martin short

(related: kennedy center honors, kennedy center honors 2007, kennedy center, kennedy center awards, super tuesday, martin short, )

The airport newsstand is not where I generally find my reading materials. And the business books section of said airport newsstand is one of the specific places youre unlikely to find me loitering. I rather pride myself on an aversion to the cheesy books one tends to encounter there, and so my first encounter with The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell comes some six years after the rest of the world was exposed to it. Im intentionally recording my thoughts on the book before doing any internet research on what, if any, consensus has been arrived at by the hive mind.

Mr. Gladwell is best known, of course, as the love-child of Martin Short and Buckwheat:

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&though some people may be surprised to know that hes had an article or two published in an obscure rag out of New York with which hes affiliated.

Im not going to rehash the main points of the book. Im sure there are a thousand better places to go for a quick overview. But a summary sufficient martin short my purposes goes thus: the Tipping Point explores the emergence and spread of societal trends (fashion, habits, crime, etc.) by means of a running comparison with disease epidemiology, pointing out unexpected non-linearities and providing speculations as to hidden causes for the explosive spread (or, conversely, failure to launch) of these trends. Though the book is ostensibly aimed at business readers (according to its marketing collateral and genre filing in the newsstand), its most compelling proposals seem to be the novel approaches to problems such as crime, smoking, and disease eradication suggested by example.

First, a coincidence, connection, link, call it what you will. The opening example given in the book is that of the resurgence of Hush Puppies as a stylish footwear choice, in the mid- 90s, owing to its kitchy-ness being mined by trend setters in New York. I happen to have grown up, K-12, with the son of the CEO of Wolverine World Wide martin short company that owns Hush Puppies). We did an incredible number of shockingly stupid things together. Anyway. Whats interesting is that my schoolmates name just came up in a conversation I had with my sister the day martin short yesterday, and thats the first time Id thought of him in at least a couple of years. (The context of that discussion is not entirely relevant here. Lets just say that he and I would provide a rather dramatic counterpoint to Gladwells insinuation that people growing up in the same social martin short anu solankigolden gate fields tend to have similar values and lifestyle choices. Exhibit A: he became a close adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney. I, the record will clearly show, did not.)

The reason this connection between myself and the Hush Puppy, and therefore between myself and this very book, strikes me as so interesting is because I am - according to a test Gladwell presents in his book - not a very connected guy. Like, please hang up and try your call again not connected. Briefly, the test consists of a list of 250 surnames, and youre supposed to go through the list and give yourself a point every time you know someone with that last name. Tally up your points, thats your connectedness score. The average score on the test is 41. The scores for those super nodes in the global social network, people deemed to be those all important connectors that figure into Gladwells scheme of things, are over 100. I scored 11.

While the talk about the necessity of Connectors, Mavens, and Salesman to make something really take off is interesting, and the examples illuminating, the basic concepts seemed rather familiar to me, and therefore didnt come across as revolutionary thinking. Perhaps my reaction would have been different if I had read the book in 2000 when it originally came out, but popular digests of complexity martin short have given even a layman like me a healthy exposure to explanations of emergent riddick bowe in complex systems that exhibit non-linear dynamics. Come to think of it, didnt a different Malcolm teach us about that in Jurassic Park?

On the other hand, the examples describing environmentally-effected behavioral modification are truly fascinating. The idea that traits we normally associate with (assign to?) people are not constant, but are more accurately described as dominant behavioral patterns exhibited by the person in the environment in which we normally observe them never really occurred to martin short before. I mean, Id been exposed to people who espoused, for example, making children wear uniforms to school to make them behave better, but I wasnt aware of the various ways by which sociologists had studied the phenomenon. And I thought Rudy was just being a hard-ass by cracking down on panhandlers in NYC; I had never seen it mentioned that this was part of a larger effort to basically change the environment such that it would be less likely to incite criminal behavior.

I guess the trick is to understand how the environment can be manipuated to make people behave how you want them martin short behave. Eeck! Did I just say that?