hisannabelle
Posts: 1992
Joined: 12/3/2006
From: Tallahassee, FL, USA
Status: offline
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master sent this to me earlier today and i thought it was pretty interesting, especially in light of the popularity of the "six degrees of separation" experiment on facebook (which it seems everybody BUT me has joined). apparently actual scientists have been doing actual experiments on this with other means of communication, though, and they came up with some pretty interesting results.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/25988549/from/ET/
quote:
The "small world theory," embodied in the old saw that there are just "six degrees of separation" between any two strangers on Earth, has been largely corroborated by a massive study of electronic communication.
With records of 30 billion electronic conversations among 180 million people from around the world, researchers have concluded that any two people on average are distanced by just 6.6 degrees of separation, meaning that they could be linked by a string of seven or fewer acquaintances.
Why does it matter that people from around the world are closely tied together? Researchers said that the knowledge might have applications for political organizations, charity efforts, natural disaster relief and missing-person searches.
"They could create large meshes of people who could be mobilized with the touch of a return key," Horvitz said.
_____________________________
a'ishah (the artist formerly known as annabelle)
i have the kind of beauty that moves...
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degrees of separation - the experiment. - 
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