Many scientists are interested in but puzzled by the various inverse power laws with a negative exponent 1 such as the rank-size rule. The rank-size rule is a very simple scaling law followed by many observations of the ubiquitous empirical patterns in physical and social systems. Where there is a rank-size distribution, there will be a hierarchy with cascade structure. However, the equivalence...

We examine avalanche statistics of rainand vibrationdriven granular slides in miniature soil mounds using experimental and numerical approaches. A crossover from powerlaw to non power-law avalanche-size statistics is demonstrated as a generic driving rate ν is increased, due to diminishing timescale separation (∼ ν) between stress buildup and release. For slowly-driven mounds, the tail of the a...

This paper examines a stochastic multiplicative process with reset events to explain the power law in the tail of personal income distribution. The tail part of the income distributions in post-war Japan persistently exhibits a power-law distribution with an exponent around 2. We find that a multiplicative process with reset events can explain this pattern. By using a default rate of corporate ...

We explore the idea that the power-law tail in the mass function of protostellar condensations and stars arises from the accretion of ambient cloud material on to a condensation, coupled with a nonuniform (exponential) distribution of accretion lifetimes. This model allows for the generation of power-law distributions in all star-forming regions, even if condensations start with a lognormal mas...

To know the statistical distribution of a variable is an important problem in management of resources. Distributions of the power law type are observed in many real systems. However power law distributions have an infinite variance and thus can not be used as a standard distribution. Normally professionals in the area use normal distribution with variable parameters or some other approximate di...

A “monkey book” is a book consisting of a random distribution of letters and blanks, where a group of letters surrounded by two blanks is defined as a word. We compare the statistics of the word distribution for a monkey book with the corresponding distribution for the general class of random books, where the latter are books for which the words are randomly distributed. It is shown that the wo...