Brewed Fresh Daily
Anotated links from a Cleveland area obsessive coffee drinker, avid quotation collector, voracious internet content consumer, amatuer social network analyzer, and armchair economic developer. Recently referred to as a "web activist".8/10/2003
Separation or just Spam?
Recently a group of scientists replicated Stanley Milgram's famous research of the 1960s that gave us "six degrees of separation". Using email, instead of postal mail, they basically obtained the same results as Milgram. What is fascinating to me is this... "Of more than 24,000 chains started, only 384 found their target." That is 1.6%! The reason given in the article below is "lack of interest". Probably "fear of SPAM" also plays a part. But I think there is more to it than just these two simple explanations. IMHO a study of *why only 1.6% of the chains were completed* may be more interesting than finding the average number of steps in the completed chains. It may give us insight into the *effective* distance between people. Valdis
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