On Mon, Nov 03, 2003 at 11:30:05AM -0500, David T-G wrote: > % - Firstly, and to your point, given that everyone "knows" that a steep > % learning curve is a hard one, people won't know what you're talking > % about if you refer to a shallow learning curve > > So? "Everyone" "knows" that Outhouse is a mail program, but not many > here (and definitely not I :-) are content to go that route or even let > the assumption stand. Did anybody ever show you a reason to believe Outlook is a bona fide email program? I know, for instance, that DOS and Windows fail miserably in multiple criteria for "Operating System" as defined in the early 70s by Computer Science textbooks. Given Microsoft's track record of calling things with names that overestimate their capabilities, I'd be somewhat hesitant to assume Outlook is an email program just because Microsoft says so. Our definition for a learning curve seems to make at least as much sense as "the original one" (see my related post for more on that), is more compatible with the reality of "steep curve == difficult to climb" which you can't entirely avoid when you start stealing real-world words to describe not-so-abstract Mathematical phenomena. (When you describe abstract phenomena, nobody knows what you're talking about, so it doesn't matter - I'll grant you that much.) > % - Secondly, the reason people talk about a learning curve in the first > % place is because they view it in two other dimensions: progress and > > Not necessarily. Not at all indeed. Not I, for instance. I visualize > the learning curve as the path from "not knowing" (low) to "knowing" > (high), and climbing that height in less time (left to right) is good; > the steeper the better. The curve is an indication of both how much > effort is going in and how capable one is. Even in your own visualization one may smell a rat: climbing your path in less time (left to right) implies traversing an awfully long path (which appears to be painfully steep looking at that graph of yours) in a very short amount of time - sounds like a rock climbing expedition to me :-( If you just give up on this whole "what you get per unit of time" idea and instead plot effort vs. gain, you end up with a familiar "what you give vs. what you get" curve, which even sounds right. Incidentally, there's another common real-world use for the learning curve idea: what you can do vs. how much you had to learn. Notice that the curve resulting from this derivation agrees with the curve immediately above, not with "the original." For times when the original definition makes sense and the common one doesn't (e.g. Web == what most people call web site; Web site == what most people call data center; etc.), by all means use the original (and give footnotes to define words, if necessary - just like you already do when you use technical terms that your audience may not understand). For times when the original definition (if this even was the original definition) makes less sense than the common one, I'd lean towards the common one in the absense of any evidence to the contrary. - Dave -- Uncle Cosmo, why do they call this a word processor? It's simple, Skyler. You've seen what food processors do to food, right? Please visit this link: http://rotter.net/israel
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