Hidden communication aspects in the exponent of Zipf's law

This article focuses on communication systems following Zipf’s law, in a study of the rel-ationship between the properties of those communication systems and the exponent of the law. The properties of communication systems are described using quantitative measures of semantic vagueness and the cost of word use. The precision and the economy of a communication system is reduced to a function of the exponent of Zipf’s law and the size of the communication system. Taking the exponent of the frequency spectrum, it is demonstrated that semantic precision grows with the exponent, where-as the cost of word use reaches a global minimum between 1.5 and 2, if the size of the communication system remains constant. The exponent of Zipf’s law is shown to be a key aspect for knowing about the number of stimuli handled by a communication system, and determining which of two systems is less vague or less expensive. The ideal exponent of Zipf’s law, it is therefore argued, should be very slightly above 2.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

The Hyperscape project (2): Participative Game Informational Construction

This paper develops Hyperscape participative game theoretical and methodological assumptions. As an hyper-structural ambient-dimensioned interaction system, Hyperscape constitutes a systemic way for territorial acknowledgement. An illustration of this principle presents a sound multisource analysis of soundscape from Malakoff, a district in Nantes, with using the sound athmosphere generator. Manipulation of this hypertool should provide information to evaluate sound interaction through Zipf law entropy dimensioning.Cet article présente les bases théoriques et méthodologiques du jeu participatif Hyperscape. Ce système de dimensionnement des interactions ambiantales vise une prise de connaissance territoriale par une méthode issue de la systémique. Pour illustrer ce principe, nous présentons une analyse multisource du paysage sonore de Malakoff (Nantes, France) en utilisant le générateur d'ambiances. Cet outil nous fournira les informations pour l'évaluation des interactions sonores par le dimensionnement de leur entropie via la loi de Zipf

Letter counting: a stem cell for Cryptology, Quantitative Linguistics, and Statistics

Counting letters in written texts is a very ancient practice. It has accompanied the development of Cryptology, Quantitative Linguistics, and Statistics. In Cryptology, counting frequencies of the different characters in an encrypted message is the basis of the so called frequency analysis method. In Quantitative Linguistics, the proportion of vowels to consonants in different languages was studied long before authorship attribution. In Statistics, the alternation vowel-consonants was the only example that Markov ever gave of his theory of chained events. A short history of letter counting is presented. The three domains, Cryptology, Quantitative Linguistics, and Statistics, are then examined, focusing on the interactions with the other two fields through letter counting. As a conclusion, the eclectism of past centuries scholars, their background in humanities, and their familiarity with cryptograms, are identified as contributing factors to the mutual enrichment process which is described here

Country Size, International Trade, and Aggregate Fluctuations in Granular Economies

This paper proposes a new mechanism by which country size and international trade affect macroeconomic volatility. We study a multi-country, multi-sector model with heterogeneous firms that are subject to idiosyncratic firm-specific shocks. When the distribution of firm sizes follows a power law with an exponent close to -1, the idiosyncratic shocks to large firms have an impact on aggregate output volatility. We explore the quantitative properties of the model calibrated to data for the 50 largest economies in the world. Smaller countries have fewer firms, and thus higher volatility. The model performs well in matching this pattern both qualitatively and quantitatively: the rate at which macroeconomic volatility decreases in country size in the model is very close to what is found in the data. Opening to trade increases the importance of large firms to the economy, thus raising macroeconomic volatility. Our simulation exercise shows that the contribution of trade to aggregate fluctuations depends strongly on country size: in the largest economies in the world, such as the U.S. or Japan, international trade increases volatility by only 1.5-3.5%. By contrast, trade increases aggregate volatility by some 15-20% in a small open economy, such as Denmark or Romania.

Identifying Authorship from Linguistic Text Patterns

Research that deals with linguistic text patterns is challenging because of the unstructured nature of text. This research presents a methodology to compare texts to identify whether two texts are written by the same or different authors. The methodology includes an algorithm to analyze the proximity of text, which is based upon Zipf’s Law [47][48]. The results have implications for text mining with applications to areas such as forensics, natural language processing, and information retrieval

Essays on Technology in Presence of Globalization

Technology has long been known to enable globalization in ways previously not thought possible, with instantaneous communication allowing members of organizations all across the globe to communicate and share information with little to no delay. However, as the effects of globalization have become more prominent, they have in turn helped to shape the very technologies that enable these processes. These three essays analyze three examples of how these two processes – globalization and technological development – impact one another. The first looks at a national policy level, attempting to understand how increased possibilities for inside leakers can force governments to consider asylum requests. The second analyzes the issue at the level of corporations, attempting to understand how and why business leaders choose to hire individuals from other countries. The third and final essay analyzes the issue at the most micro level, studying a potential application that could help analyze linguistic factors that have taken a more prominent role in a more globalized society

Space, scale, and scaling in entropy-maximising

Entropy measures were first introduced into geographical analysis during a period when the concept of human systems as being in some sort of equilibrium was in the ascendancy. In particular, entropy-maximising, in direct analogy to equilibrium statistical mechanics, provided a powerful framework in which to generate location and interaction models. This was introduced and popularised by Wilson (1970) and it led to many different extensions that filled in the framework rather than progressed it to different kinds of models. In particular, we review two such extensions here: how space can be introduced into the formulation through defining a ‘spatial entropy’ and how entropy can be decomposed and nested to capture spatial variation at different scales. Two obvious directions to this research, however, have remained implicit. First, the more substantive interpretations of the concept of entropy for different shapes and sizes of geographical systems have hardly been developed. Second, an explicit dynamics associated with generating probability distributions has not been attempted until quite recently with respect to the search for how power laws emerge as signatures of universality in complex systems. In short, the connections between entropy-maximising, substantive interpretations of entropy measures, and the longer term dynamics of how equilibrium distributions are reached and maintained have not been well-developed. This has many implications for future research and in conclusion, we will sketch the need for new and different entropy measures as well as new forms of dynamics that enable us to see how equilibrium spatial distributions can be generated as the outcomes of dynamic processes that converge to the steady state

The infochemical core

Vocalizations, and less often gestures, have been the object of linguistic research for decades. However, the development of a general theory of communication with human language as a particular case requires a clear understanding of the organization of communication through other means. Infochemicals are chemical compounds that carry information and are employed by small organisms that cannot emit acoustic signals of an optimal frequency to achieve successful communication. Here, we investigate the distribution of infochemicals across species when they are ranked by their degree or the number of species with which they are associated (because they produce them or are sensitive to them). We evaluate the quality of the fit of different functions to the dependency between degree and rank by means of a penalty for the number of parameters of the function. Surprisingly, a double Zipf (a Zipf distribution with two regimes, each with a different exponent) is the model yielding the best fit although it is the function with the largest number of parameters. This suggests that the worldwide repertoire of infochemicals contains a core which is shared by many species and is reminiscent of the core vocabularies found for human language in dictionaries or large corpora.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft