*That's a beautiful term of art, "Dragon King." It's likely to catch on where this guy's power-law statistics make any sense, or not.
http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/arxiv/23935/
(...)
"...there's a curious phenomenon associated with power laws that statisticians until now have missed, says Didier Sornette at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology. And this provides an interesting new way to look at extreme events.
"Let's look at what he's claiming. Sornette gives as an example the distribution of city sizes in France, which follows a classic power law, meaning that there are many small cities and only a few large ones. On a log-to-log scale, this distribution gives a straight line–except for Paris, which is an outlier and many times larger than it ought to be if it were to follow the power law.
"Paris is an outlier because it has been hugely influential in the history of France and so has benefited from various positive feedback mechanisms that have ensured its outsize growth. Apparently, London occupies a similarly outlying position in the distribution of cities in the United Kingdom.
"Sornette goes on to identify a number of data sets showing power laws with outliers that he says are the result of positive feedback mechanisms that make them much larger than their peers. He calls these events dragon kings. What's interesting about them is that they are entirely unaccounted for by a current understanding of power laws, from which Nassim Nicholas Taleb built the idea of black swans...."
