I've created a website for tomorrow's presentation (part of my Tufte-inspired "renounce powerpoint" efforts).
Once the paper is a little more polished (the ending is still pretty rough), I'll post it on that site.
And now to sleep. Wakeup call in six hours. Room service breakfast (it's free!) in seven hours. Blog panels begin in eight hours.
(And yes, I have a copy of the presentation running on my local web server. I'm making no assumptions about conference connectivity.)
Liz, power laws aren't 'technological determinism', they are empirical results.
Eppur si muove, as the man said.
yeah, you're right.
should have been clearer there; it wasn't the power laws themselves i was referring to, it was the implication of inevitability that surrounds most discussion of them that i think falls into the deterministic camp.
that, and the sense that describing the "empirical results" is equivalent to understanding the motivations for behavior.
see alex's discussion of this, as well.
Liz
It's just to say: success in your presentation. I'll follow your website.
Regards.
Suzana
I see power laws as promising, as the truncated distributions in classic publishing lock out too many voices.
Power law distributions imply power law disruptions too - changes of arbitrary size are possible.