Fads and Feeding

Food Fads, Facts, and Fancies

THE MEDICAL or food quack is one of the most pernicious influences scientific nutrition has to meet. The food quack today uses many of the same devices, modernized, that the patent-medicine vendor used a generation ago. The quack of former days was so crude in his statements that the modern consumer wonders how people ever could have believed such buncombe. Even today there is plenty of flagran...

Management Fads, Pedagogies, and Other Soft Technologies

We present a model for the diffusion of management fads and other technologies which lack clear objective evidence about their merits. The choices made by non-Bayesian adopters reflect both their own evaluations and the social influence of their peers. We show, both analytically and computationally, that the dynamics lead to outcomes that appear to be deterministic in spite of being governed by...

Reinforcement-Driven Spread of Innovations and Fads

We propose kinetic models for the spread of permanent innovations and transient fads by the mechanism of social reinforcement. Each individual can be in one of M + 1 states of awareness 0, 1, 2, . . . ,M , with state M corresponding to adopting an innovation. An individual with awareness k < M increases to k+1 by interacting with an adopter. Starting with a single adopter, the time for an initi...

Hairy Heel Warts: Fads and Fashions

Lameness is an economically important problem in dairy cattle worldwide. Economic losses resulting from lameness arise not only from the cost to treat clinical cases but also from decreased milk production, decreased reproductive efficiency and premature culling. New York researchers estimate the total cost of lameness per 100 cows per year to be nearly $9000. The average incidence was 30 cases...

We need leaders, not leadership fads.