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On Mon, Nov 4, 2013 at 5:06 AM, Terence Love <[log in to unmask]> wrote: > The contribution of the Power Law Indicator hypothesis is to repurpose the > above knowledge into a design tool to help identify efficiently and with > low cost which classes of design solutions are likely to be most effective. > Terry I don't want to turn this discussion into the usual, long arduous PhD design debates, so I will limit myself to one response (and then shut up). Your goal is laudatory. But I don't see the evidence. My best information is that power-law distributions come from certain statistical properties of the elements involved. For example, in psychological measurements, if equal ratios lead to equal psychological judgements, then there is a power law at play. (In sound, where I is the intensity of the physical waveform for some signal and L(I) is the psychological assessment of its loudness, if: L(10*I)/L(I) = 2, independent of the value of I That is, if a sound ten times as intense as another always seems twice as loud this leads to a power law of loudness: L = I^n (where n = 0.3: Loudness increases as the cube root of Intensity.) I see no interactions here. -- To prove your hypothesis I either need a lot of empirical data showing that Power Law phenomena involving human social groups only occur If and Only If (IFF) there is social interaction among the people/groups. (Or the weak form, .. *tends* to occur where there is social interaction and *tends not *to occur otherwise). or A nice mathematical formulation of why this would be the case. ---- It would be really nice if your hypothesis were true, for all the reasons you mention. So I am not arguing that it is false: I am saying that you have not made the case. Yet. Enough Don -- Don Norman Nielsen Norman Group, IDEO Fellow [log in to unmask] www.jnd.org http://www.core77.com/blog/columns/ Book: "Design of Everyday Things: Revised and Expanded<http://amzn.to/ZOMyys>" (DOET2). Course: Udacity On-Line course based on DOET2<https://www.udacity.com/course/design101> (free). Real Soon Now. ----------------------------------------------------------------- PhD-Design mailing list <[log in to unmask]> Discussion of PhD studies and related research in Design Subscribe or Unsubscribe at https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/phd-design -----------------------------------------------------------------