The Times: Tech column - Six degrees of separation/Microsoft inseecurity/Phone downloads
By David Rowan
A great virtue of writing for The Times is the knowledge that this column's readers are impeccably well connected. But here's an experiment to measure just how well: how quickly can you get an e-mail to the actor Kevin Bacon simply by passing it along a chain of personal contacts?
Start by e-mailing one friend, who must then do the same; as the circle fans out, someone will know someone who is in regular touch with the Bacon household. He'll probably wonder why Times readers are deluging him with e-mails, but tell him it's in the interests of science: we want to measure just how small the Internet has made the world. Besides, doesn't he know that Kevin Bacon's personal connections are the stuff of Internet legend?
When, in 1967, the Harvard sociologist Stanley Milgram calculated that two individuals could typically be connected through six associations or fewer, he was not to know that the Kevin Bacon Game would be his greatest legacy. The trivia game, in which every actor alive or dead can be connected to Bacon within six degrees, was one of the earliest Internet fads. Now, though, a number of leading universities have decided that there's some important science behind the game. And they are organising vast global experiments to test the Milgram thesis.
Dr Milgram sent 300 postcards to randomly selected people, mostly in Nebraska, and asked them to target a stranger in Boston. Sixty chains finally reached the man, and Milgram calculated that Americans were, on average, six acquaintances away from each other. Has that number fallen in a world wired for instant e-mail connection? Researchers at Columbia University in New York and Ohio State University have just begun to find out. In separate projects, they are mapping out how far e-mail has connected the planet. By getting 500,000 people to participate in electronic chains, they hope to map out the Net's social interactions - proving whether e-mail communication does in fact break down barriers of race and class.
As Duncan Watts, leading the Columbia project, explains, this is not simply an intellectual challenge. It should offer practical insights into the nature of online communication - helping us to understand how to impede computer viruses, or how to generate "buzz" for product launches. It might also produce better search engines. "The participants in our experiment have to solve what is essentially a global search problem - find a single person somewhere in the world - using only local information about the network (their friends)," he says. "If we can figure out how people solve the problem, and under what conditions they can and can't succeed, maybe we can design better search algorithms and better network structures for non-human applications. That would be a big step forward."
His team has chosen its targets - "across the globe and of different ages, races, professions, and socio-economic classes" - and needs volunteers who can start a chain by delivering a message to someone they know. Sign up at smallworld.sociology.columbia.edu, or, for the Ohio State project, at smallworld.sociology.ohio-state.edu.
But we recommend an entirely different website if you want to know what Internet users get up to together. The Sexchart (www.attrition.org/hosted/sexchart) is an online document that links more than 1,400 hackers and chatroom regulars who, you've guessed it, have shared sexual encounters. The current "winner", apparently, has had sex with 43 others on the chart. And not one of them is Kevin Bacon.
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Computer users have come to expect systems failures and security holes with Microsoft products. But finally, one company employee has blown the whistle. "Today we do not worry about electricity and water services being available," he wrote in an e-mail to Microsoft's 47,000 employees last week. "With telephony, we rely on its availability and security for conducting highly confidential business transactions without worrying about who we call or whether what we say will be compromised. Computing falls well short of this." For all Microsoft's boasts,"no trustworthy computing platform exists today". Gulp.
Was he fired? Actually, it was Bill Gates who sent the memo. The boss has vowed to make security his top priority this year, instead of new bells and whistles. It's about time - and very good news for PC owners if he means it.
++++
Funny what we'll pay for. Last year, Europeans spent 590 million (£364 million) on content for their mobile phones - ring tones, logos, football scores and other vital daily necessities. That's more than twice what they paid for PC-based content, according to the research company Jupiter MMXI - and 70 per cent of that was, you guessed it, from "adult" websites. The gap is predicted to grow, with phone-based content estimated to be worth some 3 billion (£1.85 billion) by 2006, with computers trailing way behind. You do have to take Jupiter's figures with a pinch of salt - its wildly optimistic forecasts helped to fire Internet fever - but the trend is clear. Newspaper and music websites would be well advised to remake themselves as phone services if they ever hope to make any money.
(The Times, January 21 2002)
A great virtue of writing for The Times is the knowledge that this column's readers are impeccably well connected. But here's an experiment to measure just how well: how quickly can you get an e-mail to the actor Kevin Bacon simply by passing it along a chain of personal contacts?
Start by e-mailing one friend, who must then do the same; as the circle fans out, someone will know someone who is in regular touch with the Bacon household. He'll probably wonder why Times readers are deluging him with e-mails, but tell him it's in the interests of science: we want to measure just how small the Internet has made the world. Besides, doesn't he know that Kevin Bacon's personal connections are the stuff of Internet legend?
When, in 1967, the Harvard sociologist Stanley Milgram calculated that two individuals could typically be connected through six associations or fewer, he was not to know that the Kevin Bacon Game would be his greatest legacy. The trivia game, in which every actor alive or dead can be connected to Bacon within six degrees, was one of the earliest Internet fads. Now, though, a number of leading universities have decided that there's some important science behind the game. And they are organising vast global experiments to test the Milgram thesis.
Dr Milgram sent 300 postcards to randomly selected people, mostly in Nebraska, and asked them to target a stranger in Boston. Sixty chains finally reached the man, and Milgram calculated that Americans were, on average, six acquaintances away from each other. Has that number fallen in a world wired for instant e-mail connection? Researchers at Columbia University in New York and Ohio State University have just begun to find out. In separate projects, they are mapping out how far e-mail has connected the planet. By getting 500,000 people to participate in electronic chains, they hope to map out the Net's social interactions - proving whether e-mail communication does in fact break down barriers of race and class.
As Duncan Watts, leading the Columbia project, explains, this is not simply an intellectual challenge. It should offer practical insights into the nature of online communication - helping us to understand how to impede computer viruses, or how to generate "buzz" for product launches. It might also produce better search engines. "The participants in our experiment have to solve what is essentially a global search problem - find a single person somewhere in the world - using only local information about the network (their friends)," he says. "If we can figure out how people solve the problem, and under what conditions they can and can't succeed, maybe we can design better search algorithms and better network structures for non-human applications. That would be a big step forward."
His team has chosen its targets - "across the globe and of different ages, races, professions, and socio-economic classes" - and needs volunteers who can start a chain by delivering a message to someone they know. Sign up at smallworld.sociology.columbia.edu, or, for the Ohio State project, at smallworld.sociology.ohio-state.edu.
But we recommend an entirely different website if you want to know what Internet users get up to together. The Sexchart (www.attrition.org/hosted/sexchart) is an online document that links more than 1,400 hackers and chatroom regulars who, you've guessed it, have shared sexual encounters. The current "winner", apparently, has had sex with 43 others on the chart. And not one of them is Kevin Bacon.
++++
Computer users have come to expect systems failures and security holes with Microsoft products. But finally, one company employee has blown the whistle. "Today we do not worry about electricity and water services being available," he wrote in an e-mail to Microsoft's 47,000 employees last week. "With telephony, we rely on its availability and security for conducting highly confidential business transactions without worrying about who we call or whether what we say will be compromised. Computing falls well short of this." For all Microsoft's boasts,"no trustworthy computing platform exists today". Gulp.
Was he fired? Actually, it was Bill Gates who sent the memo. The boss has vowed to make security his top priority this year, instead of new bells and whistles. It's about time - and very good news for PC owners if he means it.
++++
Funny what we'll pay for. Last year, Europeans spent 590 million (£364 million) on content for their mobile phones - ring tones, logos, football scores and other vital daily necessities. That's more than twice what they paid for PC-based content, according to the research company Jupiter MMXI - and 70 per cent of that was, you guessed it, from "adult" websites. The gap is predicted to grow, with phone-based content estimated to be worth some 3 billion (£1.85 billion) by 2006, with computers trailing way behind. You do have to take Jupiter's figures with a pinch of salt - its wildly optimistic forecasts helped to fire Internet fever - but the trend is clear. Newspaper and music websites would be well advised to remake themselves as phone services if they ever hope to make any money.
(The Times, January 21 2002)
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