so this week’s reading, “the 80/20 rule” is pretty heavy. i mean, it started off all well and good, tlaking about networks and links and nodes and hubs. but then it turned sciencey. and when i say sciencey, i mean physics. and i hate physics. and this is coming from a science student (well, i used to be, believe it or not, in high school i did chemistry, biology and psychology) but i could not stand physics.

now, the problem i found with this reading is that we were never given a really clearly defined definition of what this incredible “power law” was. i mean, it seemed like Barabási started trying to explain it then got carried away in his own thoughts and never got around to finishing that explanation. and that left me very lost for the rest of the article because a substantial amount of the content was about power laws and atoms and freezing water. and i’m not really sure what any of that had to do with the network. so instead i’ll discuss the actually interesting “80/20” rule.

the 80/20 is kind of like the opposite of the bell curve, where very few of whatever it is that your measuring have a large amount of whatever the other thing that you’re measuring is. well, that was a terrible explanation. sorry. i guess an example would help. ok. so the 80/20 rule is saying, as per an example from the reading, that 80% of the world’s money is earned by only 20% of the population. so, in slightly simpler terms, a very small part of the population earn a very large amount and vice versa (a very large part of the population earn very little money).

so, how does this work in relation to networks? well, i guess the whole point is like links on the internet. just a few of the vast number of pages or “nodes” have a lot of links connecting to them and the majority of pages will just have one or two connections. in that way, im kinda picturing google as like the king of the internet. one huge page with a million links going out, but each of the pages that google will link to will only have one, maybe two other links out. so google is what connects them all and creates the network, without which it would just be a bunch of pages that no one sees because nothing is connected.

like that nice little picture, which is a very simplified version, you can see that one person is linked to a lot of people while most of those are only linked to one or two. so that one guy would be the 20 and everyone else the 80 (not in exact figures obviously) but you can see that the smaller amount of people have more links out than the larger amount of people. and i think that’s the power rule. but, you know, when physics and maths become involved, you never know what’s really going on.