"[…] an epidemic does not always percolate through an entire population. There is a percolation threshold below which the epidemic has died out before most of the people have." (Manfred Schroeder, "Fractals, Chaos, Power Laws Minutes from an Infinite Paradise", 1990)
"Epidemics are sensitive to the conditions and circumstances of the times and places in which they occur." (Malcolm T Gladwell, "The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference", 2000)
"Epidemics tip because of the extraordinary efforts of a few select carriers. But they also sometimes tip when something happens to transform the epidemic agent itself. This is a well-known principle in virology. The strains of flu that circulate at the beginning of each winter's flu epidemic are quite different from the strains of flu that circulate at the end." (Malcolm T Gladwell, "The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference", 2000)
"Epidemics are another example of geometric progression: when a virus spreads through a population, it doubles and doubles again, until it has (figuratively) grown from a single sheet of paper all the way to the sun in fifty steps. As human beings we have a hard time with this kind of progression, because the end result - the effect - seems far out of proportion to the cause. To appreciate the power of epidemics, we have to abandon this expectation about proportionality. We need to prepare ourselves for the possibility that sometimes big changes follow from small events, and that sometimes these changes can happen very quickly." (Malcolm T Gladwell, "The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference", 2000)
"For any given population of susceptibles, there is some critical combination of contact frequency, infectivity, and disease duration just great enough for the positive loop to dominate the negative loops. That threshold is known as the tipping point. Below the tipping point, the system is stable: if the disease is introduced into the community, there may be a few new cases, but on average, people will recover faster than new cases are generated. Negative feedback dominates and the population is resistant to an epidemic. Past the tipping point, the positive loop dominates .The system is unstable and once a disease arrives, it can spread like wildfire that is, by positive feedback-limited only by the depletion of the susceptible population." (John D Sterman, "Business Dynamics: Systems thinking and modeling for a complex world", 2000)
"It takes only the smallest of changes to shatter an epidemic's equilibrium. [...] There is more than one way to tip an epidemic, in other words. Epidemics are a function of the people who transmit infectious agents, the infectious agent itself, and the environment in which the infectious agent is operating. And when an epidemic tips, when it is jolted out of equilibrium, it tips because something has happened, some change has occurred in one (or two or three) of those areas. These three agents of change I call the Law of the Few, the Stickiness Factor, and the Power of Context." (Malcolm T Gladwell, "The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference", 2000)
"Simply by finding and reaching those few special people who hold so much social power, we can shape the course of social epidemics. In the end, Tipping Points are a reaffirmation of the potential for change and the power of intelligent action." (Malcolm T Gladwell, "The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference", 2000)
"That is the paradox of the epidemic: that in order to create one contagious movement, you often have to create many small movements first." (Malcolm T Gladwell, "The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference", 2000)
"The existence of the tipping point means it is theoretically possible to completely eradicate a disease. Eradication does not require a perfect vaccine and universal immunization but only the weaker condition that the reproduction rate of the disease fall and remain below one so that new cases arise at a lower rate than old cases are resolved." (John D Sterman, "Business Dynamics: Systems thinking and modeling for a complex world", 2000)
"These three characteristics - one, contagiousness; two, the fact that little causes can have big effects; and three, that change happens not gradually but at one dramatic moment - are the same three principles that define how measles moves through a grade-school classroom or the flu attacks every winter. Of the three, the third trait - the idea that epidemics can rise or fall in one dramatic moment - is the most important, because it is the principle that makes sense of the first two and that permits the greatest insight into why modern change happens the way it does. The name given to that one dramatic moment in an epidemic when everything can change all at once is the Tipping Point." (Malcolm T Gladwell, "The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference", 2000)
"This is the first lesson of the Tipping Point. Starting epidemics requires concentrating resources on a few key areas. The Law of the Few says that Connectors, Mavens, and Salesmen are responsible for starting word-of-mouth epidemics, which means that if you are interested in starting a word-of-mouth epidemic, your resources ought to be solely concentrated on those three groups." (Malcolm T Gladwell, "The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference", 2000)
"We often hear warnings that some social problem is 'epidemic'. This expression suggests that the problem's growth is rapid, widespread, and out of control. If things are getting worse, and particularly if they're getting worse fast, we need to act." (Joel Best, "Damned Lies and Statistics: Untangling Numbers from the Media, Politicians, and Activists", 2001)
"In a complex society, individuals, organizations, and states require a high degree of confidence - even if it is misplaced - in the short-term future and a reasonable degree of confidence about the longer term. In its absence they could not commit themselves to decisions, investments, and policies. Like nudging the frame of a pinball machine to influence the path of the ball, we cope with the dilemma of uncertainty by doing what we can to make our expectations of the future self-fulfilling. We seek to control the social and physical worlds not only to make them more predictable but to reduce the likelihood of disruptive and damaging shocks (e.g., floods, epidemics, stock market crashes, foreign attacks). Our fallback strategy is denial." (Richard N Lebow, "Forbidden Fruit: Counterfactuals and International Relations", 2010)
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