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Editor Login
Convener in chief:
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Nathan Eagle
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Recent Comments
- Re: How can Scaling Laws become Actionable?
By: Patrick Meier
Date: Feb 8, 2007 10:39 AM
Notification
« Digital Life and Design Conference 2007 | Main | Government Social Software - SNS in Japan Part III: Some observations »
19 January 2007
How can Scaling Laws become Actionable?
It is becoming increasingly difficult to get excited about yet another discovery of a universal scaling law...
I can see the appeal of 'pure' science to expand the boundaries of human knowledge; however, an equally noble goal is to tackle real problems facing humanity. While discovering that systems can be described as straight lines in log-log plots will always have it's place in the literature, there seems to be a scarcity of papers that actually apply these insights to real problems.
As an engineer, I'd like to understand if scaling laws can help better inform the design of systems. Are there any case studies where discoveries such as power-law scaling in nature have been acted upon in a way that has actually helped people? (Perhaps the hub models to understand disease dissemination may qualify?)
Posted by Nathan Eagle at January 19, 2007 2:08 AM
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Comments
Hi Nathan,
I've been grappling with the same questions on the practical application of power laws. I recently co-authored a piece on this and include the abstract below. Would be more than happy to share the full paper with you. Since presenting the paper at ISA, I have what may be a promising lead which I am exploring in another co-authored paper.
Best,
Patrick
“Natural Disasters, Casualties and Power Laws:
A Comparative Analysis with Armed Conflict”
Abstract
Power-law relationships, relating events with magnitudes to their frequency, are common in natural disasters and violent conflict. Compared to many statistical distributions, power laws drop off more gradually, i.e. they have “fat tails”. Existing studies on natural disaster power laws are mostly confined to physical measurements, e.g., the Richter scale, and seldom cover casualty distributions. Drawing on the Center for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters (CRED) International Disaster Database, 1980 to 2005, we find strong evidence for power laws in casualty distributions for all disasters combined, both globally and by continent except for North America and non-EU Europe. This finding is timely and gives useful guidance for disaster preparedness and response since natural catastrophes are increasing in frequency and affecting larger numbers of people. We also find that the slopes of the disaster casualty power laws are much smaller than those for modern wars and terrorism, raising an open question of how to explain the differences. We show that many standard risk quantification methods fail in the case of natural disasters.
Posted by: Patrick Meier at February 8, 2007 10:39 AM