3 ms·
Long-term research: Slow science
- dude_abides 14y agoIt's amazing how at least some fields of science have been able to exponentially improve their experimental methodology, thanks to present-day social networks. Milgram's 1967 small world experiment that introduced the "6 degrees of separation" term consisted of 300 people trying to send physical letters to 1 target, this stock broker in Boston. 80% of the letters never reached the target, and of the ones that reached, the average number of hops was 6. Fast forward to 2008. A summer intern at Microsoft Research attempts to re-do this experiment. He constructs a graph with 180 million nodes and 1.3 billion undirected edges using MSN Messenger data, and finds the average path length between users to be 6.6. http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/horvitz/leskovec_horvitz_www2008.pdf http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/horvitz/leskov...
- pak 14y agoI normally expect the Next and Previous buttons on sites like Cracked.com that want me to generate more ad revenue with more page loads, but why five clicks for a simple article with no ads, Nature? Why can't you let me just scroll through your content, particularly when this equates to a blog post (and a Top N formatted post, to boot)?