

Long-term research: Slow science - kevin_morrill
http://www.nature.com/news/long-term-research-slow-science-1.12623?WT.ec_id=NATURE-20130321

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dude_abides
It'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/leskov...](http://research.microsoft.com/en-
us/um/people/horvitz/leskovec_horvitz_www2008.pdf)

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pak
I 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)?

