A mystery novel, a history book, and a fantasy epic may have little in common in plot or style. But count the words inside them and a strange regularity appears: many new words show up early, then fewer and fewer as the author reuses what has already been introduced. That pattern, known as Heaps’ law, turns out not to belong to books alone. A new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences finds that the same rule also describes how many complex systems grow, from living cells and corporations to universities and government agencies—and could even be used to predict how they will change in the future.
From cells to companies: Study shows how diversity scales within complex systems
More In Finance
-
Canada has some of the highest interchange fees in the world. Interchange fees are the fees businesses pay each time their customers pay by credit card. The average interchange fee in Canada is about 1.5 per cent of [...]
-
Main Street businesses that survived COVID-19 restrictions are now navigating a pandemic recovery where predicted changes in the retail industry have been accelerated by five to 10 years. The ability to adapt to these changes, coupled [...]
-
The big idea Consumers who see a product on sale being virtually touched are more engaged and willing to pay more than if the item is displayed on its own, according to a recent research paper [...]
-
Entrepreneurs, their associated startups and the subsequent growth of their companies have a vital impact on the health of our economy. In Canada, young adults have demonstrated a growing interest in entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurship has historically been narrowly [...]
-
Economics is broadly divided into macroeconomics and microeconomics. The big picture, macroeconomics, concentrates on the behavior of a national or a regional economy as a whole: the totals of goods and services, unemployment and prices. Then there’s a more [...]
