Osmosis has long been part of our metaphorical repertoire for describing the spread of knowledge. The implied passivity no doubt rankles some teachers, and the reappropriation of a fairly precise term for such nebulous purposes confounds some scientists. Diffusion is a more generic and so perhaps more appropriate concept to be used analogically, which is exactly the approach used for modeling how health policies spread through society. The general notion of policy adoption as a diffusion process actually seems to be about 50 years old (despite how the news item frames it). The specific new contributions are models for reconstructing networks showing who spreads which policies to whom, and how quickly.
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