Ultimate Reflection

I will never blog again. Blogging is just not natural for me. I do not express myself through writing. Some people said that they sometimes found it difficult to write when the prompt didn't inspire them, but at other times the writing flowed naturally. The writing never flowed naturally for me, even when the prompt provoked a strong internal dialogue or an interesting opinion. I literally have to sit at the keyboard and force the words out every time. Maybe I don't think linearly enough, or maybe I'm secretly a babbling lunatic, but I have to jump around the page, writing down multiple ideas at one time. This is after I've picked a topic, after I know what I'm writing about, and after I have some semblance of a plan for what I'm going to write. I'd still rather gouge out my eyes than write a blog post. It feels like trying to walk on my hands blindfolded or being lost in a cornfield with no shoes or eating Raisin Bran with eyeglass screws mixed in. It's uncomfortable, disorienting, and exhausting.

The only time the writing even came close to flowing was during my post about how it feels to be freshman, a post which I am not including in this 'best-of' because I don't know whether or not I agree with the conclusions I drew in it. The beginning of the post was great--telling the story of my first few weeks on campus was almost fun, even though I was writing it; however the point of the post was to describe freshmen's opportunities to interact with upperclassmen, and I don't really think I accomplished that at all. I just can't imagine that my experience freshman year is generalizable enough to comment on all 7000 freshmen's chances to talk to juniors and seniors, especially since I was definitely not seeking those relationships myself at that time.

The first post I am including is this one about zebra mussels. I think this post is pretty indicative of my writing before the course. I wrote in report format: that is the only type of writing I knew. I think I was able to provide a detailed picture of the situation, and I think my writing was competent; however, I don't think that my tone was at all developed. I was writing a report, not a blog post. I was being objective, not subjective. I was telling about a situation, not commenting on it. No matter how well or poorly written the post was, it missed the point of the blogging medium.

The second post I am including is this one about alignment. By this time, I think that I had developed more of a blog-type voice. I was writing more from my point of view rather that as an outsider. I was voicing an opinion, not just fact. I think some of my personality came through, especially at the end. I really am a humorous person, although I wouldn't guess that that has become apparent through my blog or my interactions with others in the class. The one sentence that I wrote all semester that best reflects who I am and my attitudes toward the world in general is the last one of the post: "The pessimist in me wants to return to the rowing analogy: When we pull together, we go places, but we're all still slaves on a Roman Galley." Incidentally, I feel much more qualified to write a 'worst-of' than a 'best-of.'

The third post I am including is this one about thought processes and communication. This post was a long time in coming. I had been struggling with issues regarding communication the whole semester, and they really came to a head when I was writing my book review and receiving feedback about it. I just couldn't seem to communicate what I thought about the book in any sort of manner that allowed others to pick up on it. I don't think my views of the book were not valuable, and I don't think they were any less valid for being mostly negative. At the same time, I just couldn't convey what I thought without sounding as if I'd entirely missed the point of the book. I also tried something new with this post: I brought in an idea that I'd been thinking about outside of class; that is, the mental and physical selves (which Senge talks about too on p151-156! The theme is echoed throughout the section on mental models, though I don't think the terminology arises again) . I tried to write what I knew rather than trying to develop entirely new ideas. I tried to be an expert for a bit instead of always venturing a novice's guesses. Ironically, this post about communication had a rough comments section with some failures of communication present.

The last post I am including is this one about learning. I really liked this post because of the serendipity that allowed me to write it. I had some well-formed ideas about my own learning, but I didn't have any way to make them interesting. I had no story. I had no framework for expressing my ideas. I went to the EWS computer lab after one of my classes to sit down and hash out the blog post, and that was when I inadvertently chose a seat next to someone who was taking some of the classes I took freshman year. It provided me with a perfect 'grab' for the beginning of the post to get the reader's attention. It allowed me to write about more abstract ideas through a concrete example. The situation gave me a grounded topic to write about--something I've struggled with all semester. This was the closest I ever came to actually wanting to post something to my blog because I had a current, relevant situation in my life to write about.

I learned a lot by blogging. I developed a new skill. I am proud of what I've written. I am glad I took the class. I still don't think I will blog again. Writing a post feels like running a mile: it's a huge chore, but I feel like I've improved myself. Even though I do think I will continue running, blogging is simply too painful for me.

shared vision

I don't think I have the proper perspective to comment on shared vision at the University. What is the University's vision? To promote education? To graduate well-educated students? What would it mean for me as an individual student to be compliant with this vision? Would that entail simply being committed (or even compliant) towards being a good student? What would being committed to the University's vision entail? I don't have the answers to these questions.

I do think that I can comment on what it means for an individual student (namely myself) to be committed towards an education.

I like to think that I am a committed student. I try to find value in all my courses beyond boosting my GPA and fulfilling my graduation requirements. That isn't to say that I am not also a compliant student: I study for exams; I learn what is asked of me in the way I'm asked to learn it. I memorize facts for closed-book exams. I prepare equation sheets for technical classes. I go to lecture on a regular basis. I complete my homework.

During this process, however, I am continually asking myself whether I am learning. If what's asked of me simply isn't cutting it, I'll do what I think I need to do to learn what I think is important. One way I really know that I am committed to a class or a subject is if I revisit the material after the class has ended. Whether reading Indian Country Today three years after my Introduction to American Indian Studies class, or helping students with calculus and physics, I can see my commitment to the material when I continue to pursue it after the course has ended.

These ideas tie in closely to the ideas of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, presented in Senge and the subject of a previous blog post. Commitment is closely aligned with intrinsic motivation, and compliance can have aspects of both.

One example of commitment vs. compliance vs. apathy in a classroom setting is the very class I'm writing this blog for: Designing for Effective Change.

Students committed to their blogs didn't need a prompt, or at least not much of one. They had taken complete ownership of their writing. They understood the blogging process and its facility in helping them learn. They wrote not necessarily what was asked of them, but what would help achieve the goals of blogging and of the class that they had internalized.

Students compliant with their blogs saw the value of blogging in terms of helping them learn. They were more than happy to write a blog post every week, and they generally felt comfortable following the prompt. They did not take the authority to write whatever they wanted, whenever they wanted. They constrained themselves to the system set in place by the class, and they used it to work towards the goals of the class.

Apathetic students didn't care about the class or about blogging, and didn't do much of it.

In the case of the class, part of the shared vision might be the promotion of blogging as a tool for fostering intellectual discussion--those committed to this vision will probably continue to blog. Those only compliant with this vision may not. The apathetic students still don't care.

In terms of engagement vs. disengagement, language which we've used throughout the semester, both commitment and compliance can produce engaged students. Whether or not this engagement is enough to buy into the shared vision of the University, I do not know.

Dave's Multimedia Project: Mental Models

Made some minor changes: the pacing is slightly faster, and some images that didn't transfer well have been fixed.

Daves Multimedia Project: Mental Models

View more presentations from dluedtk2.

Multimedia project--Mental models

Some of the art (namely a smiley face and some music notes) did not transfer well. I will attempt to fix it tomorrow.

http://www.slideshare.net/dluedtk2/daves-multimedia-project-mental-models

Hand washing: a new tool

I was reading the "Best of What's New 2009" article in Popular Science, and one innovation seemed to be of general interest to everyone concerned about the hand-washing problem: the Xhale HyGreen.

The Xhale HyGreen is essentially a tracking system of healthcare workers' hand-washing habits. Every time a worker washes his hands, a sensor at the hand-washing station detects the alcohol from the alcohol-based sanitizer. The detector then sends a message to a wireless badge on the worker's shirt pocket. If a worker enters a patient's room without having washed his hands, the badge vibrates and displays a red light to remind them to wash their hands. Additionally, all the data from both the hand-washing events and the patient-interaction events are collected and stored, indexed by the worker's badge number and the patient's room.

This system adds personal accountability into the mix. We talked a lot about the reasons why healthcare workers fail to wash their hands, and inconvenience of the hand washing stations and lack of salient consequences are the main reasons I remember. This system adds salient consequences. A hospital's infectious disease staff can track each employee's compliance with hand-washing policies. Additionally, patients will know if a worker has failed to wash his hands and can advocate for themselves. It's sort of a nanny system, but maybe that's what healthcare workers need. The system doesn't seem to add any barriers to hand-washing, just consequences to its absence.

It's tough to be a freshman

The first couple weeks of your freshman year are a whirlwind. Everything is new. It's the first time you are on your own. It's the first time you've lived in a dorm. It's probably the first major lifestyle change you've had to make in your life up to this point. It's kind of surreal: it feels like summer camp or a retreat. It feels impermanent, like a dream from which you will soon awaken. It does not feel like the next phase of your life. Classes are starting, and they are completely different from high school in every way--the way they're taught, their scheduling, the number of them you have to take, and the number of people in them. You're getting lost on campus. You are meeting hundreds of new people--in your dorm and classes especially. You barely have time to think.

You can't anticipate some problems you'll face because everything is so new. Typical problem: "What do you mean I 'missed' dinner? It's only 7:45! I usually eat at 8 or 9! How can I even 'miss dinner'? If the dining hall is closed, then just what am I supposed to eat?" You are dealing with the bottom rungs of Maslow's hierarchy. You are asking everyone around you for advice, but they are probably all freshmen, too. You don't know what to ask, let alone whom to ask. The RAs are helpful, and can help you navigate your new life, but there are not many of them. They are also most useful only when dealing with dorm issues--dining, roommate troubles, transportation trouble, etc. You'll outgrow them quickly.

A push from your RA will send you to quad day. You were overwhelmed before; now the inundation of new information is practically overpowering. The crowds are oppressive. The upperclassmen yelling at you from their booths are intimidating. Everyone wants a piece of you. You write your email down countless times on mailing list after mailing list. You're drowning in free pencils, fliers, cups, pamphlets, and even a houseplant from the horticulture club. The sheer volume of opportunities on campus leaves you in awe. You leave quad day dazed, and wondering just what you're in for with this whole college thing.

You didn't know it, but signing up for RSOs was your one chance to meet with upperclassmen on a regular basis. You won't see many of them in your dorm. You will see even fewer of them in your classes. RSOs do have upperclassmen. What's more, if you find that one day you're needing some career or academic advice from an upperclassman, your one hope was to sign up for a particular RSO: your professional society.

A love of Seinfeld, or the month of October, or skydiving can unite people, and these things are the basis of some RSOs; however, the bonds of friendship formed through these organizations may not be the most useful for establishing a mentoring relationship in terms of education and career goals. People in your professional society (e.g. Biomedical Engineering Society) have been through what you are going through. They know your curriculum. They know what is out there in terms of careers. Often it is part of the mission of your professional society to help freshmen like you who need guidance.

If you missed quad day, don't worry. You're probably being forced to take ENG100 or BUS101 or LAS100. You can be sure that your TA (who is probably an upperclassman, not a grad student) will present you with the opportunity to join your professional society. The class itself will also act as a sort of guide, introducing you to campus and your major. You will learn about what it means to be a student and the opportunities available to you. You will be presented with even more information, and you will need to take it, sort through it, and figure out what you still need to know.

This struggle to deal with the new realities of college life is strongest during those first few weeks, but it persists. Just as the newest freshmen don't even know to ask or worry about what time the dining hall closes, freshmen in general don't know what to ask about their major, their field, and their life goals. They don't know what they should be asking about. They don't know what is important. They can't be proactive about their careers because they can't anticipate the opportunities they'll have, let alone the problems they'll encounter.

RSOs, especially professional organizations, are a great way for freshman to learn to know upperclassmen, who can help them sort through the sensory overload of their first two semesters. The college introductory classes (ENG100, etc.) are also a great tool to get students thinking about why they are at the university, and what they hope to accomplish during their undergraduate careers. Only when freshmen get this initial understanding of what it means to be at their university, in a specific college, studying a specific field, will they have the tools to seek out formal mentoring or continue the informal mentoring that can help them successfully harness the opportunities at the university.

Learning

I'm sitting in the EWS [engineering workstation] computer lab on the fourth floor of Engineering Hall. The guy next to me is pretty busy doing Physics 212 homework online (electricity and magnetism), and he has so much going on that his papers are spilling over onto my desk. One of these interlopers is an old Differential Equations exam. This guy could have been me, way back in second semester freshman year: same classes, same problems, same computer lab, same paper overload.

Ever curious, I take a closer look at the diff. eq. exam. The visible problem asks the student to find the general solution for the homogeneous problem given an inhomogeneous linear second order differential equation, y'' + (w^2)y = x cos(x). The exam goes on to ask the student formulate the first step toward solving the equation using the method of undetermined coefficients.

I took the class Differential Equations, and I like to think I learned something about the subject of differential equations from the course: It was an important pre-req that has been built upon in many of my subsequent classes.

There's a problem, though. I can't remember what it is that distinguishes the homogeneous differential equation from the inhomogeneous one. I certainly can't remember the method of undetermined coefficients. I can't solve this exam problem. I know that I learned these concepts, in part because I was tested on them while I took the course, in part because I've learned higher level concepts in later courses that use these concepts as building blocks, and in part because I have the hard-to-define feeling of simply knowing that I had learned them. But if I learned it, why can't I solve it?

Which brings me to the topic at hand: How do I know if I've learned something? I know only if I'm tested--in an academic setting or in any other experience in general. I know I've learned something if I approach a situation I've encountered before in a new way. I know I've learned something if I act differently than I would have before I learned. I know I've learned something if I can apply what I've learned.

This makes it sound like I must be cognizant that I'm applying what I've learned, and, in the vast majority of cases, I think I am. Whether it's something small, like the fact that the hot and cold faucet handles are switched in my grandparents' bathroom, or something large, like a cultural awareness fostered by Introduction to American Indian Studies, I think that I am usually aware that I am acting in a new way based on what I've learned.

[A 'small' thing would be something that only impacts a few of my actions/interactions/aspects of my life--like washing my hands when I visit my grandparents. A 'large' thing would be something that impacts me daily--like my perceptions of culture, my perceptions of my culture, and my attitudes towards interpersonal interaction.]

This sentiment of learning manifested as changing behavior is certainly not new. Virtually all of my classmates wrote variations on the same thing in this past week's reflections. [I was going to link to all of them, but that would have been ridiculous, so you get this obnoxious aside instead.] All had slightly different takes on the subject, but the essence of most of what I read was that learning is proven by demonstration of that learning, or as I would say it, that learning involves the changing of thought processes, and that the outward manifestation of these changes is behavioral.

If you are so inclined, see my previous post for my views on the workings of the mind. From this lens, learning is like trying to communicate with yourself: you can only learn if you are able to overcome your current thought processes and forge new connections in your brain. People have different learning methods because different things help them to form these new connections--for some (e.g. me) the auditory stimuli of a lecturer combined with diligent note-taking and a receptive attitude is the preferred combination.

A quick dip into the internet (<10 min.) has reacquainted me with homogeneous differential equations and the method of undetermined coefficients. I was able to 're-learn' this material much faster than I learned it the first time. I think that this is because the connections to deal with differential equations already exist in my brain; they had just become re-discovered. Someone exposed to differential equations for the first time would obviously need much longer than 10 minutes to decipher the problem given on this exam, much less begin to solve it. The upshot seems to be that learning isn't permanent: just as connections can be made, so too can they be lost.


Incidentally, for anyone who cares, the solutions are:
y=A cos(w*x) + B sin(w*x)
yp [which is the particular solution] =(Ax+B)cos(x) + (Cx+D)sin(x)

The time

is 2:42 am.

Don't even try to read this.

every time I add to the beginning this gets less accessible

I keep going back to the beginning and adding things--this has long since ceased to be this week's reflection; I guess I'll have to try that later (I'm not even being sarcastic for once)

Sarcasm is hard to detect when written. Sarcasm is easy to detect when written.

*disclaimer: this post might be entirely nonsensical if you're not me.

===post still under construction===

Attribution is hard for me.

I lead an internal life--most of what I think, what I value, what I know, and what I am exists only in my head. I latch on to information that is intriguing or different no matter the source. The only thing that matters is the value of that information, or rather, whether or not the information is valuable. If it's valuable, I process the information (in ways I don't understand). Then--once I have totally assimilated the information, figured out its content, its significance to myself, and its bearing on the world--I drop it. I move on. I don't ever think about it again.

So as I've been writing this particular post, I've come to realize that I'm being unclear about a crucial point. All the thought processes I describe are subconscious. I don't actually decide what information is valuable, I've got a hard-wired filter that decides for me. I can't help it. That is pretty much true for every instance where it sounds like I'm just being dumb, or intransigent, or something--it's not meeeee, it's my braaain.

I don't mean that I have trouble writing a works cited page for a research paper. I mean that I have trouble answering questions like, "Please describe a situation in which you worked on a team and encountered a problem. How did you overcome this problem?" Give me a situation, and I'll tell you how I would act. Don't ask me about the past--it's over and done with and it doesn't matter right now. Anyways, what kind of problem should I talk about? Why are you even asking me this question? What's the point? What kind of team? Why?

This is also why I find writing this stupid blog so difficult. Sure, I like thinking about the issues presented in class and in the prompts (sometimes--it depends whether I see any value in them or not). But as soon as I reach a conclusion or draw a bit of insight, I immediately loose the drive to write it down. I've figured it out. It's old news. It is now so commonplace to me that there is no point in recording it in a blog--Why on earth would I write down the obvious?

I see that this presents a lot of problems in a class like ours. Communication of our ideas is paramount for fostering discussion, which in turn leads to (uhh, whatever it is, I'm sure it's important). [[so as I'm sitting here typing this, I drifted off into another train of thought, and had a small epiphany about language and its role {in society/for individual humans/across culture/re:my difficulties understanding prof. Arvan's modus operandi/etc.}, which I can't seem to bring myself to write down because it's so obvious that it doesn't need to be written down]]

Which doesn't lead into [the topic of] criticism, although I've been trying to lead into criticism for almost a month. I just haven't found exactly what I think about criticism. I think I tend to only listen to criticism if I see the value in it. I don't think hurt feelings are usually a problem for me. I tend to judge the criticizer on whether they are able to pick up on the important aspects of my performance. I dismiss criticism if I don't think it's warranted or valid. I don't get a lot of criticism. Unless I do and I just don't notice it.

broken disjointed disconnected intermittently-comprehensible abortive stilted underdeveloped unclear ineffective blurry bleary bleak blah bloated bland I don't care if you get it because it makes sense to me logorrhea

I hate writing (this blog? in general?).
I think.

"Language fits over experience like a strait-jacket." -William Golding
"Childhood is a disease- a sickness that you grow out of." -William Golding

Stephen King sometimes writes in unconventional ways that I find very accessible. Do you agree with this? The arts allow communication that transcends language. "let's argue semantics" Let's not. I think law is stupid (inane? frivolous? pointless? dangerously definitive? do any of these words convey the same meaning that "stupid" did for me?).

Now I have a compelling urge to delete all this. It's very weird.
a)afraid of judgment
b)does this fit the goals of the blog?
c)why on earth would anyone care to read this
The conscious answers are b) and c), but I can't quite convince myself a) isn't true.

You may have gathered that I like reading stream of consciousness writing which is what this has devolved into. We read a stream of consciousness Reklam in my German Literature class that was easier for me to understand than a lot of the other things we read.

anyways,

The Bioengineering Curriculum

The Bioengineering curriculum is jam-packed. There are 132 required hours, which averages out to 16.5 hours per semester for a typical 4-year student. 1 hour is devoted to introducing bioengineering freshman to their major, college, and university through Engineering 100 and Bioengineering 120. BIOE 120 specifically consists of guest lecturers in the field of bioengineering; this course allows students to see the applications of their chosen program, which is important as they take the generic math, biology, and chemistry classes first semester.

34 hours comprise the "foundational mathematics and science," which includes two semesters of chemistry and lab, 4 semesters of calculus/differential equations, and 3 semesters of physics. These courses provide the basic scientific fundamentals that are needed for all engineering disciplines.

52 hours are components of the "technical core," which includes most of the courses that are actually in the bioengineering department as well as a lot of biology. There are also statistics and organic chemistry courses. 2 additional hours are an ethics/professionalism component of Senior Design, the capstone course in the Bioengineering sequence.

15 hours are used for the track electives, which allow the student to develop their program of study in one of five tracks: Biomechanics, Biomolecular, Cell and Tissue Engineering, Computational and Systems Biology, or Imaging and Sensing. I am in the Imaging and Sensing track, and my track electives have included electrical engineering classes that have given me a background in medical imaging methodologies such as ultrasound and MRI.

18 hours are devoted to social sciences and humanities. Students must fulfill a variety of requirements through these general education classes, including taking classes with both a Western and a non-Western cultural component. An additional 4 hours are taken by Rhetoric 105, which introduces students to effective writing techniques.

The remaining 6 hours are set aside as free electives. Students are allowed to use these hours in any way they wish.

I don't think there is any way to reduce the foundational course load. The foundational courses are aptly named: They really are important for a basic scientific background, and the skills learned through them are called on throughout the curriculum and in industry as well. Calculus and differential equations are important in almost every engineering application, both in the university setting and elsewhere. The physics and chemistry skills are essential for understanding the concepts of the upper level courses, and important background skills for engineering applications as well.

The core courses are a slightly different story. Depending on the path you choose, you may not need the skills and knowledge learned in a specific course that is part of the core curriculum. For instance, a engineer who works with a pharmaceutical company may not need to know the electrical systems learned about in Bioinstrumentation. That being said, I personally would not feel comfortable calling myself a bioengineer without having had all the core classes, even though I may not be using everything in my job after graduation.

One big reason I feel this way is that most people do not have the same job their whole lives. A degree gives you something to fall back on, and if you remove some of the importance and depth of the degree, it is not as valuable. Obviously a classroom setting is not the only way to gain the learning needed for a degree, but the core classes offer a breadth of knowledge that cannot be replaced by experiential learning unless those experiences are in the right sub-fields of bioengineering, and then it would serve little purpose to replace the core courses.

The track electives allow for a depth of learning in one specific branch of bioengineering. I can only speak to the Imaging and Sensing track, which I am in. If anything, I think that the track could benefit from more courses. 15 hours is just barely enough to catch up with the electrical engineering knowledge and specific applications to bioengineering. There is certainly no room to prune any hours.

What is left? The social sciences/humanities hours and the 6 free hours. These hours are designated by the College of Engineering (not the Bioengineering Department) to round out the education. The specific requirements are supposed to ensure that students are getting an education that includes a lot of different viewpoints and skills. ('supposed to' because engineering students often take soft options to satisfy these requirements, like Technical Writing for the advanced composition requirement. This is understandable if you consider that 15 technical hours is a lot of work in one semester--no one wants a lot of work in a gen-ed class they probably aren't all that interested in on top of that.)

Removing hours from the engineering courses to devote to free electives does not make sense to me. There are simply no hours to spare from the curriculum. If the goal the university education were to fully develop life skills (like learning to learn, communications skills, and a sense of citizenship) with just enough technical skills to pass into a job, then a dramatic restructuring of the curriculum would be in order. I think the university presents an opportunity to become an expert in a field: that is what a degree signifies. Obviously life skills are important, but they can be developed through other avenues than class (i.e. experiential learning). I could have amazing life skills, but I would not feel comfortable with my degree without the depth and breadth of knowledge and skills in my field conferred by the curriculum as it stands.

Gladwell's The Tipping Point: a review

What do syphilis in Baltimore, Sesame Street, Hush Puppies shoes, and crime reduction in New York City all have in common? They are all epidemics. They started with a small group of people, reached some ethereal level and exploded across a community, be it local, national, or worldwide. They are also prominently featured in Malcolm Gladwell’s book, The Tipping Point. In The Tipping Point, Gladwell examines epidemics to explore the reasons why these disparate things have been able to affect so many people. He seems personally most interested in those epidemics that can make a positive difference in people's lives, such as the learning epidemics caused by Sesame Street and Blues Clues. Regardless, he traces the elements involved in the spread of many different epidemics–be they fashion statements, non-crime waves or messages such as Paul Revere's famous cry of impending battle.

Central to the book is the idea of a tipping point: An idea, fashion statement or germ--a contagion--may exist at some basal level within a population, infecting roughly the same number of people that overcome it in any given time period. Some stimulus can cause an imbalance in this equilibrium, though, and the contagion will start to reach more new people than it leaves behind. This is the tipping point, and an epidemic follows. Without that push to disrupt the equilibrium, it may never reach that critical mass, that threshold it needs to cross in order to infect the whole population. Gladwell's analysis of epidemics centers around this idea: How can we identify strategies to "tip" phenomena into epidemics?

The idea of an equilibrium is central to the analyses that engineers (like me) perform. Every analysis begins with a system (such as a rope supporting some hanging weight) and a basis of evaluating that system (such as the system's momentum). Due to the conservation of momentum, which states that momentum cannot be created or destroyed, every bit of momentum that enters the system will either be accumulated, or it must leave the system in some way. Equilibrium occurs when the accumulation term is zero: then everything that enters the system also leaves the system. In the case of momentum, accumulation results in motion. The rope with the hanging weight is at rest, so it is not accumulating momentum, and it is in equilibrium. (Incidentally, this means that the sum of forces acting on it is zero, and the tension in the rope can be calculated.) The upshot of this is that equilibria can be described mathematically. As soon as Gladwell mentioned the word 'equilibrium', I began to formulate a mathematical model to track the spread of an epidemic throughout a population.

The model works roughly thus: The system is a population of individuals, and the quantity being tracked is the spread of a particular contagion. Each member of the population in question would have a state, either "infected" or "not infected." They would also contact "x" number of people in a given time step "t", and, if infected, have a "y"% chance of "infecting" each of the people they came into contact with. Each individual would remain infected for "z" time steps. Each of these variables would be different for each person in the population (except for the time step, which would necessarily be the same for all), and, when all members of the population were considered, the total spread of the contagion could be tracked. You could predict the percent of a population "infected" with some contagion after a time period by setting an initial condition (maybe only one individual is infected to start with) and extrapolating to the desired number of time steps. Just as Gladwell attempts to cut to the heart of the issue, this is the simplest model I could think of to describe the spread of a contagion.

Gladwell defines the transmission of epidemics by three laws. The first of these, "The Law of the Few," explores three special types of people that can help an idea become an epidemic: his “Connectors,” “Salespeople” and "Mavens." These are the people who can tip that contagion over the edge into boundless effect. In my model, these are people who have exceptional coefficients "x", "y", and "z". The first of these, the Connectors, spread contagions exceptionally well simply by the sheer magnitude of people they know. Their "x" is through the roof. If I am studying the spread of the newest pop hit, “Bulletproof” by La Roux, an average person would pass the song along to maybe two people per day. The Connectors would get ten people to listen to it: they know more people, they are in contact with them more, and their contact is meaningful. These people have huge social networks.

What if you don’t like pop? Especially dance pop from the UK, like "Bulletproof"? Gladwell’s Salespeople will convince you that you do. Their "y" is near 100%: they have the ability to transmit ideas to everyone they meet. Gladwell’s Mavens are an interesting case. These people are experts in a narrow field. As a result, they hold a lot of sway when giving advice about that field, and people they "infect" are likely to stick with whatever the Maven is spreading. Given the right contagion--something in their field--they have a high "y," and the "z" of those they infect is likely to rise. Mavens also practice selection among contagions--they will only select the best. The case of the Maven may not apply as well to the spread of a pop hit. Maybe a music reviewer would be a maven, and a favorable review would encourage others to listen.

In this way, these three types of people infect more than their fair share; they diffuse ideas farther than normal people. Whether from sheer numbers as with the Connectors, from careful selection as with the Mavens, or with efficacy of transmission as with the Salespeople, these special individuals have the ability to tip things into epidemics. Gladwell identified them through studying epidemics he was familiar with and by thinking about extraordinary people he knew. I could also have identified them by analysis of my model: They are the individuals with exceptional coefficients.

When evaluating any system that is described by a model, it is helpful to explore the ramifications that changing each variable of the model has. This is accomplished by holding all the variables except one constant and then manipulating that one. Alternatively, one variable can be held constant and the others changed to identify the restrictions imposed by that variable on the system. In this way, the effects of each variable, that is, each critical component of the system, can be identified. Just by looking at my simple model, I disagree that the three types of people who are Gladwell's Few would be the only ones who would have the power to transform a contagion into an epidemic–There are other ways to manipulate the "x," "y" and "z" values to produce extraordinary individuals. What about someone with a high "z" who harbors a contagion for a long time–a 'Convert?' These people would be able to upset the equilibrium by transmitting the contagion for a long time–they will be singing “Bulletproof” for weeks rather than just the day or two after they hear it, and they will be able to tip this phenomenon just like the Few can. Although Gladwell did not uncover any such others through his exploration of epidemics, a simple analysis of the model shows that more types of individuals with the power to tip things could exist. If we are interested in the identification of individuals to help us tip our own epidemics, shouldn't we spread the net as far as possible?

What about the media? It turns out that people do not only communicate on a one-to-one basis. The media are an alternate route to the Few for tipping epidemics. Sort of like super-Connectors, the media have a huge audience to whom they can spread information. Indeed, as Gladwell addresses his second criteria, “The Stickiness Factor,” he talks about children's television as a vehicle for learning epidemics, a case in which messages are disseminated entirely by the media, not by the Few. Even if the media are considered within Gladwell's framework as individual Connectors (or as one big mega-Connector), they throw the whole system out of whack due to the huge audience they command, orders of magnitude higher than anything that could be achieved by one of the Few. Why should we even bother looking for these Few if the conglomerate media is the ultimate Connector, and can tip our ideas into epidemics?

The internet is a medium that blurs the distinction between the Few and the general population. Through the proliferation of email, blogs, forums and social networking sites, we are able to communicate with each other much more rapidly and voluminously than nine years ago when Gladwell wrote his book. For my model, this means that everybody's "x" is elevated: we are all pseudo-Connectors. Connectors are no longer critical links in the chain that connects the population. I can message hundreds of people with the click of a mouse on Facebook, and link them to “Bulletproof” on Youtube. This glut of information necessarily devalues it: We as listeners cannot pay attention to it all. Mavens are drowned out by thousands of their peers reviewing the same items on Amazon; however, maybe this connectedness would allow an ultimate Maven to exist. The internet would empower the Maven to reach a huge audience. Maybe the Few can draw on the internet just as others do. Regardless, new forms of communication have changed the roles of the Few.

One very important distinction heretofore not considered is that different individuals will have different reactions to different contagions. A Maven is a perfect example: they will only have 'tipping power' for things they are experts at. From the perspective of my model, this means that considering different contagions requires the calculation of new coefficients for each individual. This presents a huge task, and there may be no way to correctly identify what the coefficients are; indeed this goes beyond tracking the spread of an epidemic, and instead delves into the realm of innovation, discovering new contagions. My model is not a useful tool for finding which things will spread, but rather how they will spread. The contagion up until this point has been an abstraction. To more fully explore the spread of epidemics, Gladwell turns his attention to the message that is being spread.

Gladwell's second law is the "Stickiness Factor," with which he explores the reason that some things are contagions--why do they 'stick' to us? He here focuses not on the population through which the epidemic spreads, or the Few who tip it; he looks at the contents of the contagion. The Few can’t do anything with an impotent virus or a worthless idea. It must be "sticky" enough to be absorbed before it can be passed on.

As his primary examples for this law, Gladwell highlights the television programs Sesame Street and Blue’s Clues. He shows them as examples of intentionally engineering the 'stickiness' of a message, in this case increasing the stickiness of learning for children. The creators of Sesame Street studied children and what was sticky with them. They then tailored their show to meet those criteria. The sticky factor came not just from the information, but also the way it was presented, catering to children’s short attention spans. Blue’s Clues took the information and success of Sesame Street to another level by further developing the stickiness of the information, repeating it five times every week. This is a very interesting concept, that presentation can change the stickiness of a message without altering the content.

This stickiness factor is not taken into account in my simple model. It is assumed that the contagion will be sticky, that it can be transmitted, and that it will spread. This is the case for most of the things we typically consider contagions, i.e. diseases. With the example of education, Gladwell shows how non-inherently transmissible things can also become contagions. This has huge implications: We can engineer virtually anything to become an epidemic if we can figure out how to make it sticky. We can spread information, ideas and positive change just like H1N1 has spread across the world, if we only figure out how to make our information stickier.

My model is much too simplistic to describe a real-world epidemic, but so is Gladwell's commentary up to this point. He had been hinting at it, like when he described some indefinable quality that some Salespeople posses, but he truly explores the issue in the third section of the book, "The Power of Context." Here he states the very obvious point that circumstances matter. People and ideas do not exist in vacuums. There is more than just stickiness and personality type at play. We as humans have complex subconscious psychological processes that pick up on subtle environmental cues we may not even be aware of. If the song “Bulletproof” is used as a theoretical example in a class project, the context informs the reader that it is not meant as a serious suggestion. The would-be epidemic tipper needs to consider the context that the message will be transmitted in.

Within a population, up until this point, only the transmitters of epidemics (The Connectors, the Mavens, and the Salespeople) have been considered, but the recipient of the transmission is just as important. Communication is a complicated subject that demands a lot from both the sender and the receiver to be effective. The great managerial writer, Drucker, addressed this in a 1974 essay called "Functioning Communications." He delineates there the effort required by the communicator to reach the listener due to differences in mental processes. Communications can fall upon deaf ears when the communicator fails to take into account the listener's mindset. People hear what they want to hear. People's brains are hard-wired to process stimuli in certain fashions. Drucker writes how communication is almost a battle: As the communicator, you have to bring the listener around to your way of thinking. You have to bypass the natural route in the listener's mind and develop new pathways. Otherwise, they will hear what they want to hear, and not what you want them to hear.

Effective communication from the communicator's standpoint demands messages that speak to the audience. Effective communication from the listener's standpoint demands a receptive attitude and a commitment to the consideration of new ideas. This is a hard thing to accomplish when so much of the information processing that goes on in our brains occurs below our consciousness. It's almost like holding you breath: you can only do it for so long before your natural processes take over. For Gladwell, this is addressed as Context. Some messages can be groomed for mass audiences (like Sesame Street), but I think enough variation exists to provide significant barriers for the universal transmission of most messages.

Should my model include another variable, "w," for the receptiveness of an individual to the spreading contagion? This would make the model more robust by considering the receiver's situation. At the same time, it would add another level of difficulty to the actual application of the model to a given system. Defining each individual's "x" should be rather straightforward, and it should be proportional to the number of people they know. Defining each person's "z" depends on how long they are likely to hold on to the contagion in question. The "y" and "w" terms, though, are highly subjective and variable, and depend on the intricacies of interpersonal communication. Each individual's "y" and "w" would change not only with the contagion, but also with the other members of the population with whom the individual interacts. One individual (let's call him Dave) will have a different "y" depending on how effective his communication of the message to another member of the population. Dave's "w" will also change depending on how receptive he is to others' communications. Although the model may describe the spread of an epidemic sufficiently, setting it up, that is, defining the variables, is nearly impossible.

Gladwell devotes considerable space toward discussing nuanced studies of various epidemics, and how his three laws played into them. One example I found particularly interesting told of suicide in the nation of Micronesia: Unheard of before a teenager took his life in the 1960s over a minor disagreement with his parents, a suicide epidemic soon swept the nation. The power of context played a powerful role here: that first suicide gave permission for the rest. Stickiness was important too: suicide, unfortunately, is absolutely sticky, and there is no way to make it less sticky. Try it once, and you are dead. One thing this example lacked, though, was any tie-in to the Few. No Connectors advertised suicide to their many acquaintances, no Mavens told the best methods, and no Salesmen advocated their friends try it. As far as I can tell, the first suicide was reported in the newspapers, and the epidemic spread; the media again was the culprit for tipping this epidemic.

This is indicative of the book as a whole: Gladwell presents a wealth of provocative ideas, a wealth of interesting examples, and a wealth of succinct conclusions. His writing is expertly woven and watertight. His book is chock full of marvelous anecdotes; however, nowhere does he give an example that effectively demonstrates the importance of all of his three laws in causing epidemics to tip. This does not mean his ideas are worthless; rather, he has presented tools that can be used to create change in society, in our thinking patterns, and in the way we spread our messages. If we want to spread things that really matter, such as anti-crime waves and learning, we need to identify ways that will help these things, which are not inherently transmitted, to spread to epidemic proportions. Seen as a historical reckoning of the factors involved in the spread of epidemics, Gladwell's Tipping Point excels. He fails, however, as I did, to define a general model that we can use to predict the spread of epidemics.

Review of The Tipping Point -- draft 3

Draft three: added a lot of commentary. Further explored the model I've been talking about in several locations throughout the review. Restructured the discussion of the media and the internet, but it's still not right. Pruned some areas that, while interesting, didn't tie in to anything else. I think this is really close to a final version to be posted late today.

What do syphilis in Baltimore, Sesame Street, Hush Puppies shoes, and crime reduction in New York City all have in common? They are all epidemics. They started with a small group of people, reached some ethereal level and exploded across a community, be it local, national, or worldwide. They are also prominently featured in Malcolm Gladwell’s book, The Tipping Point. In The Tipping Point, Gladwell examines epidemics to explore the reasons why these disparate things have been able to affect so many people. He seems personally most interested in those epidemics that can make a positive difference in people's lives, such as the learning epidemics caused by Sesame Street and Blues Clues. Regardless, he traces the elements involved in the spread of many different epidemics–be they fashion statements, non-crime waves or messages such as Paul Revere's famous cry of impending battle.

Central to the book is the idea of a tipping point: An idea, fashion statement or germ--a contagion--may exist at some basal level within a population, infecting roughly the same number of people that overcome it in any given time period. Some stimulus can cause an imbalance in this equilibrium, though, and the contagion will start to reach more new people than it leaves behind. This is the tipping point, and an epidemic follows. Without that push to disrupt the equilibrium, it may never reach that critical mass, that threshold it needs to cross in order to infect the whole population. Gladwell's analysis of epidemics centers around this idea: How can we identify strategies to "tip" phenomena into epidemics?

The idea of an equilibrium is central to the analyses that engineers (like me) perform, and is central to our way of thinking. Every analysis begins with a system (such as a rope that supports a free hanging weight) and a basis of evaluating that system (such as the system's momentum). Due to conservation laws, in this case the conservation of momentum, which states that momentum cannot be created or destroyed, every bit of momentum that enters the system will either be accumulated, or it will leave the system in some way. Equilibrium occurs when the accumulation term is zero, and then everything that enters the system also leaves the system; an accumulation of momentum results in motion. The rope with the hanging weight is at rest, so it is not accumulating momentum, and it is in equilibrium. (Incidentally, this means that the sum of forces acting on it is zero, and the tension in the rope can be calculated.) The upshot of this is that equilibria can be described mathematically. As soon as Gladwell mentioned the word 'equilibrium', I began to formulate a mathematical model to track the spread of an epidemic throughout a population.

The model works roughly thus: The system is a population of individuals, and the quantity being tracked is the spread of a particular contagion (which is not conserved as momentum is; however, the same analysis can be used to track it). Each member of the population in question would have a state, either "infected" or "not infected." They would also contact "x" number of people in a given time step "t", and, if infected, have a "y"% chance of "infecting" each of the people they came into contact with. Each individual would remain infected for "z" time steps. Each of these variables would be different for each person in the population (except for the time step, which would necessarily be the same for all), and, when all members of the population were considered, the total spread of the contagion could be tracked. You could predict the percent of a population "infected" with some contagion after a time period by setting an initial condition (maybe only one individual is infected to start with) and extrapolating to the desired number of time steps. Just as Gladwell attempts to cut to the heart of the issue, this is the simplest model I could think of to describe the spread of a contagion.

Gladwell defines the transmission of epidemics by three laws. The first of these, "The Law of the Few," explores three special types of people that can help an idea become an epidemic: his “Connectors,” “Salespeople” and "Mavens." These are the people who can tip that contagion over the edge into boundless effect. In my model, these are people who have exceptional coefficients "x", "y", and "z". The first of these, the Connectors, spread contagions exceptionally well simply by the sheer magnitude of people they know. Their "x" is through the roof. If I am studying the spread of the newest pop hit, “Bulletproof” by La Roux, an average person would pass the song along to maybe two people per day. The Connectors would get ten people to listen to it: they know more people, they are in contact with them more, and their contact is meaningful. These people have huge social networks.

What if you don’t like pop? Especially dance pop from the UK, like "Bulletproof"? Gladwell’s Salespeople will convince you that you do. Their "y" is near 100%: they have the ability to transmit ideas to everyone they meet. Gladwell’s Mavens are an interesting case. These people are experts in a narrow field. As a result, they hold a lot of sway when giving advice about that field, and people they "infect" are likely to stick with whatever the Maven is spreading. Given the right contagion--something in their field--they have a high "y," and the "z" of those they infect is likely to rise. Mavens also practice selection among contagions--they will only select the best. The case of the Maven may not apply as well to the spread of a pop hit. Maybe a music reviewer would be a maven, and a favorable review would encourage others to listen.

In this way, these three types of people infect more than their fair share; they diffuse ideas farther than normal people. Whether from sheer numbers as with the Connectors, from careful selection as with the Mavens, or with efficacy of transmission as with the Salespeople, these special individuals have the ability to tip things into epidemics. Gladwell identified them through studying epidemics he was familiar with and by thinking about extraordinary people he knew. I could also have identified them by analysis of my model: They are individuals with exceptional coefficients.

When evaluating any system that is described by a model, it is helpful to explore the ramifications that changing each variable of the model has. This is accomplished by holding all the variables except one constant and then manipulating that one. Alternatively, one variable can be held constant and the others changed to identify the restrictions imposed by that variable on the system. In this way, the effects of each variable, that is, each critical component of the system, can be identified. Just by looking at my simple model, I disagree that the three types of people who are Gladwell's Few would be the only ones who would have the power to transform a contagion into an epidemic–There are other ways to manipulate the "x," "y" and "z" values to produce extraordinary individuals. What about someone with a high "z" who harbors a contagion for a long time–a 'Convert?' These people would be able to upset the equilibrium by transmitting the contagion for a long time–they will be singing “Bulletproof” for weeks rather than just the day or two after they hear it, and they will be able to tip this phenomenon just like the Few can. Although Gladwell did not uncover any such others through his exploration of epidemics, a simple analysis of the model shows that more types of individuals with the power to tip things could exist. If we are interested in the identification of individuals to help us tip our own epidemics, shouldn't we spread the net as far as possible?

What about the media? It turns out that people do not only communicate face to face. The media are an alternate route to the Few for tipping epidemics. Sort of like super-Connectors, the media have a huge audience to whom they can spread information. Indeed, as Gladwell addresses his second criteria, “The Stickiness Factor,” he talks about children's television as a vehicle for learning epidemics, a case in which messages are disseminated entirely by the media, not by the Few. Even if the media are considered as individual Connectors (or as one big mega-Connector), they throw the whole system out of whack due to the huge audience they command, orders of magnitude higher than anything that could be achieved by one of the Few. Why should we even bother looking for these Few if the conglomerate media is the ultimate Connector, and can tip our ideas into epidemics?

The internet is a medium that blurs the distinction between the Few and the general population. Through the proliferation of email, blogs, forums and social networking sites, we are able to communicate with each other much more rapidly and voluminously than nine years ago when Gladwell wrote his book. For my model, this means that everybody's "x" is elevated: we are all pseudo-Connectors. Connectors are no longer critical links in the chain that connects the population. I can message hundreds of people with the click of a mouse on Facebook, and link them to “Bulletproof” on Youtube. This glut of information necessarily devalues it: We as listeners cannot pay attention to it all. Mavens are drowned out by thousands of their peers reviewing the same items on Amazon; however, maybe this connectedness would allow an ultimate Maven to exist. The internet would empower the Maven to reach a huge audience. Maybe the Few can draw on the internet just as others do. Regardless, new forms of communication have changed the roles of the Few.

One very important distinction heretofore not considered is that different individuals will have different reactions to different contagions. A Maven is a perfect example: they will only have 'tipping power' for things they are experts at. From the perspective of my model, this means that considering different contagions requires the calculation of new coefficients for each individual. This presents a huge task, and there may be no way to correctly identify what the coefficients are; indeed this goes beyond tracking the spread of an epidemic, and instead delves into the realm of innovation, discovering new contagions. My model is not a useful tool for finding which things will spread, but rather how they will spread. The contagion up until this point has been an abstraction. To more fully explore the spread of epidemics, Gladwell turns his attention to the message that is being spread.

Gladwell's second law is the "Stickiness Factor," with which he explores the reason that some things are contagions--why do they 'stick' to us? He here focuses not on the population through which the epidemic spreads, or the Few who tip it; he looks at the contents of the contagion. The Few can’t do anything with an impotent virus or a worthless idea. It must be "sticky" enough to be absorbed before it can be passed on.

As his primary examples for this law, Gladwell highlights the television programs Sesame Street and Blue’s Clues. He shows them as examples of intentionally engineering the 'stickiness' of a message, in this case increasing the stickiness of learning for children. The creators of Sesame Street studied children and what was sticky with them. They then tailored their show to meet those criteria. The sticky factor came not just from the information, but also the way it was presented, catering to children’s short attention spans. Blue’s Clues took the information and success of Sesame Street to another level by further developing the stickiness of the information, repeating it five times every week. This is a very interesting concept, that presentation can change the stickiness of a message without altering the content.

This stickiness factor is not taken into account in my simple model. It is assumed that the contagion will be sticky, that it can be transmitted, and that it will spread. This is the case for most of the things we typically consider contagions, i.e. diseases. With the example of education, Gladwell shows how non-inherently transmissible things can also become contagions. This has huge implications: We can engineer virtually anything to become an epidemic if we can figure out how to make it sticky. We can spread information, ideas and positive change just like H1N1 has spread across the world, if we only figure out how to make our information stickier.

My model is much too simplistic to describe a real-world epidemic, but so is Gladwell's commentary up to this point. He had been hinting at it, like when he described some indefinable quality that some Salespeople posses, but he truly explores the issue in the third section of the book, "The Power of Context." Here he states the very obvious point that circumstances matter. People and ideas do not exist in vacuums. There is more than just stickiness and personality type at play. We as humans have complex subconscious psychological processes that pick up on subtle environmental cues we may not even be aware of. If the song “Bulletproof” is used as a theoretical example in a class project, the context informs the reader that it is not meant as a serious suggestion. The would-be epidemic tipper needs to consider the context that the message will be transmitted in.

Within a population, up until this point, only the transmitters of epidemics (The Connectors, the Mavens, and the Salespeople) have been considered, but the recipient of the transmission is just as important. Communication is a complicated subject that demands a lot from both the sender and the receiver to be effective. The great managerial writer, Drucker, addressed this in a 1974 essay called "Functioning Communications." He delineates there the effort required by the communicator to reach the listener due to differences in mental processes. Communications can fall upon deaf ears when the communicator fails to take into account the listener's mindset. People hear what they want to hear. People's brains are hard-wired to process stimuli in certain fashions. Drucker writes how communication is almost a battle: As the communicator, you have to bring the listener around to your way of thinking. You have to bypass the natural route in the listener's mind and develop new pathways. Otherwise, they will hear what they want to hear, and not what you want them to hear.

Effective communication from the communicator's standpoint demands messages that speak to the audience. Effective communication from the listener's standpoint demands a receptive attitude and a commitment to the consideration of new ideas. This is a hard thing to accomplish when so much of the information processing that goes on in our brains occurs below our consciousness. It's almost like holding you breath: you can only do it for so long before your natural processes take over. For Gladwell, this is addressed as Context. Some messages can be groomed for mass audiences (like Sesame Street), but there will still be barriers to transmission to everybody.

Gladwell devotes considerable space toward discussing nuanced studies of various epidemics, and how his three laws played into them. One example I found particularly interesting told of suicide in the nation of Micronesia: Unheard of before a teenager took his life in the 1960s over a minor disagreement with his parents, a suicide epidemic soon swept the nation. The power of context played a powerful role here: that first suicide gave permission for the rest. Stickiness was important too: suicide, unfortunately, is absolutely sticky, and there is no way to make it less sticky. Try it once, and you are dead. One thing this example lacked, though, was any tie-in to the Few. No Connectors advertised suicide to their many acquaintances, no Mavens told the best methods, and no Salesmen advocated their friends try it. As far as I can tell, the first suicide was reported in the newspapers; the media again was the culprit for tipping this epidemic.

This is indicative of the book as a whole: Gladwell presents a wealth of provocative ideas, a wealth of interesting examples, and a wealth of succinct conclusions. His writing is expertly woven and watertight. His book is chock full of marvelous anecdotes; however, nowhere does he give an example that effectively demonstrates the importance of all of his three laws in causing epidemics to tip. This does not mean his ideas are worthless; rather, he has presented tools that can be used to create change in society, in our thinking patterns, and in the way we spread our messages. If we want to spread things that really matter, such as anti-crime waves and learning, we need to identify ways that will help these things, which are not inherently transmitted, to spread to epidemic proportions. Seen as a historical reckoning of the factors involved in the spread of epidemics, Gladwell's Tipping Point excels. He failed, however, to define a general model that we can use to predict the spread of epidemics

Book Review draft 2

What do syphilis in Baltimore, Sesame Street, Hush Puppies shoes, and crime reduction in New York City all have in common? They are all epidemics. They started with a small group of people, reached some ethereal level and exploded across a community, be it local, national, or worldwide. They are also prominently featured in Malcolm Gladwell’s book, The Tipping Point. In The Tipping Point, Gladwell examines epidemics to explore the reasons why these disparate things have been able to affect so many people. He seems personally most interested in those epidemics that can make a positive difference in people's lives, such as the learning epidemics caused by Sesame Street and Blues Clues. Regardless, he traces the elements involved in the spread of many different epidemics–be they fashion statements, non-crime waves or messages such as Paul Revere's famous cry of impending battle.

Central to the book is the idea of a tipping point: An idea, trend, or germ--a contagion--may exist at some basal level within a population, infecting roughly the same number of people that overcome it in any given time period. Some stimulus can cause an imbalance in this equilibrium, though, and the contagion will start to reach more new people than it leaves behind. This is the tipping point, and an epidemic follows. Without that push to disrupt the equilibrium, it may never reach that critical mass, that threshold it needs to cross in order to infect the whole population. Gladwell's analysis of epidemics centers around this idea: How can we identify strategies to "tip" phenomena into epidemics?

Perhaps because of the discussion of this equilibrium, I began to formulate a mathematical model to track the spread of an epidemic to go along with Gladwell's commentary. The model works roughly thus: Each member of the population in question would have a state, either "infected" or "not infected." They would also contact "x" number of people in a given time step "t", and, if infected, have a "y"% chance of "infecting" each of the people they came into contact with. Each individual would remain infected for "z" time steps. Each of these variables would be different for each person in the population (except for the time step, which would necessarily be the same for all), and, when all members of the population were considered, the total spread of the contagion could be tracked. You could predict the percent of a population "infected" with some contagion after a time period by setting an initial condition (maybe only one individual is infected to start with) and extrapolating to the desired number of time steps.

Gladwell defines the transmission of epidemics by three laws. The first of these, "The Law of the Few," explores three special types of people that can help an idea become an epidemic: his “Connectors,” “Salespeople” and "Mavens." These are the people who can tip that contagion over the edge into boundless effect. In my model, these are people who have exceptional coefficients "x", "y", and "z". The first of these, the Connectors, spread contagions exceptionally well simply by the sheer magnitude of people they know. Their "x" is through the roof. If I am studying the spread of the newest pop hit, “Bulletproof” by La Roux, an average person would pass the song along to maybe two people per day. The Connectors would get ten people to listen to it: they know more people, they are in contact with them more, and their contact is meaningful. These people have huge social networks.

What if you don’t like pop? Especially dance pop from the UK, like "Bulletproof"? Gladwell’s Salespeople will convince you that you do. Their "y" is near 100%: they have the ability to transmit ideas to everyone they meet. Gladwell’s Mavens are an interesting case. These people are experts in a narrow field. As a result, they hold a lot of sway when giving advice about that field, and people they "infect" are likely to stick with whatever the Maven is spreading. Given the right contagion--something in their field--they have a high "y," and the "z" of those they infect is likely to rise. Mavens also practice selection among contagions--they will only select the best. The case of the Maven may not apply as well to the spread of a pop hit. Maybe a music reviewer would be a maven, and a favorable review would encourage others to listen.

In this way, these three types of people infect more than their fair share; they diffuse ideas farther than normal people. Whether from sheer numbers as with the Connectors, from careful selection as with the Mavens, or with efficacy of transmission as with the Salespeople, these special individuals have the ability to tip things into epidemics.

Just by looking at my simple model, I disagree that these three types of people would be the only ones who would have the power to transform a contagion into an epidemic–There are other ways to manipulate the "x," "y" and "z" values to produce extraordinary individuals. What about someone with a high "z" who harbors a contagion for a long time–a 'Collector?' These people would be able to upset the equilibrium by transmitting the contagion for a long time–they will be singing “Bulletproof” for weeks rather than just the day or two after they hear it. I also wonder if these Connectors, Salespeople, and Mavens are truly different from the average population, or if there is a broad spectrum of ability. In any case, it is useless to define these people if you can't find them to help tip your epidemic.

The Internet has also caused Gladwell’s heroes, especially the Connectors, to lose some of their power. Social networking sites allow all of us to be Connectors. I can message hundreds of people with the click of a mouse on Facebook, and link them to “Bulletproof” on Youtube. This glut of information devalues the communications of the Connectors. Mavens lose their uniqueness when faced with thousands of their peers reviewing the same items on Amazon. Salespeople are perhaps immune, as good salesmanship requires face-to-face contact.

Additionally, it is short-sighted to say that certain types of people are necessary for an epidemic to transpire. Some exceptional contagions can spread on their own, like H1N1 and results of the presidential race in the USA.

The Few are not even necessary to tip epidemics. The media can take their place. Gladwell even acknowledges that the media can be an alternative vehicle to the “Few” for reaching many people at once. Indeed, as he addresses his second criteria, “The Stickiness Factor,” he talks about children's television as a vehicle for learning epidemics, a case in which messages are disseminated entirely by the media, not by the Few. Gladwell here focuses not on the population through which the epidemic spreads, or the Few who tip it; he looks at the contents of the contagion. The Few can’t do anything with an impotent virus or a worthless idea. It must be "sticky" enough to be absorbed before it can be passed on.

Gladwell highlights Sesame Street and Blue’s Clues as examples of intentionally increasing the 'stickiness' of a message, in this case increasing the stickiness of learning for children. The creators of Sesame Street studied children and what was sticky with them. They then tailored their show to meet those criteria. The sticky factor came not just from the information, but also the way it was presented, catering to children’s short attention spans. Blue’s Clues took the information and success of Sesame Street to another level by further developing the stickiness of the information, repeating it five times every week. This is a very interesting concept, that presentation can change the stickiness of a message without altering the content.

This stickiness factor is not taken into account in my simple model. It is assumed that the contagion will be sticky, that it can be transmitted, and that it will spread. This is the case for most of the things we typically consider contagions, i.e. diseases. With the example of education, Gladwell shows how non-inherently transmissible things can also become contagions. This has huge implications: We can engineer virtually anything to become an epidemic if we can figure out how to make it sticky. We can spread information, ideas and positive change just like H1N1 has spread across the world, if we only figure out how to make our information stickier.

My model is much too simplistic to describe a real-world epidemic, but so is Gladwell's commentary up to this point. He had been hinting at it, like when he described some indefinable quality that some Salespeople posses, but he truly explores the issue in the third section of the book, "The Power of Context." Here he states the very obvious point that circumstances matter. People and ideas do not exist in vacuums. There is more than just stickiness and personality type at play. We as humans have complex subconscious psychological processes that pick up on subtle environmental cues we may not even be aware of. If the song “Bulletproof” is used as a theoretical example in a class project, the context informs the reader that it is not meant as a serious suggestion. The would-be epidemic tipper needs to consider the context that the message will be transmitted in.

Within a population, up until this point, only the transmitters of epidemics (The Connectors, the Mavens, and the Salespeople) have been considered, but the recipient of the transmission is just as important. Communication is a complicated subject that demands a lot from both the sender and the receiver to be effective. The great managerial writer, Drucker, addressed this in a 1974 essay called "Functioning Communications." He delineates there the effort required by the communicator to reach the listener due to differences in mental processes. Communications can fall upon deaf ears when the communicator fails to take into account the listener's mindset. People hear what they want to hear. People's brains are hard-wired to process stimuli in certain fashions. Drucker writes how communication is almost a battle: As the communicator, you have to bring the listener around to your way of thinking. You have to bypass the natural route in the listener's mind and develop new pathways. Otherwise, they will hear what they want to hear, and not what you want them to hear.

Effective communication from the communicator's standpoint demands messages that speak to the audience. Effective communication from the listener's standpoint demands a receptive attitude and a commitment to the consideration of new ideas. This is a hard thing to accomplish when so much of the information processing that goes on in our brains occurs below our consciousness. It's almost like holding you breath: you can only do it for so long before your natural processes take over. For Gladwell, this is addressed as Context. Some messages can be groomed for mass audiences (like Sesame Street), but there will still be barriers to transmission to everybody.

Gladwell devotes considerable space toward discussing nuanced studies of various epidemics, and how his three laws played into them. One example I found particularly interesting told of suicide in the nation of Micronesia: Unheard of before a teenager took his life in the 1960s over a minor disagreement with his parents, a suicide epidemic soon swept the nation. The power of context played a powerful role here: that first suicide gave permission for the rest. Stickiness was important too: suicide, unfortunately, is absolutely sticky, and there is no way to make it less sticky. Try it once, and you are dead. One thing this example lacked, though, was any tie-in to the Few. No Connectors advertised suicide to their many acquaintances, no Mavens told the best methods, and no Salesmen advocated their friends try it. As far as I can tell, the first suicide was reported in the newspapers; the media again was the culprit for tipping this epidemic.

This is indicative of the book as a whole: Gladwell presents a wealth of provocative ideas, a wealth of interesting examples, and a wealth of succinct conclusions. His writing is expertly woven and watertight. His book is chock full of marvelous anecdotes; however, nowhere does he give an example that effectively demonstrates the importance of all of his three laws in causing epidemics to tip. This does not mean his ideas are worthless; rather, he has presented tools that can be used to create change in society, in our thinking patterns, and in the way we spread our messages. If we want to spread things that really matter, such as anti-crime waves and learning, we need to identify ways that will help these things, which are not inherently transmitted, to spread to epidemic proportions.

The biological/psychological (non)dichotomy

You cannot separate mind from body. We frequently do in everyday conversation and in the way we approach ourselves, but, at a fundamental level, our biological and psychological selves are the same. Even if you consider the body and mind separate entities, you have to acknowledge that they are entirely dependent upon each other: a body without a mind will not move, will not eat, will not care for itself, will die. A mind without a body cannot see, hear, feel, taste, or smell; it cannot sense anything; it cannot communicate; it cannot be.

This notion of symbiosis, that the physical and mental rely on one another in an intimate fashion, does not go far enough, though. Our physical and mental selves are linked even more fundamentally than this. Your mind is not housed in your body; rather, it is an extension of your physiology:

You have a brain. You have a physical organ made of millions and millions of neurons, connected in wonderfully complicated ways, conducting action potentials along their lengths, transmitting signals to one another through chemical molecules called neurotransmitters. You have a biological network of neural cells encased in your cranium. Everything that you think, everything that you sense, and everything that you do is dependent on that incredibly complex collection of neurons, your brain. All your thoughts and thought processes depend on the transmission of electrical signals through that tissue. Your sense organs (ears, eyes, skin, etc.) detect stimuli and transmit electrical signals to specific areas of your brain. These signals are processed in incredibly intricate ways, spinning paths through your neural network. Your actions depend on the signals reaching the motor center of your brain, causing you to move your limbs, form words with your lips and throat, and place your hands on the keyboard and type.

Raise your hand.

Okay, you can put it down.

How were you able to get your hand get up in the air? You might say, "The same way I move any other part of myself. I am in control. I think, and I move." The process is more biological than that, though. Initially, you received a visual stimulus from the computer screen, which interfaced with the photoreceptors of your eye, transmitting a signal along your optic nerve to the occipital lobe of your brain. Some processing center in your brain identified the signal as words, which were decoded into meaning by another area of neurons. The meaning was transmitted to your motor centers, which sent a signal to the muscles in your arm and shoulder, and your raised your hand. Unless you didn't. If you didn't raise your hand, it is because another pathway intervened. Maybe you are in a public place and didn't want to look foolish. Maybe you aren't engaged and are just skimming this post. Maybe you don't normally acquiesce to odd written requests. In any case, the signal encountered a group of neurons that did not send it on to your motor cortex. It took a path through your neural network that did not involve movement.

Another important point is that you may or may not have been conscious of your decision to raise your hand. Our brains operate and process stimuli much more thoroughly and deeply than we are aware of. (Many debatably reputable sources will give you ways to harness this unused power--just google 'subconscious.') The point is, your brain is like a biological supercomputer, making innumerable connections and subtle distinctions through complex neural interactions, upon which your conscious mind is entirely dependent.

Raise your hand.

Did you do it that time? It was the same visual stimulus. If you had different responses to the commands, it means that the stimulus activated different pathways each time.

Highly trafficked pathways correspond to familiar thoughts or important subconscious processes (like facial recognition and decoding of written words). New stimuli require the development of unused pathways. Making connections between ideas literally involves making connections between neurons in your brain. That's also why we 'fall into an old way of thinking' of 'get stuck in a rut'; we are playing out the same mental pathways that are present in our brains.

Drucker wrote about this in 1974 in "Functioning Communications." He delineates the effort required by the communicator to reach the listener due to differences in mental processes. Communications can fall upon deaf ears when the communicator fails to take into account the listener's mindset. People hear what they want to hear. People's brains are hard-wired to process stimuli in certain fashions. Drucker writes how communication is almost a battle: As the communicator, you have to bring the listener around to your way of thinking. You have to bypass the natural route in the listener's mind and develop new pathways. Otherwise, they will hear what they want to hear, and not what you want them to hear.

Effective communication from the communicator's standpoint demands messages that speak to the audience. Effective communication from the listener's standpoint demands a receptive attitude and a commitment to the consideration of new ideas. This is a hard thing to accomplish when so much of the information processing that goes on in our brains occurs below our consciousness. It's almost like holding you breath: you can only do it for so long before your natural processes take over.

I recently have been tangling with this issue regarding the interpretation of Gladwell's The Tipping Point. In my mind, Gladwell writes about the population dynamics that allow epidemics to spread. He frames his argument using the spread of syphilis in Baltimore. He explains the concept of the tipping point using a model of a disease. He then generalizes to all sorts of epidemics like fashion trends and waves of violence. The first time I read the book, I viewed it as a study in transmission. Gladwell did everything short of writing a mathematical model with variables like the number of individuals within a population contacted and the probability of spreading the contagion to explain the spread of epidemics. The second time I read the book, I saw the same thing. The specifics of what I have been calling the contagion do not matter--if it can be transmitted, Gladwell is talking about it. It doesn't matter whether it infects through a hostile takeover of the host's cells or by forging new pathways in the recipient's brain to develop a new way of thinking or a new desire for a product. The ultimate goal of the book, only partially achieved, was to elucidate the path that every contagion must take to become an epidemic.

Someone else who read this book saw exactly the opposite. Gladwell's use of syphilis was only a useful starting point toward getting his audience to think about headier, more abstract issues. The point of the book was not to study transmission in general, but to study the diffusion of innovation, of new ideas, and of positive changes in the world. The specifics of a model do not matter. What matters is the elucidation of tools that can be used to create change in society, in our thinking patterns, and in the way we spread our messages. The distinction between biological epidemics and those that really matter is huge: everyone knows that disease spreads; that is disease's basic function; who cares. If we want to spread things that really matter, such as anti-crime waves and learning, we need to identify ways that will help these things, which are not inherently transmitted, to spread to epidemic proportions.

As I stated, I am having a hard time making that distinction. The preceding paragraph sounds like a load of bunk to me. Due to the eccentricities of my own mental pathways, the transmission aspect of the book is most important to me. If a model can be developed that describes transmission throughout a population, that model should yield generalizable conclusions that can be applied to the spread of anything. The mechanism of actually infecting each individual is irrelevant. It is taken for granted. There may be some indication of 'transmissibility' (e.g. only 5% of contacted individuals will be infected), but the actual underlying reason that this phenomenon spreads does not matter.

I think that I am being asked to view Gladwell' Tipping Point from a different vantage point. Rather than focusing on some model, I should be focusing on _________. I'm still not sure. It's nice to talk about the spread of various positive ideas or halting the progress of negative epidemics, but without something generalizable to take away, I am just left with a bunch of anecdotes. I am trying to be receptive to a new interpretation of the book, but I cannot escape the thought processes of my brain that lead me back to the same conclusion every time I try to consider it from a different angle: We can create a model of the spread of a contagion throughout a population of dissimilar individuals; this model will allow us to engineer our own epidemics.

Our "minds" are products of our biology. If we are cognizant of the fact that our thought processes are biological processes, we can try to overcome the limitations imposed by following these same neural pathways over and over again.

Do you find this trivial? Do you think to yourself, "Who cares where our thoughts arise from. There is a distinction between my mind and body. I acknowledge that keeping an open mind is important for communication, but it doesn't matter what underlying physiological phenomena are responsible for this."

I have tried to present my thoughts in an accessible fashion. I hope that I have been able to pioneer an undiscovered path in your brain. I urge you to realize the limits imposed on your mind by your body, and try to overcome them.

A review of Gladwell's The Tipping Point

What do syphilis in Baltimore, Sesame Street, Hush Puppies shoes, and crime reduction in New York City all have in common? They are all epidemics. They started with a small group of people, reached some ethereal level and exploded across a community, be it local, national, or worldwide. They are also prominently featured in Malcolm Gladwell’s book, The Tipping Point. In The Tipping Point, Gladwell attempts to trace the elements involved in the spread of such epidemics–be they diseases, fashion statements, or messages such as Paul Revere's famous cry of impending battle. Gladwell wastes not time in defining the problem with three variables:

1) The people among whom the epidemic spreads, or "The Law of the Few"

2) The content of the epidemic (contagious disease, commercial message, etc.), or "The Stickiness Factor"

3) Environmental factors influencing the epidemic's spread, or "The Power of Context"

With these laws, Gladwell presents a framework in which all epidemics–both biological and social–can be analyzed and controlled.

Central to the book is the idea of a tipping point: A contagion may exist at some basal level within a population, infecting roughly the same number of people that overcome it in any given time period. Some stimulus can cause an imbalance in this equilibrium, though, and the contagion will start to reach more new people than it leaves behind. This is the tipping point, and an epidemic follows. Without that push to disrupt the equilibrium, it may never reach that critical mass, that threshold it needs to cross in order to infect the whole population. With his “Law of the Few,” Gladwell explores three special types of people that can help an idea become an epidemic: his “Connectors,” “Mavens” and “Salespeople.” These are the people who can tip that contagion over the edge into boundless effect.

Gladwell’s Connectors spread contagions simply by contacting lots of people. Let’s say I, a normal person, spread this contagion (how about the newest pop hit, “Bulletproof” by La Roux) to one person today. A Connector will get ten people to listen to it: he knows more people than I do, he is in contact with them more, and his contact is meaningful.

Gladwell’s Mavens spread contagions by fostering the most contagious strains. They would not spread “Bulletproof.” They would research the topic and pick a better song, one with a better beat, more artistic merit, and the best societal implications.

What if you don’t like pop? Especially dance pop from the UK? Gladwell’s Salespeople will convince you that you do. In this way, these three types of people infect more than their fair share; they diffuse ideas farther than normal people. Whether from sheer numbers as with the Connectors, from careful selection as with the Mavens, or with efficacy of transmission as with the Salespeople, these special individuals have the ability to tip things into epidemics.

I disagree that these three types of people would be the only ones who would have the power to transform a contagion into an epidemic–what about someone who harbors a contagion for a long time–a 'Collector?' These people would be able to upset the equilibrium by transmitting the contagion for a long time–they will be singing “Bulletproof” for weeks rather than just the day or two after they hear it. Additionally, it is short-sighted to say that certain types of people are necessary for an epidemic to transpire. Some exceptional contagions can spread on their own, like H1N1 and results of the presidential race in the USA.

The Internet has also caused Gladwell’s heroes, especially the Connectors, to lose some of their power. Social networking sites allow all of us to be Connectors. I can message hundreds of people with the click of a mouse on Facebook, and link them to “Bulletproof” on Youtube. This glut of information devalues the communications of the Connectors. Mavens lose their uniqueness when faced with thousands of their peers reviewing the same items on Amazon. Salespeople are perhaps immune, as good salesmanship requires face-to-face contact.

Gladwell acknowledges the media as an alternative vehicle to the “Few” for reaching many people at once. Indeed, as he addresses his second criteria, “The Stickiness Factor,” he talks about children's television as a vehicle for learning epidemics, both messages disseminated entirely by the media. Gladwell here focuses not on the population through which the epidemic spreads, or the Few who tip it; he looks at the contents of the contagion. The Few can’t do anything with an impotent virus or a worthless idea. It must be "sticky" enough to be absorbed before it can be passed on.

Gladwell highlights Sesame Street and Blue’s Clues as examples of intentionally increasing the 'stickiness' of a message, in this case increasing the stickiness of learning for children. The creators of Sesame Street studied children and what was sticky with them. They then tailored their show to meet those criteria. The sticky factor came not just from the information, but also the way it was presented, catering to children’s short attention spans. Blue’s Clues took the information and success of Sesame Street to another level by further developing the stickiness of the information, repeating it five times every week. This is a very interesting concept, that presentation can change the stickiness of a message without altering the content.

In the third section of the book, "The Power of Context", Gladwell states the very obvious point that circumstances matter. People and ideas do not exist in vacuums. There is more than just stickiness and personality type at play. Humans also have complex subconscious psychological processes that pick up on subtle environmental cues we may not even be aware of. Gladwell almost undermines some of his earlier conclusions by emphasizing the importance of context. More, though, it serves as another variable that must be taken into account. If the song “Bulletproof” is used as a theoretical example in a class project, the context informs the reader that it is not meant as a serious suggestion. The would-be epidemic tipper needs to consider the context that the message will be transmitted in.

Gladwell devotes considerable space toward discussing nuanced studies of various epidemics, and how his three laws played into them. One example I found particularly interesting told of suicide in the nation of Micronesia: Unheard of before a teenager took his life in the 1960s over a minor disagreement with his parents, a suicide epidemic soon swept the nation. The power of context played a powerful role here: that first suicide gave permission for the rest. One thing this example lacked, though, was any tie-in to the Few. No Connectors advertised suicide to their many acquaintances, no Mavens told the best methods, and no Salesmen advocated their friends try it.

This is indicative of the book as a whole: Gladwell presents a wealth of provocative ideas, a wealth of interesting examples, and a wealth of succinct conclusions. His writing is expertly woven and watertight. His book is chock full of marvelous anecdotes; however, nowhere does he give an example that effectively demonstrates the importance of his three laws in causing epidemics to tip.