Duncan Watts (see entry for 1/25) gave a talk at the MIT Media Lab today. I wasn’t able to get into Cambridge to see it, but it was simulcast on the web (the webcast failed 45 minutes into the presentation, but that was not bad). Called, “Six Degrees: Science of the Connected Age,” it was a good history of social network study “and a background on the mathematics involved.

A real point to ponder. The mathematics demonstrate this Small World Fact: regardless of size of a random network, roughly five random shortcuts reduce the average path length by a factor of 1/2. This would mean that in a big organization, if the average separation among employees is something like 6, then if you introduce five people at random to others (presumably others that they do not know), then the number of degrees of separation will fall to roughly 3. Hm.