power law
1
8.2
- noun
- /ˈpaʊər lɔː/
- Specialized
- What we see here in looking at web traffic is an almost perfect power law distribution.
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Watch on YouTubeAnd, and more often than not in this networked age, the, the, they're what we call these Glengarry Glen Ross markets, which is, it's a power law.
- And, and more often than not in this networked age, the, the, they're what we call these Glengarry Glen Ross markets, which is, it's a power law.
- So with the power law, the things we've done on Earth, the model you have says that it's very unlikely, like we're lucky as Sobs.
Examples
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This dashed green line is the power law that fits this.
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Over the last 40 years, power-law behavior has been observed in an amazing array of physical situations.
Academic text (2004) -
In his study, Price built on original models by George Yule and Herbert Simon (n3) to argue that the distribution in the number of citations to individual publications had a power-law form.
Academic text (2006) -
Linear preferential attachment models provide appealing explanations for the power-law distributions of connections observed in many social systems, natural networks, and manmade networks such as the World Wide Web.
Academic text (2006) -
Many natural phenomena, including city sizes and earthquake magnitudes, exhibit a power law relationship.
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Researchers found that the frequency of word usage often follows a power law distribution in language.
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In statistical mechanics, the power law is crucial for understanding the distribution of particle energies.
Synonyms
A rule that how strong something feels grows as a power of its actual strength
A rule that says how our sense of things like sound or light grows when the physical signal gets stronger
Surface Forms
Morphology
The phrase is compositionally suggestive: 'law' = a rule and 'power' can refer to an exponent or multiplicative factor, so a learner could infer it is a rule involving a power. However, the precise technical meaning (a specific scaling relationship where magnitude varies as a constant power of stimulus intensity) requires domain knowledge of exponentiation and scientific usage that a typical B1 learner would not have, so it is only partially predictable.
Etymology
Power law comes from math: power means multiplying a number by itself, as when 3 times 3 equals 9, and law means a simple 'rule'. So a power law is a simple math 'rule' where a few things are very large and many things are much smaller, which is why it describes city sizes and wealth.