Lognormal distributions of user post lengths in Internet discussions - a consequence of the Weber-Fechner law?

Sobkowicz, Paweł; Thelwall, Mike; Buckley, Kevan; Paltoglou, George; Sobkowicz, Antoni

doi:10.1140/epjds14

Cited by 45 publications

(34 citation statements)

References 41 publications

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“…Decision making and short-term memory error accumulation also obey the Weber–Fechner law 6,7 . Word usage and sentence lengths in most languages, and even the lengths of e-mail messages, follow a lognormal form, irrespective of the language of the sender 8,9 . Mental organization of numbers is also described by a logarithmic scale (log scale) 10 .…”

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confidence: 99%

The log-dynamic brain: how skewed distributions affect network operations

2014

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We often assume that the variables of functional and structural brain parameters — such as synaptic weights, the firing rates of individual neurons, the synchronous discharge of neural populations, the number of synaptic contacts between neurons and the size of dendritic boutons — have a bell-shaped distribution. However, at many physiological and anatomical levels in the brain, the distribution of numerous parameters is in fact strongly skewed with a heavy tail, suggesting that skewed (typically lognormal) distributions are fundamental to structural and functional brain organization. This insight not only has implications for how we should collect and analyse data, it may also help us to understand how the different levels of skewed distributions — from synapses to cognition — are related to each other.

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confidence: 99%

The log-dynamic brain: how skewed distributions affect network operations

2014

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“…To verify the proposed mechanism, the author would like to check whether the Weber-Fechner law actually works, but this task is very difficult. The mechanism of the lognormal distribution similar to this study, the combination of the Gaussian distribution and the Weber-Fechner law, has been used in the statistics of sentence lengths of users' posts in Internet [19] and English and Chinese word lengths [20]. Meanwhile, the author does not think that the lognormal distribution is decisive for the character size, and does not exclude the possibility that other distribution is more suitable.…”

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confidence: 99%

Lognormal Behavior of the Size Distributions of Animation Characters

Yamamoto¹

2017

Proceedings of the Asia-Pacific Econophysics Conference 2016 — Big Data Analysis and Modeling Toward Super Smart Society — (APE

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This study investigates the statistical property of the character sizes of animation, superhero series, and video game. By using online databases of Pokémon (video game) and Power Rangers (superhero series), the height and weight distributions are constructed, and we find that the weight distributions of Pokémon and Zords (robots in Power Rangers) follow the lognormal distribution in common. For the theoretical mechanism of this lognormal behavior, the combination of the normal distribution and the Weber-Fechner law is proposed.

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“…Lognormal distributions are supported by works in Stylometry, the statistical study of linguistic style, on general sentence length distributions [28][29][30][31]. They have also been found in a variety of other areas such as file sizes or durations of telephone calls and seem to be a universal phenomenon [32]. In any case, the distribution of sentence lengths in particular being relatively understudied leaves both origin and validity of the lognormal distribution an open question.…”

Section: Phenomenological Response Lawsmentioning

confidence: 96%

Contraction of Online Response to Major Events

2014

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Quantifying regularities in behavioral dynamics is of crucial interest for understanding collective social events such as panics or political revolutions. With the widespread use of digital communication media it has become possible to study massive data streams of user-created content in which individuals express their sentiments, often towards a specific topic. Here we investigate messages from various online media created in response to major, collectively followed events such as sport tournaments, presidential elections, or a large snow storm. We relate content length and message rate, and find a systematic correlation during events which can be described by a power law relation—the higher the excitation, the shorter the messages. We show that on the one hand this effect can be observed in the behavior of most regular users, and on the other hand is accentuated by the engagement of additional user demographics who only post during phases of high collective activity. Further, we identify the distributions of content lengths as lognormals in line with statistical linguistics, and suggest a phenomenological law for the systematic dependence of the message rate to the lognormal mean parameter. Our measurements have practical implications for the design of micro-blogging and messaging services. In the case of the existing service Twitter, we show that the imposed limit of 140 characters per message currently leads to a substantial fraction of possibly dissatisfying to compose tweets that need to be truncated by their users.

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Lognormal distributions of user post lengths in Internet discussions - a consequence of the Weber-Fechner law?

Cited by 45 publications

References 41 publications

The log-dynamic brain: how skewed distributions affect network operations

The log-dynamic brain: how skewed distributions affect network operations

Lognormal Behavior of the Size Distributions of Animation Characters

Contraction of Online Response to Major Events

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