I recently talked to a couple of Amwayers about issues like saturation. I
presented a) the duplicating bacteria example and b) the logistics curve.
In case youre not familiar with the duplicating bacteria example (they
werent) the story goes like this: A biologist developed a bacteria that
reproduced by splitting in two every minute. He put a tiny little sample
in a closed jar and after 37 hours the jar was half-filled with bacteria.
How long would it take to completely fill the jar? (Answer in the end of
this message.)
The first thing my audience did was to argue that this example was not
applicable because, unlike the jar, the world doesnt have finite capacity.
Being an SDer, you know how to handle this: whenever your input rate is
higher than the output rate, you have saturation. In the case of the
bacteria, it simply turned out that the output rate was 0.
You can always model the number of potential clients as a growth rate,
which in turn is a function of other variables. My audience recognized
that not everybody are potential clients, and also that some people drop
out for different reasons. We can dig into those reasons for a more
complete model, but simply using a constant turnover rate was okay for me.
And they had a figure for that.
If this helps, and if youre interested in going any further, please let
me know. Id love to join in.
Regards,
Pedro
From: "Pedro M. Mendes" <
pedro@ati.utexas.edu>
P.S. Answer: 1 minute.