Random Curiosities Blog

. After quite some time, I was able to publish a single-author work again. My paper on a sandpile-based model of earthquakes was accepted in EPL (Europhysics Letters) .  R.C. Batac, Clustering regimes in a sandpile with targeted triggering, EPL ( Europhysics Letters ) 135 , 19003, DOI:10.1209/0295-5075/135/19003 (2021).  This work is an extension of an idea that came to me during one of the discussions with my principal investigator during my postdoc work. Prof. Dr. Holger Kantz, himself an early researcher on discrete models of self-organized criticality (SOC), noted that the sandpile model, while exhibiting SOC, in fundamentally different from earthquakes, which are perhaps the most famous large-scale examples of SOC. Whereas earthquakes dissipate energy is bursts of correlated activity, the sandpile generates single-shot avalanches. When energy is depleted in a sandpile grid, it has to wait again before a new significant event can be generated.  Because of this, for t...

. Our new publication [ 1 ] just got accepted recently. The paper deals with the statistical distributions of the measures of spatial spreading of roads and building over the urban zone. I am very happy for my team, composed of Camille, Ardie, and Michelle, for this has been the culmination of year of their undergrad work. 😊 In this post, I would like to go back to the series of decisions that led me to do work on urban zones. I will also discuss some insights about our primary data set, which is the capital region of our country.  A view from the east of the Metro Manila region. Working on something new. In 2014, after my postdoc, I rejoined my former university and started my research group on complex systems. Back then, my main concern was in the discrete models of complex behavior, with particular application to natural hazards, which are large-scale nonlinear events in nature.  Going back to the Philippines, where studies on complex systems was (and still is) a relative...