NEWSLETTER BFI May 22 2005
Bandung Fe Institute
May 22 2005
POWER-LAWs EVERYWHERE!
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Power-laws are somewhat sensational concerning their ubiquity in great
deal of our life aspects. It appears from the distribution of wealths
to the rank of words used in any texts or literatures; from how a man
connected to each other representing the "small world" to the
extinction of species (depicted by taxa in phylogenetic trees) in the
process of evolution; from the results of election in multi-party
system to the distribution of return in the financial market; from the
distribution of population to the occurances of earthquakes. Everything
seems to be touched by the simple inheritance of the power-law.
Obviously, it came to a quest for current scientists to find out what
kind of mechanisms in our nature yielding such interesting and simple
law. Roughly, power law exhibits P(r)=r^(-alfa) where alfa is a
constant. It is clear that such law presents distribution of occurances
that is almost persistent over many scales of measurement. Simple
statistically speaking, we can always talk about how tall the students
in a classroom by representing the measurement of average or mean. It
said that if we discover that the average heights of students is 180 cm
tall, then we should barely find any person of height 10 cm tall in the
classroom (or probably in many places around the world). However, we
cannot use such thing when we talk about how populated cities in
Indonesia are, since there are highly populated cities of hundred of
thousands people in significant number as the much smaller ones of only
thousands. And so it is when we talk about many other objects.
Our recent understanding about power law has emerged to the study of
complex system. The question is then transformed to how the complex
systems exhibit such simple laws in their nature. There have been a lot
of research proceedings to find out the theoretical explanation on
this, such as the self-organized criticallity, the phase transition,
least effort behavior, the Yule process, highly optimized tolerance,
and many more. Still the question remains interesting and encourages
scientific endeavor to explore more.
The institute has widely areas of research on this subject. Several
reports have been published showing our social system exhibits such
fascinating law whatsoever. The researches are in the part of research
regarding econo- and sociophysics in the institute in the last two
years. Some reports available on-line are:
1. Explorations of power-law in accordance to findings in physics
(phase transition) and statistical thoughts emerging econophysics as a
new subject. The paper is entitled "DARI TRANSISI FASA KE SISTEM
KEUANGAN: Distribusi Statistika pada Sistem Kompleks", written in
Indonesian and available on-line in:
http://bandungfe.net/wp2003/plaw.pdf
2. Discovery of power law signatures in Indonesian multi-party
elections that factually also discovered in many places around the
world, such as Brazil, India, etc. The paper is entitled "Power-Law
Signature in Indonesian Legislative Election 1999-2004", written in
English and available on-line in: http://bandungfe.net/wp2004/2004k.pdf
3. Explorations of power-laws in the population of Indonesian cities
and municipals. The paper is entitled "Power-law Signatures in
Indonesian Population", written in English and available on-line in:
http://bandungfe.net/wp2004/2004t.pdf
In the current month, BFI will brought this issue as part of GENERAL
LECTURE SERIES for scholars of the institute and also opened to them
interesting in this topics. The general lecture will be held in Room.dx
Bandung Fe Institute, 3.00pm (GMT+7) Wednesday, May 25th 2005. As
stated before, interesting non-BFI felows are welcome by confirmation
to b...@bandungfe.net. The general lecture will be brought by Hokky
Situngkir, the chairman of Dept. Computational Sociology BFI. The title
of the general lecture will be "Recognizing the universality of
power-laws" and delivered in Indonesian.
======== NEW RESEARCH PAPER ==========
There has been a new research paper published on-line in the
institute's web-page. The paper elaborates a post-research analysis
held in the previous cooperation with Surya Research International and
Jakarta Stock Exchange. The paper presents analysis of the evolving
price fluctuations by using ultrametric distance of minimally spanning
financial tree of stocks traded in Jakarta Stock Exchange 2000-2004.
Ultrametricity is derived from transformation of correlation
coeffcients into the distances among stocks. The paper evaluates the
performance of ups and downs of stock prices and discovers the
evolution towards the financial and economic stabilization in Indonesia
after the monetary crisis. This is partly recognized by mapping the
hierarchical trees upon the recognition of liquid and illiquid stocks.
It notes how we can use the concept of ultrametricity in the evaluation
of spectral market movements and intuitive understanding for portfolio
management purposes.
The paper is entitled: "On Stock Market Dynamics through Ultrametricity
of Minimum Spanning Tree" and written in English. You are invited to
see the paper on-line in: http://www.bandungfe.net/wp2005/2005h.pdf
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Bandung Fe Institute
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Bandung
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INDONESIA
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http://www.bandungfe.net
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