“…Power law, which is also known as the 80:20 rule or Pareto principle, exponential, and log‐normal distributions are addressed in the literature that tends to search for a specific statistical distribution to discover the characteristics of many natural and unnatural phenomena. The example phenomena reflecting these distributions are compiled and categorized from (Limpert et al, 2001; Milojević, 2010; Newman, 2004; White et al, 2008) or other resources with given references as follows: - Natural phenomena fitting log‐normal : element concentration in the Earth's crust, latent periods (from infection to the first symptoms) of infectious disease [e.g., the incubation period of Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID‐19), SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome), and MERS (Middle East Respiratory Syndrome; Backer et al, 2020)], the abundance of bacteria on plants;
- Unnatural phenomena fitting log‐normal : number of letters per word, number of words per sentence, age of first marriage in Western;
- Natural phenomena fitting exponential : damage in nuclear power incidents and accidents before 1980 (Wheatley et al, 2017), moderate‐sized disasters (observed sea‐level variations, wind velocity, annual river floods) (Pisarenko & Rodkin, 2010), the arrival rate of cosmic ray alpha particles or Geiger counter tics (Tobias, 2012);
- Unnatural phenomena fitting exponential : time to failure patterns (also in natural phenomena) (Frank, 2009), modeling malware propagation delays (Wang & Murynets, 2013), frequency of Korean family names (power law in family names in the world), intervals between aircraft arrivals to major airports (Willemain et al, 2004), the inter‐arrival times of the 911 calls (Albert, 2011), the time between goals in World Cup football matches (Chu, 2003), the dispersion of U.S. incomes which was qualified as a kind of thermal equilibrium (Bartels, 2012);
- Natural phenomena fitting power law : island sizes, lake sizes, flood magnitudes, species body sizes, individual body sizes (White et al, 2008), basic community structure descriptors (number of species, links, and links per species) with the area (Galiana et al, 2022); and
- Unnatural phenomena fitting power law : author productivity, citations received by papers, scattering of scientific literature (Milojević, 2010). Component sizes in component‐based software development (Sharma & Pendharkar, 2022).
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