at the SigmaPhi2014 conference at Rhodes, Greece, 7-11 July 2014. To be published in Entropy (2015