15th
Principles, Laws and Effects…
I always seem to forget the name of the Hawthorne Effect — which describes how you can’t measure/monitor a subject of a study if he/she/they know you’re watching them. The name comes from the Hawthorne Works factory where workers were monitored to see if their productivity improved when various factors were changed. The lighting in the factory was made brighter, and productivity increased. The lights were made dimmer, and the productivity also increased. Basically, anything that changed increased productivity because the workers knew they were being watched — and not because of the changes in lighting or working conditions.
Another neat principle is Zipf’s Law. It’s a subset of the empirical power laws that seem to occur all the time when plotting the rank and frequency of various collections of items. Zipf’s Law refers specifically to the frequency of word usage, where the frquency of word usage is inversely related to its rank.
