Terry
Sorry, but your observations about power laws makes no sense to me. Power
laws are ubiquitous in many domains. Nobody quite knows why, but these
domains include things where human interactions simply are irrelevant.
Love's Power Law Indicator Hypothesis for Social Systems:
> When human behaviour data exhibits the features of Power Law
> relationships, this indicates the behaviour is shaped by human interactions.
(I once heard a violent argument between Herb Simon and Benoît Mandelbrot
over the derivation of Zipf's law, one of those pervasive power functions.
Neither argument had social implications -- it was pure mathematics.)
All sorts of weird things follow Zipf's law, including the length of words,
the sizes of cities. Loudness of a sound and brightness of a light follow
power laws, as do all psychological measurements of sensory phenomena that
derive from an additive physical stimulation. (Hue, location, and pitch are
substitutive dimensions, not additive ones, and they do not follow power
laws).
"Phase transitions in thermodynamic systems are associated with the
emergence of power-law distributions" ... "The ubiquity of power-law
relations in physics is partly due to dimensional constraints, while in
complex systems, power laws are often thought to be signatures of hierarchy
or of specific stochastic processes. A few notable examples of power laws
are the Gutenberg–Richter law for earthquake sizes, Pareto's law of income
distribution, structural self-similarity of fractals, and scaling laws in
biological systems. Research on the origins of power-law relations, and
efforts to observe and validate them in the real world, is an active topic
of research in many fields of science, including physics, computer science,
linguistics, geophysics, neuroscience, sociology, economics and more."
(from Wikipedia article on "Power Law".)
What leads to power laws? See Wikipedia. For example, in its article oj
Zipf's Law: "Wentian Li has shown that in a document in which each
character has been chosen randomly from a uniform distribution of all
letters (plus a space character), the "words" follow the general trend of
Zipf's law (appearing approximately linear on log-log plot)." Terry: where
is the social interaction in that random selection?
So, nice try Terry, but power laws are far too ubiquituous to he explained
by social facgtors. they appear to be the resut of statistical factors.
(Power law is often confused by those unfamilar with mathematics with
logaritms or with exponentials. (Logarithms are inverse eponetials.)
Let "^n" represent the exponent and let "a" and"b" be constants. An
exponential is y = a^.(Solving for x yields the logarihmic epression: x = a
log y.) A power function is of the form y = x^n. )
Don
========
On Mon, Nov 4, 2013 at 12:14 AM, Terence Love <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> I've hypothesised a simple indicator that can be done by plotting and
> observing the shape of a couple of key behaviour variables. The test is
> whether they follow a power law.
>
...
Love's Power Law Indicator Hypothesis for Social Systems:
When human behaviour data exhibits the features of Power Law relationships,
this indicates the behaviour is shaped by human interactions.
--
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
-----------------------------------------------------------------
|