This image is lifted from an article at First Monday (A Practical Model for Analyzing Long Tails).
I’d seen this trick of using a sports field to help inform your intuition about power-law curves previously. In that case the distribution of wealth is the topic. These guys talk about the L-curve; shown here (video):
Both of these do a nice job of helping to visualize the actual shape of these curves. They help to clarify why the politics and business models that serve the two legs are very different and why the appeals that emphasis middle class values are should be treated with some suspicion. The more typical illustration, shown to the right, is preferable if you want to deemphasis the polarization and highlight the uniformity of the underlying generative processes.
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Long Tail Field
Sometimes it takes a good visualization to bring out relevant comparisons.
[...] Here’s an example that’s actually a bit different. The start up costs of this system were paid to identify one largely powerless population, i.e. prisoners, but it’s moving not toward a more powerful one; but toward a less powerful one, i.e. cattle. Virtual Fencing for cattle. It’s an obvious idea of course. Each animal wears a collar and with the help of GPS tracking they are taught to remain within the bounds of the virtual fence, and then you can move the fence around to manage your pastures. (Great, we are back to the turf maintenance and ground-cover problem again.) [...]
[...] Here’s an example that’s actually a bit different. The start up costs of this system were paid to identify one largely powerless population, i.e. prisoners, but it’s moving not toward a more powerful one; but toward a less powerful one, i.e. cattle. Virtual Fencing for cattle. It’s an obvious idea of course. Each animal wears a collar and with the help of GPS tracking they are taught to remain within the bounds of the virtual fence, and then you can move the fence around to manage your pastures. (Great, we are back to the turf maintenance and ground-cover problem again.) [...]
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