by: rob korobkin

Murray Bookchin was one of the great twentieth century American anarchist thinkers and activists.  From his birth on January 14, 1921 to his death last year on July 30, 2006, his life impacted many, both politically as a leader of the anti-nuclear movement and the Green party and intellectually through his theories of “social ecology” and “libertarian municipalism.”  His largest influence on the radical intellectual theoretical canon came primarily in his introducing concepts of “ecology” and emphasizing the role of the natural world to movements that had previously been entirely social in orientation.  His book of essays, The Modern Crisis offers four essays that explore many of these key ideas.

“Look at the world around you. It may seem like an immovable, implacable place. It is not. With the slightest push – in just the right place – it can be tipped.” - Malcolm Gladwell

In his book The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell describes how major changes in society happen rather unexpectedly and quickly. The main focus of the book is why some trends, including epidemics, fashion trends, ideas, messages, etc., manage to become very popular, and spread like viruses of infectious disease, while others do not. He gives examples, such as how Syphilis spread in Baltimore, how Paul Revere spread the initial message of the British attack and in turn initiated the American Revolution, and how television shows like Sesame Street were able to teach children how to read, to explain how he believes trends spread. Gladwell believes that when a certain trend reaches a “tipping point,” it instantly becomes popular. This tipping point is reached when three important conditions are met.

    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.

Feminist critiques of science have largely focused their efforts upon reforming the ways in which scientists practice science via pedagogy and research, in which scientific communities are organized and in which science conceptualizes the natural world. I wish to question the ways in which science is used in public discourse by non-scientists. I argue that just as feminist critiques argue that scientific inquiry must be socially responsible, discourse on social concerns must be equally responsible for their use and understanding of scientific knowledge and explain the ways in which Karen Barad's ideas on scientific pedagogy would reinforce both arenas. I take as a case study, Lisa Belkin's October 2003 New York Times article, “The Opt-out Revolution.”

Language is one of the most nuanced tools we, as human beings, have at our disposal, but it can also be one of the clumsiest. In a world where context means everything and when one word with a clear definition but an ambiguous connotation can change how the reader interprets your statement, word choice is paramount and virtually an art form.

So the use of the word “agency” as it is perceived in the scientific community can be a little problematic at times. Common understanding of the word is “a person or thing through which power is exerted or an end is achieved”1 or “working as a means to an end; instrumentality, intermediation.”2

Paper 3: What use can you make of the feminist critique of science?

There Isn’t Just One

Dear Journal,

            So, I’m supposed to write about the feminist critique of science, drawing from my experiences in my Gender and Science class and from the readings that we had been assigned. It’s weird to think of a single feminist critique of science, or the structure of science as it has been institutionalized. From the words of Caryn Musil, who is one of the authors, whose works we read in class,

Studying a feminist perspective of science has slightly altered my priorities for my future career.  As an ecologist, I firmly believe that environmental literacy is the way to solve the anthropogenic environmental problems we are facing. For example, currently species extinction rates are extremely high due to habitat degradation caused by development and pollution.  In order to slow these rates it is necessary to help people understand their interactions with their environment and that is at the heart of my career interests.  The feminist perspective has changed my idea of the best way to pursue this interest.