The first reading for this week was called the 80/20 rule. This immediately made me think of an article I read on Miranda Kerr, which said she ate according to this rule. Meaning she was healthy 80% of the time and unhealthy 20% of the time. This seemed easy enough, until I read her “unhealthy” treat was a few cubes of dark chocolate. That wasn’t going to work out.
I was definitely surprised to see how many things could relate back to this rule, even the research that showed that 80% of links on web pages only link to 15% of pages on the web. It’s crazy to think how much there actually is on the Internet that most of us won’t ever know about.
The discussions surrounding bell curves got me thinking back to year 12 maths and as I’ve probably said previously, that wasn’t a fun time. I also have to admit that I’m still a little confused about Power Law and what it all means but from the diagram included (always helpful) this is what I gathered.
Bell curves are loved by nature. They usually contain nodes that have similar number of links and none of them are highly connected. Power Law usually indicates chaos. It contains many nodes with not many links. There are also few ‘hubs’.
So I’ll check out the second reading and let you know if I get a better understanding.
– Caitlin
Ps. I am reading and writing this on a plane at 8:30 at night so bear with me.
