Emergence 362

    Milgram’s Six Degrees experiment presented a unique and provocative insight into the world as a whole.  The idea that six billion people might all be more closely connected than we originally believed is fascinating – it has the possibility to change both the ways we think about information, approach organizational infrastructures, and our relations to each other.
    Watts approaches Milgram’s experiment as a way into what he calls the “science of networks,” the study of the interconnectedness in our world.  To help elucidate matters, he first refers to the massive West Coast power outage from the 90’s.  The massive failure of this particular system was caused as a result of the safety precautions taken.  These supposed precautions led to a series of interactions that were entirely unpredicted and unexpected, and that brought down power to a massive area of the nation.  The idea that a system can contain within it characteristics that lead to unexpected results on a massive scale is the key to the science of networks.

“At the heart of the universe is a steady, insistent beat: the sound of cycles in sync…almost as if nature has an eerie yearning for order” (1).
 

In Sync: The Emerging Science of Spontaneous Order, Cornell professor Steven Strogatz draws upon a vast array of situations in order to analyze the dynamic, decentralized behavior of coupled oscillators through such interdisciplinary lenses as mathematics, neuroscience, physics, and sociology. For his 2003 publication, Strogatz weds computational modeling to natural observation in producing a thoughtful narrative that both highlights his own contributions to the realm of chaos theory and also provokingly reflects on questions raised by colleagues’ research.

Alex Moser

Emergence 362

Prof. Paul Grobstein

March 25, 2007

Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point is a discussion of epidemics and how they begin. Gladwell presents three rules defining his concept of a tipping point, essentially a threshold at which a trend will “tip” and become an epidemic. The theory as argued is applicable to all sorts of epidemics, whether syphilis, fashion trends or crime. While written to be accessible and keep interest, The Tipping Point fails to present a truly cohesive theory largely because it relies so heavily on anecdotal evidence and implied relationships. I will present the rules of the theory and discuss the evidence Gladwell presents to explicate the strengths and weaknesses of this book.

Albert-Laszlo Barabasi’s Linked: The New Science of Networks is about how everything connects and about the importance of those connections in this world. He uses the spread of Christianity to introduce the strong effects that networks can have by emphasizing how Paul was able to master the network and spread word about Christianity. Obviously, there was not any technology in earlier times to make communication as easy as it is today; however, Paul was still able to make Christianity the biggest religion. This was made possible because of the strength of networks. Sometimes, we may not even be aware of how we are connected to certain people – even those who we are unaware of the existence of. For example, my first day at Bryn Mawr – my family friends came to drop me off and as we were meeting the international students and their families, talks led to how one of my current classmate’s mom is from the same hometown as my family friends and then they were able to figure out that they are distant cousins. Wow, the world really is small. They had never met each other before, never heard any mention of them, but nevertheless, they are related. As I started to read Linked, it made me wonder if it is possible that there are fundamental laws of networks that describe how the sum of relationships cause people to meet.

Emergence That May Become Possible By ‘Blink'

Urban planning theorist Jane Jacobs comes from a long line of deductive thinkers that can be traced back to empiricists like Thomas Hobbes and John Locke. In “The Death and Life of Great American Cities” she endeavors to apply such methods of inquiry to the modern American city. Just as Locke argued that the mind is a “tabula rasa,” Jacobs contends that most components of the urban landscape are not inherently badly or well designed; rather, the success or failure of such components — sidewalks, parks, blocks, neighborhoods — depends entirely on the surrounding environment in which they are deployed.