Wired: Bell Curve to Well Curve
April 18, 2003 - 8:05pm — bmann
The Wired article talks about how the bell curve is turning into a well curve. Via Boing Boing, which did a lovely job of summarizing what this new well curve means:
an inverted bell-curve that's showing up in more and more contexts: students are either doing very poorly or very well on their standardized tests; companies are either very small or very large; Americans are either very poor or very wealthy.
I guess this means that the term "surfing the bell curve" is destined to become "stuck in the well". It's definitely something I've been feeling out here in BC.
I've tried to analyse this strange feeling that's come over me. In Ottawa, I seem to feel "cool stuff happening". In Vancouver/the parts of BC I've been on this trip, it's different. The tech sector here is non-existent, pretty much, except for some wireless stuff. It could also be because I've been away for over 3 years, the feeling of not being plugged in to what's happening.
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Comments
In some places...
you can get arrested for blogging.
Hope that never happens in Canada.
The Sears Example
Isn't about large and small companies... it's about somewhere that has middle of the road prices... in comparison to Walmart (cheap) and boutiques which are expensive.
Having lived in different places... doing different work...
I know this mix of feelings well, a displacement, an asynchronism, a relativism, a schizoid tinge of regret, a hint of nostalgia.
It's like living different lives which don't intersect, or only minimally. My Calgary - Ottawa - Montreal - Toronto for example: each vivid and true yet each having little to do with the others, except that I'm part of them all.
That's kind of it I've realized: I have the constants in this set of equations, so I am the key to solutions.
You have Kate along with you, you share solutions.
When I read that article in the magazine....
I thought it was so bogus, cuz these graphs are mathematically similar and the difference is human interpretation of data, a "readerly" view, a half-empty vs half-full non-sequitur, a sleight of mind.
Then I looked up the author, a former political speechwriter, a wordsmith and a spinner. Oh-oh.
But then I thought: perception is everything isn't it, and this surfacing of perspective says more about these times than a long-winded sociological elaboration.
Yeah, sign of the times.
For example, he claims Sears is a middle-sized company. Or companies with no employees are springing up everwhere - why do you even count them? This all comes down to definition, and his quick 'n dirty analysis comes up pretty darn short. Personally, Sears is a massive company to me - how many Sears-sized companies are there? They have well over $40 billion in annual revenue, that is what I call large. Walmart may have almost a million employees, but the mathematics of the bell curve include that top 0.5% of corporations when ranking by revenue, population, etc.
Personally, this article came off as meaningless filler with little useful content. He doesn't even provide a graph of this well curve, let alone any solid statistical data. And that's pretty much it - everything he is talking about is statistics.