5,254 research outputs found
A Simple Explanation for Taxon Abundance Patterns
For taxonomic levels higher than species, the abundance distributions of
number of subtaxa per taxon tend to approximate power laws, but often show
strong deviationns from such a law. Previously, these deviations were
attributed to finite-time effects in a continuous time branching process at the
generic level. Instead, we describe here a simple discrete branching process
which generates the observed distributions and find that the distribution's
deviation from power-law form is not caused by disequilibration, but rather
that it is time-independent and determined by the evolutionary properties of
the taxa of interest. Our model predicts-with no free parameters-the
rank-frequency distribution of number of families in fossil marine animal
orders obtained from the fossil record. We find that near power-law
distributions are statistically almost inevitable for taxa higher than species.
The branching model also sheds light on species abundance patterns, as well as
on links between evolutionary processes, self-organized criticality and
fractals.Comment: 10 pages, 4 Fig
Neuronal avalanches recorded in the awake and sleeping monkey do not show a power law but can be reproduced by a self-organized critical model
Poster presentation: Self-organized critical (SOC) systems are complex dynamical systems that may express cascades of events, called avalanches [1]. The SOC state was proposed to govern brain function, because of its activity fluctuations over many orders of magnitude, its sensitivity to small input and its long term stability [2,3]. In addition, the critical state is optimal for information storage and processing [4]. Both hallmark features of SOC systems, a power law distribution f(s) for the avalanche size s and a branching parameter (bp) of unity, were found for neuronal avalanches recorded in vitro [5]. However, recordings in vivo yielded contradictory results [6]. Electrophysiological recordings in vivo only cover a small fraction of the brain, while criticality analysis assumes that the complete system is sampled. We hypothesized that spatial subsampling might influence the observed avalanche statistics. In addition, SOC models can have different connectivity, but always show a power law for f(s) and bp = 1 when fully sampled. This may not be the case under subsampling, however. Here, we wanted to know whether a state change from awake to asleep could be modeled by changing the connectivity of a SOC model without leaving the critical state. We simulated a SOC model [1] and calculated f(s) and bp obtained from sampling only the activity of a set of 4 × 4 sites, representing the electrode positions in the cortex. We compared these results with results obtained from multielectrode recordings of local field potentials (LFP) in the cortex of behaving monkeys. We calculated f(s) and bp for the LFP activity recorded while the monkey was either awake or asleep and compared these results to results obtained from two subsampled SOC model with different connectivity. f(s) and bp were very similar for both the experiments and the subsampled SOC model, but in contrast to the fully sampled model, f(s) did not show a power law and bp was smaller than unity. With increasing the distance between the sampling sites, f(s) changed from "apparently supercritical" to "apparently subcritical" distributions in both the model and the LFP data. f(s) and bp calculated from LFP recorded during awake and asleep differed. These changes could be explained by altering the connectivity in the SOC model. Our results show that subsampling can prevent the observation of the characteristic power law and bp in SOC systems, and misclassifications of critical systems as sub- or supercritical are possible. In addition, a change in f(s) and bp for different states (awake/asleep) does not necessarily imply a change from criticality to sub- or supercriticality, but can also be explained by a change in the effective connectivity of the network without leaving the critical state
Log-Poisson Statistics and Extended Self-Similarity in Driven Dissipative Systems
The Bak-Chen-Tang forest fire model was proposed as a toy model of turbulent
systems, where energy (in the form of trees) is injected uniformly and
globally, but is dissipated (burns) locally. We review our previous results on
the model and present our new results on the statistics of the higher-order
moments for the spatial distribution of fires. We show numerically that the
spatial distribution of dissipation can be described by Log-Poisson statistics
which leads to extended self-similarity (ESS). Similar behavior is also found
in models based on directed percolation; this suggests that the concept of
Log-Poisson statistics of (appropriately normalized) variables can be used to
describe scaling not only in turbulence but also in a wide range of driven
dissipative systems.Comment: 10 pages, 5 figure
Distribution of repetitions of ancestors in genealogical trees
We calculate the probability distribution of repetitions of ancestors in a
genealogical tree for simple neutral models of a closed population with sexual
reproduction and non-overlapping generations. Each ancestor at generation g in
the past has a weight w which is (up to a normalization) the number of times
this ancestor appears in the genealogical tree of an individual at present. The
distribution P_g(w) of these weights reaches a stationary shape P_\infty(w) for
large g, i.e. for a large number of generations back in the past. For small w,
P_\infty(w) is a power law with a non-trivial exponent which can be computed
exactly using a standard procedure of the renormalization group approach. Some
extensions of the model are discussed and the effect of these variants on the
shape of P_\infty(w) are analysed.Comment: 20 pages, 5 figures included, to appear in Physica
Spatial-temporal correlations in the process to self-organized criticality
A new type of spatial-temporal correlation in the process approaching to the
self-organized criticality is investigated for the two simple models for
biological evolution. The change behaviors of the position with minimum barrier
are shown to be quantitatively different in the two models. Different results
of the correlation are given for the two models. We argue that the correlation
can be used, together with the power-law distributions, as criteria for
self-organized criticality.Comment: 3 pages in RevTeX, 3 eps figure
Scaling of impact fragmentation near the critical point
We investigated two-dimensional brittle fragmentation with a flat impact
experimentally, focusing on the low impact energy region near the
fragmentation-critical point. We found that the universality class of
fragmentation transition disagreed with that of percolation. However, the
weighted mean mass of the fragments could be scaled using the pseudo-control
parameter multiplicity. The data for highly fragmented samples included a
cumulative fragment mass distribution that clearly obeyed a power-law. The
exponent of this power-law was 0.5 and it was independent of sample size. The
fragment mass distributions in this regime seemed to collapse into a unified
scaling function using weighted mean fragment mass scaling. We also examined
the behavior of higher order moments of the fragment mass distributions, and
obtained multi-scaling exponents that agreed with those of the simple biased
cascade model.Comment: 6 pages, 6 figure
Crossover from Percolation to Self-Organized Criticality
We include immunity against fire as a new parameter into the self-organized
critical forest-fire model. When the immunity assumes a critical value,
clusters of burnt trees are identical to percolation clusters of random bond
percolation. As long as the immunity is below its critical value, the
asymptotic critical exponents are those of the original self-organized critical
model, i.e. the system performs a crossover from percolation to self-organized
criticality. We present a scaling theory and computer simulation results.Comment: 4 pages Revtex, two figures included, to be published in PR
The complex scaling behavior of non--conserved self--organized critical systems
The Olami--Feder--Christensen earthquake model is often considered the
prototype dissipative self--organized critical model. It is shown that the size
distribution of events in this model results from a complex interplay of
several different phenomena, including limited floating--point precision.
Parallels between the dynamics of synchronized regions and those of a system
with periodic boundary conditions are pointed out, and the asymptotic avalanche
size distribution is conjectured to be dominated by avalanches of size one,
with the weight of larger avalanches converging towards zero as the system size
increases.Comment: 4 pages revtex4, 5 figure
Avalanche Merging and Continuous Flow in a Sandpile Model
A dynamical transition separating intermittent and continuous flow is
observed in a sandpile model, with scaling functions relating the transport
behaviors between both regimes. The width of the active zone diverges with
system size in the avalanche regime but becomes very narrow for continuous
flow. The change of the mean slope, Delta z, on increasing the driving rate, r,
obeys Delta z ~ r^{1/theta}. It has nontrivial scaling behavior in the
continuous flow phase with an exponent theta given, paradoxically, only in
terms of exponents characterizing the avalanches theta = (1+z-D)/(3-D).Comment: Explanations added; relation to other model
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