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Bursts: The Hidden Pattern Behind Everything We Do (2010)

by Albert-László Barabási(Favorite Author)

3.16 of 5 Votes: 1

ISBN

0525951601 (ISBN13: 9780525951605)

languge

English

genre

History & Biography

publisher

Dutton Adult

review 1: Barabasi manages to breath life and luster into a mathematical puzzle, one that explains human behavior not as Brownian motion, or random walks, but as "burstiness": bursts of activity punctuated by long, quiet intervals. He tackles the job through a clever parallel. One one path he builds the case with succinct cases drawn from modern life, each culminating (more or less) in an illustration of its "burstiness". On the other, he looks back to an epochal incident in Hungary during the early 16th century and shows how inexplicable behavior by key players is understandable using "burst" theory. This one's highly engrossing---a sure winner!
review 2: The organization of this book frustrated me. Barabasi seemed to try to emulate his title by writing in short sn... moreippets, each following a different topic and story line. Halfway through the book, he acknowledged this by asking how it would be possible for all of these snippets to come together, but that it was time to bring them together. Nothing changed, however, and the book continued to its end fragmented, disjointed, and difficult to understand.Many of the storylines fascinated me. The story of the Tracking Transience project, of Gyorgy Szekely's leading a Crusade-cum-revolution in centuries-ago Hungary, and of Barabasi's own research on innovation, human movement, and information in the current "digital" age. If they had been developed in a more traditional chapter format, I may have enjoyed the book a bit more. less

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