At 07.54 -0700 01-08-08, Bill Barowy scrobe:
>Clearly, these top six
>players are not posting enough, and it is great that Diane is working on
>making up the difference. But can she really? Can Mike and Paul possibly
>post what they must to conform to the pattern of zipf's law that the
>remainder
>of people posting to xmca form?
At 22.26 -0600 01-08-08, Diane Hodges scrobe:
>- hey! can i make it to 1000 by september? ya think?
Well, no, I think not. Perhaps if you try the auto-reply method, you might
get to be the Countess of the Year... but it's taken Mike three and a half
years to accumulate close to one thousand postings (984 to be more xact -
which means that one message out of ten has been from him - but that
includes all kinds of messaging acts: list administration as well as
questions, answers, greetings and discussion). No, I don't think you'll be
able to beat that, Diane.
And besides, IF you should make it to a thousand this year, you would just
have moved into another slot in the rank order, unless the other frequent
contributors also speed up production. It has a certain social interest to
look at who contributes how many postings - but on the other hand the
PATTERN of how postings are distributed over contributors is a lot more
stable than the social composition.
Looking at the mailstream stats in combination with our sense of how
relatively much or little of our waking time we put into the xmca I think
it's pretty clear that the projected figures that Bill posted are not only
impossible for the most frequent contributors to reach (number one would
have to produce as much as the whole list does in a year), they would also
be quite impossible for other participants to keep up with. Well, that is
just to say the same thing that Bill says, in other words: the xmca
mailstream could only follow Zipf's law IF messages were completely
unrelated. So if we would like to follow the Law (the Zipf, that is) - we
could perhaps manage it if nobody ever read the postings but we just kept
emitting these packets of text according to some auto-mechanism. The human
question to that is: why on EARTH would we want to do THAT??
Could Bill, or anybody else with some understanding of the kind of systems
that DO follow Zipf's law give me an example of how this sort of
distribution pattern would arise? (I have managed to confuse myself enough
for today ;-)
Eva
actual "ideal"
_______________________
A. 229 3629
B. 149 1039
C. 135 500
D. 129 297
E. 104 199
F. 103 143
G. 97
H. 55
I. 52
J. 44
K. 39
L. 36
M. 33
N. 33
O. 31
P. 28
Q. 21
R. 19
S. 19
T. 17
U. 17
V. 17
W. 16
X. 16
Y. 15
Z. 15
AA. 13
BB. 11
CC. 11
DD. 10
EE. 10
FF. 7
GG. 7
HH. 7
II. 6
JJ. 6
KK. 6
LL. 6
MM. 5
NN. 4
OO. 4
PP. 4
QQ. 4
RR. 4
SS. 4
TT. 3
UU. 3
VV. 3
WW. 3
XX. 3
YY. 3
ZZ. 3
AAA. 3
BBB. 2
CCC. 2
DDD. 2
EEE. 2
FFF. 2
GGG. 2
HHH. 2
III. 2
JJJ. 2
KKK. 2
LLL. 2
MMM. 2
NNN. 2
OOO. 2
PPP. 1
QQQ. 1
RRR. 1
SSS. 1
TTT. 1
UUU. 1
VVV. 1
WWW. 1
XXX. 1
YYY. 1
ZZZ. 1
AAAA. 1
BBBB. 1
CCCC. 1
DDDD. 1
EEEE. 1
FFFF. 1
GGGG. 1
HHHH. 1
IIII. 1
JJJJ. 1
KKKK. 1
LLLL. 1
MMMM. 1
NNNN. 1
OOOO. 1
PPPP. 1
QQQQ. 1
RRRR. 1
SSSS. 1
TTTT. 1
UUUU. 1
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Mon Oct 01 2001 - 01:02:06 PDT