The Tipping Point

The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference is the debut book by Malcolm Gladwell, first published by Little Brown in 2000. Gladwell defines a tipping point as "the moment of critical mass, the threshold, the boiling point". The book seeks to explain and describe the "mysterious" sociological changes that mark everyday life. As Gladwell states, "Ideas and products and messages and behaviors spread like viruses do". The examples of such changes in his book include the rise in popularity and sales of Hush Puppies shoes in the mid-1990s and the steep drop in New York City's crime rate after 1990.

The three rules

Malcolm Gladwell describes the "three rules of epidemics" (or the three "agents of change") in the tipping points of epidemics.

The Law of the Few

"The Law of the Few", or, as Malcolm Gladwell states, "The success of any kind of social epidemic is heavily dependent on the involvement of people with a particular and rare set of social gifts". According to Malcolm Gladwell, economists call this the "80/20 Principle, which is the idea that in any situation roughly 80 percent of the 'work' will be done by 20 percent of the participants" (see Pareto Principle). These people are described in the following ways:

The Tipping Point (The Roots album)

The Tipping Point is the sixth studio album by American hip hop band The Roots, released July 13, 2004 on Geffen Records and Interscope Records. It is named after Malcolm Gladwell's book of the same name (2000), and it serves as the follow-up to Phrenology (2002). The album is a musical departure from their previous work, featuring a more diverse, yet pop-oriented sound, and it contains lyrics associated with rapping-prowess, political insight, and social commentary.The Tipping Point has been noted by music writers for exhibiting and emphasizing soul, jazz, and funk influences as well. The song "I Don't Care" was featured on the soundtrack of the game, Gran Turismo 4.

Reception

The album debuted at number four on the U.S. Billboard 200 chart, selling 109,000 copies in its first week. Despite mixed criticism towards its production and lyrical substance,The Tipping Point received generally positive reviews from most music critics, based on an aggregate score of 72 out of 100 on Metacritic.

Tipping point

Tipping point may refer to:

Science

Other uses

Tipping point (physics)

A tipping point is an example of hysteresis in which the point at which an object is displaced from a state of stable equilibrium into a new equilibrium state is qualitatively dissimilar from the first.

In electric power

Tipping points are commonly used in electric switches to assure fast opening and closing of switch contacts, so as to minimize electric arc formation and prevent burning or welding of the switch contacts.

Toggle switches

The switch mechanism is designed to have two tipping points that are a mirror image of each other, with the contact actuator always resting at one tipping point or the other. Movement of the switch control lever applies tension to a spring, until the control lever crosses the equilibrium point of the contact actuator. The spring then pushes the actuator to the opposite tipping point, releasing the spring tension.

There are several advantages to the tipping point mechanism in comparison to old-fashioned direct-operated knife switches:

Tipping point (sociology)

In sociology, a tipping point is a point in time when a group—or a large number of group members—rapidly and dramatically changes its behavior by widely adopting a previously rare practice.

The phrase was first used in sociology by Morton Grodzins when he adopted the phrase from physics where it referred to the adding a small amount of weight to a balanced object until the additional weight caused the object to suddenly and completely topple, or tip. Grodzins studied integrating American neighborhoods in the early 1960s. He discovered that most of the white families remained in the neighborhood as long as the comparative number of black families remained very small. But, at a certain point, when "one too many" black families arrived, the remaining white families would move out en masse in a process known as white flight. He called that moment the "tipping point".

The idea was expanded and built upon by Nobel Prize-winner Thomas Schelling in 1972. A similar idea underlies Mark Granovetter's threshold model of collective behavior.

Tipping point (climatology)

A climate tipping point is a somewhat ill-defined concept of a point when global climate changes from one stable state to another stable state, in a similar manner to a wine glass tipping over. After the tipping point has been passed, a transition to a new state occurs. The tipping event may be irreversible, comparable to wine spilling from the glass: standing up the glass will not put the wine back.

Definition

The IPCC AR5 report stated with medium confidence that precise levels of climate change sufficient to trigger a tipping point, defined as a threshold for abrupt and irreversible change, remain uncertain, and that the risk associated with crossing multiple tipping points increases with rising temperature.

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