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Comment on Barabasi, Nature 435, 207 (2005)

Daniel B. Stouffer·R. Dean Malmgren·Luis A. N. Amaral
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Abstract

In a recent letter, Barabasi claims that the dynamics of a number of human activities are scale-free [1]. He specifically reports that the probability distribution of time intervals tau between consecutive e-mails sent by a single user and time delays for e-mail replies follow a power-law with an exponent -1, and proposes a priority-queuing process as an explanation of the bursty nature of human activity. Here, we quantitatively demonstrate that the reported power-law distributions are solely an artifact of the analysis of the empirical data and that the proposed model is not representative of e-mail communication patterns.

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Daniel B. Stouffer, R. Dean Malmgren, Luis A. N. Amaral. 2005-10-25. Comment on Barabasi, Nature 435, 207 (2005). https://arxiv.org/abs/physics/0510216

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