Comment on Barabasi, Nature 435, 207 (2005)

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.

• Publication year

  2005

• Venue

  arXiv: Data Analysis, Statistics and Probability

• Publication date

  2005-10-25

• Fields of study

  Mathematics, Physics

• Identifiers
  arXiv physics/0510216
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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