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Physicists Find Users Uninterested After 36 Hours
SuperGrads writes "Statistical physicists working in the US and Hungary have found that the number of people reading a particular news story on the web decreases with time by a power law rather than exponentially as was previously thought. The finding has implications for the study of information flow in social networks, marketing and web design."
The "news" in this story is not that people become disinterested in a story, but that the rate at which they become disinterested is quite different from what was expected.
Furthermore, the study was not done by taking people and finding out how quickly they became disinterested in one story or another. A quick glance at the summary informs us that the subject of the study was the number of people reading a news story (more likely downloading the story) at a given time. That this number decreases with time is obvious. However, it was expected that the decrease would follow an exponential curve, whereas the experiment showed a power law curve instead.
SIGSEGV caught, terminating
wait... not that kind of sig.
The difference is whether the independent variable is the base or the exponent. A power function is something like f(x)=x^(.5) whereas an exponential function could be f(x)= (.5)^x.