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1. Introduction
Many phenomena in the physical, natural, economic
and social sciences can be characterized by power-law
statistics, for which there are many different
mechanisms (Mitzenmacher, 2003; Newman, 2005;
Sornette, 2006). Power-law (i.e. self-similar)
distributions of the sizes of events suggest that
mechanisms of nucleation and growth dynamics
remain the same over the whole spectrum of relevant
spatial and temporal scales. According to this
paradigm, small, large and extreme events belong to
the same population, the same distribution, and reflect
the
same
underlying
mechanism(s).
Major
catastrophes are just events that started small and did
not stop growing to develop into large or extreme
sizes.
Following that reasoning, a majority of the
scientific community considers those events as
unpredictable, in the sense that the final size of a
*Corresponding author.
E-mail address: sornette@ethz.ch
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