User talk:WebDrake

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Welcome!

Hello, WebDrake, and welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions. I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Here are a few good links for newcomers:

I hope you enjoy editing here and being a Wikipedian! Please sign your name on talk pages using four tildes (~~~~); this will automatically produce your name and the date. If you need help, check out Wikipedia:Where to ask a question, ask me on my talk page, or place {{helpme}} on your talk page and someone will show up shortly to answer your questions. Again, welcome! , SqueakBox 20:25, 3 October 2005 (UTC)

Hello SqueakBox! Thanks very much for the welcome & the links. I'm looking forward to much fun contributing to this community. Best wishes, WebDrake 17:11, 6 October 2005 (UTC)

Contents

[edit] Next steps

Hello again WebDrake :-) You wrote on Talk:Self-organized criticality:

The next few things I want to do are to write up a couple of models as examples of SOC dynamics (I think BTW sandpile and Bak-Sneppen evolution model are good choices). I'd also like to have a hack at the self-organization and power law articles, but I'd like to chat a bit more with the existing writers on that since I think any major changes there would be more likely to cause a ruckus — self-organization, at least, is much more disputed and less well-defined than SOC. I guess you know the people who have worked on that stuff somewhat, so do you reckon you could bounce them into some discussion? (Get them to look over this article too.:-) Best, — WebDrake 16:01, 12 October 2005 (UTC)

Some examples of SOC would be excellent. Since the article is getting quite long, you might like to consider putting them in separate new articles with suitably specific titles, and forward and back links.

As far as power law is concerned, I don't think you need worry too much. It's a fairly straightforward article with only about 60 edits. I think you should go ahead and rewrite it, just taking care to incorporate all the existing material in some form, or else putting a copy of anything you remove completely from the article itself onto Talk:Power law with a brief explanation. (In this connection you might like to have a look at a question I asked about experience curve effects, although I'm not really convinced there is any hard numerical "law" in that case.)

For self-organization I think your caution is very sensible. It's a complex :-) article with many editors and edits. A total rewrite without preparation might not be taken well in all quarters. On the other hand, I'm not actually as well known around there myself as you assume :-) But I'll have a go at laying some groundwork in the next day or two!

Regards -- JimR 17:47, 14 October 2005 (UTC)

Hi Jim — nice to hear from you! Thanks for the interest and advice. Re SOC models, I think a section on "Examples of SOC dynamics" would be good, with links to subpages on, say, BTW sandpile, forest-fire models, Bak-Sneppen, Olami-Feder-Christensen and maybe one or two others. I'd also like to do a page on the Oslo ricepile experiment.
On power laws, I'll be meeting up with a few scientific colleagues in the latter half of November and I'll have a good chat with them about how to revise that article. Ditto self-organization.
Alas in general I'm not going to do much writing in the next couple of weeks because I have a thesis to get finished... But I'll try to drop in some words when I can. ;-)
All the best, — Joe aka WebDrake 01:10, 15 October 2005 (UTC)

Hi Joe. The example stubs are a very nice start. I've cross-linked co-evolution and Bak-Sneppen model. I've also drawn attention to your work on Talk:Self-organization as foreshadowed. Good luck with the thesis! -- JimR 06:42, 16 October 2005 (UTC)

Great! Thanks so much. I shall be pretty quiet for the next couple of weeks but I'll look forward to much further fun discussion and writing. :-) — WebDrake 08:07, 17 October 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Self-organized criticality

You wrote:

Hi Karol,
Thanks for your contributions to self-organized criticality: it was a good idea to add it to the Fractals and Dynamical systems categories.
I decided to restore the Physics category though. I know it's a bit general but I felt it was necessary since it doesn't fit well into one sole field of physics (it has origins in both statistical and condensed matter physics, plus relevance to other fields such as solar/plasma physics, etc.).
I like your homepage here! Great to see someone whose interests are so wide.
Best wishes, — Joe aka WebDrake 13:52, 17 October 2005 (UTC)
Hi. First let me say - nice to see such an open-minded editor. Although SOC is in fact a broad subject and can be applied in many fields, I think placing it in Category:Physics is a mistake. By definition, Category:Physics should contain pages about physics and pages defining its subcategories (such as Category:Mechanics. Since SOC is a topic in physics, but not about physics, it does not belong there. Also, it is already in Category:Dynamical systems, which is a sub-sub-category of Category:Physics and therefore redundant. All in all, I wouldn't protest, but we just finished depopulating the Physics category 2 months ago. There are alot of topics like SOC that could well stay there, but if they did we would have > 200 pages in the category again (which is not a nice thing). Karol 15:54, 17 October 2005 (UTC) P.S. WP:CG is a nice reference.
OK, I did wonder if it might be an issue like that — so let's see if we can be more precise with the categories. Dynamical systems is not actually listed as a sub-category of physics, although I think it should be. In any case I'd like to have some sort of direct reference to physics in one of the categories. I think a nice compromise might be to put it in both Category:Statistical Physics and Category:Dynamical Systems. Sounds good? — WebDrake 17:19, 17 October 2005 (UTC)

You wrote:

Further to your comments on my talk page, I agree that SOC is not appropriate to belong to Category:Physics. I've therefore revised it so the article now belongs to: category:applied and interdisciplinary physics; category:dynamical systems; category:statistical mechanics; category:fractals; and category:interdisciplinary fields. That seems like a nice summary. :-)

One other thing that might be interesting to you: in checking out appropriate categories, I noted a discrepancy between the spelling of the article Non-equilibrium thermodynamics and the associated category, which lacked the hyphen. So I did a host of minor updates and the upshot is that the system is now using Category:Non-equilibrium thermodynamics, bringing the spellings into line. I left the former category as a redirect page, but it should probably be deleted.

Best wishes, — WebDrake 18:44, 17 October 2005 (UTC)

As to Category:Dynamical systems, it is a subcategory of Category:Mechanics, which is a subcategory of Category:Physics, making for a "second order" redundancy.
Good call on the categories. Actually, I found that there is no Category:Self-organization, which (I think) would be the perfect place to put SOC. I created the cat and put the SOC examples you made in it. And yes, these categories and articles will need more work in the future.
Cheers. Karol 19:34, 17 October 2005 (UTC)
P.S. I think we should continue this discussion on Talk:Self-organized_criticality. Karol 07:55, 18 October 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Power law sections

Hi Joe. The additional material in Power law is good. But sorry I think you may be misinterpreting WP:CITE. Doesn't WP:CITE#Further reading/external links support my contention that (a) works which are not cited as sources (which I think means in footnotes) should be in a Further reading section; and (b) Further reading and/or External links goes after References? -- JimR 06:25, 22 July 2006 (UTC)

Thanks for the reply, Joe. I've now renamed "References" to "Further reading" and moved it to above "External links". This seems to fit the guidelines for the moment. As you add more notes or sources, you can of course readjust as appropriate. -- JimR 11:24, 22 July 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Benoît's accent

Oh well, the article about Benoît Mandelbrot has the accent in its title; so I was guided by that. Kelisi 16:11, 5 August 2006 (UTC)

[edit] John Metcalf (composer)

Booyabazooka, why did you edit the link on this page? I gave the exact title of the website linked to, why change it?

I'm happy that you took a look at the page so soon after its creation, but I don't understand your reasoning. —WebDrake 19:36, 9 August 2006 (UTC)

It was just a trivial edit... I removed that bit of text because it doesn't really help describe the link. In a citation, if that site were being used as a reference, I would probably want to include its full title; but as an external link, I'd rather see text that helps indicate what the link contains. ~ Booya Bazooka 22:03, 9 August 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Power Laws and Universality

Hi WebDrake,

(Just to warn you, this ended up being a lot longer than I'd originally thought - I hope this all makes sense. My general desire is to not import what I see as some confusion in the scientific literature on power laws in "complex systems" to the wikipedia article.)

I think that the section on universality needs to make a couple of things explicit. In some systems in physics, e.g., spin glasses, the universality of power-law behavior rests on firm empirical and theoretical grounds. For other systems, such as complex networks or various sociophysics applications, claims of universality seem to be mere speculation. It seems to me that a lot of statistical physicists who work in these areas have imported the familiar (to them) idea of universality, but are applying it in a way that may not be congruent with its original meaning. For instance, in statistical physics, critical exponents describe the functional behavior of a variable, while in these "complex systems", the exponent of a power law describes the probabilistic behavior of the variable. Even if we accept that the idea of universality is applicable to probability distributions, significant problems remain.

For instance, universality requires the coincidence of the scaling exponents. But, in most of these "complex systems", the estimates of the scaling exponent's value are extremely coarse (this is at least partially due to the MLEs not being widely used). People often claim universality after seeing a power law with an exponent in the range 2 < α < 3, rather than by precisely matching exponents as was done for the more traditonal physics systems. Also, 2 < α < 3 is a huge range over which to claim a precise matching, and it's expecting a lot to assume that, as the fitting methods improve, the values will continue to match in a precise way among these disparate systems. And, there are a large number of stochastic mechanisms that all produce power law distributions with exponents in exactly the observed range, so there doesn't seem to be any reason that we should a priori expect any universality class, in the traditional sense, to apply to these probabilistic systems (more on this in a moment). One of the silliest claims of universality in a "complex system" is in the "scale-free networks" literature, concerning the structure of the Internet. Walter Willinger, David Alderson and their colleagues have criticized this claim extensively in a series of careful articles, such as this one.

Finally, there are no validated theories that describe why we should expect to see power laws with certain exponents in these "complex systems". There are lots of interesting ideas, but researchers rarely do the necessary work to validate their models. Without such validation, it seems hazardous to try to generalize two systems into a universality class. Rather, similar behavior could just be a coincidence - perhaps two different mechanisms just happen to produce power law distributions with the similar exponents, but, for other reason, there is no way to put them in the same class of systems. (Or, similar behavior could be a data artifact.) Renormalization provided this deeper connection for many traditional systems, but there is not yet such a theory for any "complex systems". (At least, I'm not aware of one...) Michael Mitzenmacher has commented on some of these issues in a recent editorical for Internet Mathematics (available from his publications page). The problem is basically that people have been getting ahead of themselves (and what their data supports) in pushing into these new "complex systems" areas. I'm pretty sure that all of these issues will get sorted out eventually, but since there's already a lot of confusion in the "complex systems" scientific literature, I think we need to be careful in the wikipedia article not to repeat things as fact that are merely speculation.

Now... I wonder how we can work this perspective into the article.

Paresnah 01:54, 10 September 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Fighting Fantasy

Hi there. Thanks a lot for your contribution to the Moonrunner page - it's one of my favourite books in the series, so I'm glad that it has the high-quality desciption that it deserves. The format that you describe for the book entries seems very close to the existing format, certainly for all the entries that I've written - I must confess to not having checked every entry recently. If there are any that aren't laid out in this format, please feel free to sort them out. Euchrid 15:47, 16 September 2006 (UTC)

I wrote the first article about a single FF book, so I guess that you could say that it is my invention, though I hadn't thought of it in those terms. I'm just glad to see some action on the FF articles again! Euchrid 06:25, 17 September 2006 (UTC)
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