An Example of a "Learning Process" Journal (using the 2 colored box format)

Book: Nexus by Mark Buchanan.

Source: New York: W W Norton, 2002.

It is 5:30 am (Tuesday). I hope to complete my note making for this book this morning.

Chapter 10 Tipping Points

• "A book of recent years that seems to have fired the public imagination is Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point." [p. 158]
• "The central idea of The Tipping Point is that tiny and apparently insignificant changes can often have consequences out of all proportion to themselves, and that this accounts for the fact that sweeping changes often rise up out of nowhere to transform industries, communities, and nations." [p. 158]
• "human nature ... a susceptibility to influence and a prediliction toward imitation." [p. 160]
• "Advertising is an immense industry for a very good reason: what we think and want can be influenced." [p. 160]
• "... it is fair to wonder if this comparison is anything more than a loose analogy. Do fashions and ideas really spread like viruses and have the potential to erupt into epidemics?" [p. 161]
• "What determines whether a disease explodes into a nightmaraish epidemic or instead quietly fades away? ...The proximity of people, in fact, is one of the reasons why we get colds in winter. ... everyone sits around indoors ... in close quarters, and the virus has a field day. All manner of complicated details affect how a disease spreads. ... Nevertheless, the situation is not necessarily as omplicated as it seems. ... The nub of the issue is this: if one person gets infected, how many others, on average, does this person directly infect?" [p. 162-3]
• "The real question in trying to decide about the notion of 'idea viruses' is how much the details matter, and the emerging science of networks reveals how to do that." [p. 164]
• "At the center of this branch of physics is a little game known as the contact process. ... Everything that physicists have discovered indicates that no matter you bend the rules, there is always some sharp tipping point" [p. 166]
• "Gladwell suggested that the connectors in a society, those superconnected few, play a disproportionate role in helping influences to spread." [p. 168]

I spotted Gladwell's book the day after I completed reading Nexus and immediately purchased it. I plan to begin reading it as soon as I have finished "Linked".

The central idea of the Tipping Point is also related to chaos theory and the butterfly effect. While the central idea may be true, that does not mean that we know which small change will have what large consequence. But it does mean that we do not always have to look for large changes.

The physics 'game' of contact process is very similar to Conway's Game of Life. This is getting close to Wolfram's New Kind of Science as well.

Chapter 11 Breaking Out, Small-World Style

• "What pushes the epidemic over the edge is not the likelihood of it moving from one person to another, but a change in the very architecture of the social network." [p. 178]
• "To tackle some diseases, we may need a more specific 'small-world' approach." [p. 180]
• "If a disease cannot hop easilty or fast enough, if too many people are vaccinated, or if it kills those it infects too quickly, a single case will generate less than one other new case. As a result, the infection, being below the tipping point, should dwindle and ultimately disappear. ... this is never the case in an aristocratic network. ... The superactive core of the connectors is enough to guarantee that one infection will lead, on average, to more than one." [p. 181]
• "... a treatment program targeting connectors can restore the tipping point by altering the very architecture of the social network itself. ... The treatment of a very few, but a special few, may be the secret to stamping out the disease." [p. 182]
• "Ironically, when it comes to AIDS, for example, the recipe for stopping the epidemic is not mass treatment and education, but highly selective measures targeted intelligently toward the special few." [p. 183]

The first quote is significant. This is the heart of the argument that network theory is important.

Let's play with the idea of the spread of a new idea (i.e. learning). We should focus on the connectors (i.e. the most socially active among the peer group). If they get excited about the idea, then they should help spread it. Do I agree with this??

Chapter 12 Laws for the Living

• This chapter is about simulation models in economics that are built on a network principle.
• "Giving people random amounts of wealth to start out, and letting the economy run for a long time, Bouchard and Mezard found that a small fraction of the people always ended up possessing a large fraction of the entire wealth. ... This result occurred despite the fact that every person in the model was endowed with identical 'money-making' skills." [p. 192]
• "Taxation ... the wealth will become distributed somewhat more equitably, with the rich owning a smaller fraction of the overall pie. Somewhat more surprisingly, the model suggests that a like distribution of wealth should result from any economic measures aimed at boosting spending right across the economy." [p. 194]
• "... the irregularity of investment returns stirs up wealth differences, while transactions of all types between people tend to wipe them out." [p. 195]

Chapter 13 Beyond Coincidence

• "Year after year we are becoming better equipped to accomplish the things we are striving for. But what are we striving for?" [p. 197]
• "The very aim of the science of complexity is to discover patterns in complex networks of all kinds and to learn how we might use this understanding to better ourselves and our world. Central to this task is the notion of emergence, the idea that meaningful order can emerge all on its own in complex systems made of many interacting parts." [p. 198]
• "In a clustered network, most of the links between people are strong links, endowed with history and cemented with frequent interaction. ... shared experience and proximity through time build ethical feeling and shared norms. ... Perhaps most of what is learned is not by explicit instruction by by nonverbal communication as the new employee comes to see how colleagues behave and how the organization works." [p. 202]
• "Social capital is the ability of a team to work as a team on its own, willingly, without participation being managed by legally binding rules and regulations, the need for which is already a signal of lacking efficiency." [p. 203]
• "On the other hand, there are drawbacks to too much clustering ... To live within a cluster is to be protected from differing norms, and also from truly novel ways of thinking, patterns of behavior, or pieces of information." [p. 204]

Reading this book has led by to two new books: Linked and The Tipping Point.

I must say that I am very excited about the ideas.

Mathematics Index