For most Norwegians, the best income distribution curve is a perfectly flat one.
Previously, employees were reviewed twice a year on a five-point scale, plotted on a distribution curve, which determined workers' bonuses.
By tranching your capital into a deal over time, as risk is discharged, you can assess where on the distribution curve a deal is tracking.
FORBES: Gravity, Biotech Returns, and Why The Median Matters
Informed by these historic curves, we can then ask ourselves the key question at the heart of venture capital going forward: how do we bend this distribution curve?
FORBES: Data Insight: Venture Capital returns and loss rates
My point is that the blogosphere expands the distribution curve.
The company also got rid of the distribution curve and individual performance bonuses, instead giving everyone an 8% salary bump, as well as group performance bonuses and stock options.
Imagine a society that has a bell-shaped income distribution curve with a broad middle class, a smaller number of rich and poor, and an even smaller number of super rich and super poor.
Although people in every population come in all shapes and sizes, body types and physiological characteristics follow a Gaussian distribution curve as a result of evolutionary adaptations by our ancestors to extremely varied environmental challenges.
FORBES: The DNA Olympics -- Jamaicans Win Sprinting 'Genetic Lottery' -- and Why We Should All Care
This non-linear tendency is why complex systems are more likely to follow a power-law probability distribution than the more familiar bell-curve distribution.
In a bell-curve distribution of probabilities, the range of possible events are clumped together around the average.
Noted mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss gave us the normal distribution or bell curve.
FORBES: Wise Up: 'Normal' Market Behavior Is Not Normal But Crazy Is
As for talent, it follows a bell-curve distribution, as in every other age, but today it follows stock options, too.
In other words, if we cured all diseases and prevented all accidents, people would still die (of old age) in a narrow bell curve distribution centered on 85.
To see what was going on, Dr Hansen superimposed the actual curves for each decade from the fifties to the noughties on a normal distribution, which acted as a reference curve.
It used to be that Wall Street was functioning on the basic idea that financial events were subject to something very like a normal distribution, also known as a bell curve.
FORBES: Christmas, Kurtosis, Fat Tails, Black Swans And Risk Management, Pt. 2
Could the wider distribution of the latest iPhone have thrown a curve ball at HTC?
"With the increasing popularity of smartphones in China, we are delighted to offer the BlackBerry Curve 8910 smartphone through our retail distribution network in China, " said Guo Wei, Chairman and CEO, Digital China.
ENGADGET: Research In Motion enters Chinese retail channel with BlackBerry 8910 Curve
In the 1890s, when he was a doctoral student, Swiss economist Pareto found that the distribution of wealth and income in France deviated from the bell curve in a unique way.
FORBES: Wise Up: 'Normal' Market Behavior Is Not Normal But Crazy Is
"We are very pleased to launch the BlackBerry Curve 8910 smartphone with Digital China across their nationwide retail distribution network, " said Gregory Shea, Managing Director, China at Research In Motion.
ENGADGET: Research In Motion enters Chinese retail channel with BlackBerry 8910 Curve
应用推荐