Comment on Barabasi, Nature 435, 207 (2005)

By Daniel B. Stouffer, R. Dean Malmgren, L. A. N. Amaral. 2005

1,512 citations recorded by the source corpus.

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.

Subfields: Experimental and Cognitive Psychology, Statistical and Nonlinear Physics

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Citations in the corpus

Comparison of online social relations in volume vs interaction: a case study of cyworld (2008, methodology): “In [6] Barabasi begins with a simple model for human task execution and verifies his model with email data.”
The Anatomy of a Scientific Rumor (2013, methodology): “The bursty nature of user behavior has been recently attributed [16] to decision-based queuing processes [17], where individuals tend to act in response to some perceived priority.”
Toward developing a systematic approach to generate benchmark datasets for intrusion detection (2012, background): “Apart from the difficulties in modeling such behavior due to the dynamic behavior of human activity (Barabsi, 2005), it is not the objective of this work to generate realistic traffic for the purpose of network modeling and simulation.”
Planetary-scale views on a large instant-messaging network (2008, background): “, waiting times of emails and letters before a reply is generated [4].”
Rise and fall patterns of information diffusion: model and implications (2012, background): “5 as discovered by earlier work on read data: real bloggers [22], and response to mails by Einstein and Darwin [2].”
Contact Patterns among High School Students (2014, background): “ery short, but very long durations are also observed. This highlights the burstiness of human contacts, a well known feature of human dynamics observed in a variety of systems driven by human actions [29,30]. Contact matrices Figure 2 reports the cumulative durations and the total numbers of contact”
Colloquium: Criticality and dynamical scaling in living systems (2017, background): “For example, physiological and clinical time-series data have typically a spectrum that decays as a power of the frequency (Mandelbrot, 2002) and mobility patterns often exhibit scale-free features (Barabasi, 2005; Brockmann et al., 2006; Proekt et al., 2012).”