Empirical analysis on temporal statistics of human correspondence patterns

Recently, extensive empirical evidence shows that the timing of human behaviors obeys non-Possion statistics with heavy-tailed interevent time distribution. In this paper, we empirically study the correspondence pattern of a great Chinese scientist, named Hsue-Shen Tsien. Both the interevent time distribution and response time distributions deviate from the Poisson statistics, showing an approximate power-law decaying. The two power-law exponents are more or less the same (about 2.1), which strongly Support the hypothesis in [A. Vazquez,J.G. Oliveira, Z. Dezsb, K.-I. Goh, I. Kondor, A.-L. Barabasi, Phys. Rev. E 73 (2006) 036127] that the response time distribution of the tasks could in fact drive the interevent time distribution, and both the two distributions should decay with the same exponent. Our result is against the claim in [A. Wzquez, J.G. Oliveira, Z. Dezsb, K.-I. Goh, I. Kondor, A.-L. Barabasi, Phys. Rev. E 73 (2006) 036127], which suggests the human correspondence pattern belongs to a universality class with exponent 1.5. (C) 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.