A power law distribution in patients' lengths of stay in hospital

The distribution of patients' lengths of stay in English hospitals is measured by using routinely collected data from 11 years. It is found to be well approximated by a power law distribution spanning over more than 3 decades. To explain this observation, a theoretical resource allocation model is presented. It is based on iterative long-term scheduling of hospital beds, and its main assumption is that future beds are allocated preferentially. This represents a situation where di®erent parts of the health care system compete for resources, with bargaining powers proportional to current resource levels

The urban economy as a scale-free network

We present empirical evidence that land values are scale-free and introduce a network model that reproduces the observations. The network approach to urban modelling is based on the assumption that the market dynamics that generates land values can be represented as a growing scale-free network. Our results suggest that the network properties of trade between specialized activities causes land values, and likely also other observables such as population, to be power law distributed. In addition to being an attractive avenue for further analytical inquiry, the network representation is also applicable to empirical data and is thereby attractive for predictive modelling.Comment: Submitted to Phys. Rev. E. 7 pages, 3 figures. (Minor typos and details fixed