power-law

Discovery CEO Adrian Gore said it is important for leaders to realise human activities follow a Pareto distribution. Sports performance is a perfect example.

Social scientists cling to simple models of reality – with disastrous results. Instead they must embrace chaos theory

In statistics, a power law is a functional relationship between two quantities, where a relative change in one quantity results in a relative change in the other quantity proportional to a power of the change, independent of the initial size of those quantities: one quantity varies as a power of another. For instance, considering the area of a square in terms of the length of its side, if the length is doubled, the area is multiplied by a factor of four. The rate of change exhibited in these relationships is said to be multiplicative.

Ubiquity tells the story of how dynamic complex systems sit on the edge of instability which can lead to unpredictable catastrophic outcomes.

http://www.ted.com By pulling raw data from the news and plotting it onto a graph, Sean Gourley and his team have come up with a stunning conclusion about the nature of modern war -- and perhaps a model for resolving conflicts. TEDTalks is a daily video podcast of the best talks and performances from the TED Conference, where the world's leading thinkers and doers give the talk of their lives in 18 minutes. TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design, and TEDTalks cover these topics as well as science, business, development and the arts. Watch the Top 10 TEDTalks on TED.com, at http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/top10 Follow us on Twitter http://www.twitter.com/tednews Checkout our Facebook page for TED exclusives https://www.facebook.com/TED

A new study of wars over 600 years shows conflict following a universal mathematical law, suggesting that the current period of relative peace could be more fragile than many have thought.

Economic stability is destabilizing and the seeds of economic calamity are sown during good times. Generally knowing where we are in the market cycle is an essential mental model that can promote better investment behavior.

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Economists who yearn for the redistribution of wealth in an ideal society are up against history. According to a recent study, the uneven distribution of wealth in a society appears to be a universal ...

Power laws -- a mathematical distribution, usually depicted as a curve, that depicts a low number of large extreme events (on the left) tailing off to a large number of mild events (on the right) -- are good at describing...

A remarkable phenomenon in probability theory is that of universality – that many seemingly unrelated probability distributions, which ostensibly involve large numbers of unknown parameters, …

A random number is a number chosen as if by chance from some specified distribution such that selection of a large set of these numbers reproduces the underlying distribution. Almost always, such numbers are also required to be independent, so that there are no correlations between successive numbers. Computer-generated random numbers are sometimes called pseudorandom numbers, while the term "random" is reserved for the output of unpredictable physical processes. When used without...

We’re shifting from a Gaussian world to a Paretian world, with profound implications for business. Johann Gauss was a famous mathematician in the 18th century and Vilfredo Pareto was a great economist who lived across the cusp of the 19th...

2019 UPDATE: Since this post came out, I co-authored a book about it called Super Thinking: The Big Book of Mental Models. You can get…

A new study challenges one of the most celebrated and controversial ideas in network science.

A System Collapse Framework for Societies | 1913 Intel. The Snow Avalanche Image During the good times the snow falls and slowly builds up. Without anyone noticing, the snow reaches a pre-collapse …

It all boils down to the power law, also known as the 80:20 rule.

In today's increasingly complex, interdependent world, leaders must change their view of interpreting the real world phenomena with normal distribution to power law distribution. Chart out the daily, weekly or monthly uptake curve to identify and feed early winners to catalyze radical innovation.

Since 1945, there have been relatively few large interstate wars, especially compared to the preceding 30 years, which included both World Wars. This pattern, sometimes called the long peace, is highly controversial. Does it represent an enduring trend caused by a genuine change in the underlying conflict-generating processes? Or is it consistent with a highly variable but otherwise stable system of conflict? Using the empirical distributions of interstate war sizes and onset times from 1823 to 2003, we parameterize stationary models of conflict generation that can distinguish trends from s...

Although the war in Syria is in its eighth year, statisticians have established that the world is becoming increasingly peaceful.

Giant earthquakes and extreme wealth may not appear to have much in common, but the frequency with which the "Big One" will hit San Francisco and how often someone will earn as much money as Bill Gates ...

Change happens quickly and, often, unpredictably. And as we will see, the unpredictable part is actually a mathematical principle.

If a tree falls in the forest and nobody is there to hear it, does it make a sound? Niall Ferguson, the celebrated British historian now at Stanford’s Hoover Institution has spouted his own version of that age-old riddle.

The music industry can tell us a lot about our winner-take-all economy.