Degrees of Separation

Just how small is the world?

“I am bound, you are bound, to everyone on this planet by a trail of six people,” says a character in the play and film Six Degrees of Separation. The notion that any two individuals are connected by a chain of six people or fewer is popular, but is there any truth to it?

Testing the theory 
This hypothesis was tested first in 1969 when 64 people sent a letter to one Boston stockbroker through an average of 6.2 people. This “small world experiment” entered the Internet Age in 2003 through Columbia University.

Scientists selected a wide sampling of people to send a message to 18 randomly selected people. Around 400 completed the experiment by sending an email to someone who then forwarded it to someone else. The final contact was accomplished in an average of 4.05 emails.

Then Facebook happened 
Facebook conducted a study to compute the average degrees between the 721 million active accounts held in 2011. The figure came out to be 4.74 degrees! Research out of Taiwan found only 3.9 degrees between any two people on Earth in 2013, showing that social networking continues to decrease separation.

Info Cloud
Teaching Topic: Mail and Email 教學主題: Mail 與 Email 的差別與用法
If you are a regular info cloud listener or viewer, you’ll know how often we stressed the difference between countable and uncountable nouns. Well, today, we have another uncountable noun for you, mail spelled m, a, i, l.

As a mass noun, mail is never countable. If you want to count it, you can use the word "piece". I received seven pieces of mail today.

Or if you want to use a countable word, you can use the word letter. But seven pieces of mail is not necessarily the same as seven letters. Seven pieces of mail may have only one real letter, the rest might be junk mail or bills.

Right, so that’s mail. And then there’s email which has both countable and uncountable usages depending on the context. For example, we don’t say we have seven pieces of email. We can simply say we have seven emails.

And that’s the countable usage. But you can also say you received a lot of email today. And that’s the uncountable.

Okay, so how did the countable usage come about? The word email has developed as a shorthand reference to email message which is countable. So instead of saying you have seven email messages, you can shorten it by saying you have seven emails.

Language Lab
notion n.
an idea or opinion
- He has some pretty strange notions.

hypothesis n.
/ˌhaɪˈpɑːθəsəs/
an idea or theory that is not proven but that leads to further study or discussion
- The results of the experiment did not support/confirm his hypothesis.

randomly adv.
chosen, done, etc., without a particular plan or pattern
- We were each asked to randomly pick a word on the page.

compute v.
to find out (something) by using mathematical processes : calculate


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