Spirling cited in Nature, underlying pattern of human conflict found 

 A  recent paper in Nature  documents power-law patterns (i.e. scale invariance) in the distribution of events within insurgencies: The number of casualties per insurgent event, and the number of insurgent events per day, apparently follow striking regularities across an array of insurgencies. Power laws everywhere! 

 What makes the paper especially notable around IQSS is that our own Arthur Spirling is cited in the first sentence: 
 The political scientist Spirling and others have correctly warned that finding common statistical distributions (for example, power laws) in sociological data is not the same as understanding their origin.
 
 The citation is to Arthur's unpublished paper  The Next Big Thing: Scale Invariance in Political Science , which provides a breezy overview of scale invariance as a concept and documents a few previously unremarked examples from political science.  

 Part of the point of Arthur's paper is that political science (and social science more broadly) has mostly ignored research in natural sciences that, like the Nature article, examines emergent patterns in social phenomena. As he points out, it's not how we "do business." The hard scientists chasing power laws attempt to explain an underlying random process starting from the distribution of outcomes; we're more accustomed to starting from the joint density of outcomes and covariates.  

 In a way, the fact that Arthur's paper was cited at all highlights the lack of interest in this style of work in social science. The authors of the Nature piece wanted to cite social science work on power laws, and they ended up with Arthur's piece, which is, for all its merits, several years old and unpublished.  

 I admit I've been a bit of a power-law curmudgeon, like other social scientists, but lately I've come to better understand the value of this approach. I don't expect that I'll be focusing on this kind of work myself, but, like Arthur, I believe it is a growth industry.