Dragon-kings: mechanisms, statistical methods and empirical evidence

This introductory article presents the special Discussion and Debate volume "From black swans to dragon-kings, is there life beyond power laws?" published in Eur. Phys. J. Special Topics in May 2012. We summarize and put in perspective the contributions into three main themes: (i) mechanisms for dragon-kings, (ii) detection of dragon-kings and statistical tests and (iii) empirical evidence in a large variety of natural and social systems. Overall, we are pleased to witness significant advances both in the introduction and clarification of underlying mechanisms and in the development of novel efficient tests that demonstrate clear evidence for the presence of dragon-kings in many systems. However, this positive view should be balanced by the fact that this remains a very delicate and difficult field, if only due to the scarcity of data as well as the extraordinary important implications with respect to hazard assessment, risk control and predictability.Comment: 20 page

Comparison of Pareto and tapered Pareto distributions for environmental phenomena

The Pareto distribution is often used to describe environmental phenomena such as the sizes of earthquakes or wildfires, or the interevent times or distances between such environmental disturbances. Because it is heavy-tailed, the Pareto distribution, or power-law distribution as it is occasionally called, suggests that a higher frequency of extremely large values occur compared to other, more familiar distributions such as the normal, exponential, or uniform. However, an alternative distribution called the tapered Pareto has been shown in some cases to fit as well or better to data than the Pareto distribution, and the tapered Pareto distribution is not heavy-tailed, suggesting a far lower frequency of extreme events. Even with rather large datasets, it is often quite difficult to distinguish which of these distributions is preferable, as they only differ markedly in the extreme upper tail where few, if any, observations are recorded. This article reviews the evidence and arguments related to these two competing distributions, especially in the context of earthquakes and wildfires

Status of child population health — the future of the country (part 1)

The article of the team of scientists of pediatricians and organizers of pediatric health care of Ukraine is devoted to the study of the main trends in the health status of children over last 22 years. The results of the analysis of the incidence and prevalence of diseases among Ukrainian child population, infant mortality rates over the past two decades demonstrates that they remain significantly higher than the average European indicators against the background of a progressive decrease in the number of child population at 3,16 million people. The prevalence of childhood diseases in Ukraine over past 22 years has grown by 41 %, the incidence of childhood diseases arose by 36 %. The article considers the ways of solving a number of new social and medico-ecological problems that negatively affect child health

Child health status — the future of the country (part 2)

The article deals with the problems of increasing the incidence and prevalence of childhood diseases during 1994–2016 against the background of a global reduction in the staffing of children’s specialists by 1.7 times, with an extremely inadequate supply of the regions of the South-East, Donetsk and Luhansk regions. All of this has a negative impact on the proper medical care of the child population, including the detection of childhood diseases. The authors substantiate the need to restore the personnel and material-technical potential of the pediatric service, the development of modern diagnostic and treatment technologies, the preservation of immunization and the prevention of disability of common childhood diseases that is an important component of the national health care and safety system of the country as a whole