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Friday, August 08, 2003 |
Salon and The Well say:
Get
Grandparented!
Announcing the opportunity to lock in your Salon Premium
Subscription rate if you have the one year Think Ahead Special with Salon
Premium now!
If you regularly read the award-winning journalism of Salon.com, the WELL's
parent site, you've probably noticed that Salon will be raising the rates
for subscriptions! The old rate for the full Premium subscription there,
with the ability to suppress all banner ads, and get full benefits and
goodies, was $30 per year, and the new rate will be $35. Right now you have
an opportunity to be grandfathered in with the old rate for as long as you
keep your Salon Premium subscription. Now we'll extend that offer for
active WELL and TT community members who think ahead and pre- pay by the
year.
The WELL/Table Talk Think Ahead special offer provides memberships at
discounted rates when you pre-pay a year at a time -- and we include a
year's full subsciption to Salon Premium, soon to be a $35 value -- for no
extra charge.
- We will not be raising the rates for the Think Ahead special at
this time.
- And better than that, we want to grandfather you in. Or grandmother,
for that matter, if you prefer! The same Salon Premium lock-in will apply
to everyone who has a Think Ahead annual membership in good standing on the
15th of August. This means that should you ever decide to drop out of TT or
The WELL for a while, you will have the option of continuing a stand- alone
Salon Premium subscription at the original $30 annual rate.
- If you decide to pay by the month, you will not be locked in at this
rate, but you will still be able to issue yourself an extended day- pass to
Salon with your month-to-month WELL or TT membership.
To be eligible for this lock-in you must have an active Think Ahead
membership as of August 15.
Well membership is worth every penny, IMHO.
3:21:37 PM 
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Email experiment
confirms six degrees of separation -- NewScientist.com.
Duncan Watts and colleagues at Cornell University in New York
conducted a massive email experiment to test the theory of "six degrees of
separation", i.e. that everyone in the world can be linked through just six
social ties.
More than 60,000 people from 166 different countries took part in the
experiment. Participants were assigned one of 18 target people. They were
asked to contact that person by sending email to people they already knew
and considered potentially "closer" to the target. The targets were chosen
at random and included a professor from America, an Australian policeman
and a veterinarian from Norway.
I'd like to know a bit more about that ''chosen at random'' part.
The researchers found that it in most cases it took between
five and seven emails to contact the target. Watts says this shows that
email has not fundamentally changed the way social ties are
created.
I don't understand. They don't have any social ties with the
targets. And they didn't use any social ties outside e-mail in the
experiment. So, what warrants inferences about how social ties are created?
Duncan Watts knows a lot about social networks -- is something missing in
this story? How many jumps does it take to contact random targets
without e-mail, I wonder.
The researchers did see some internet-only relationships in the
experiment, but these accounted for only six per cent overall. By far the
most successful bonds were found to be work-related ones. And messages were
also more likely to reach their target if they were forwarded to someone of
the same sex.
The researchers were surprised to discover that message chains did not rely
on a few highly connected individuals, so-called "hubs". Previous research
by Watts and fellow Cornell mathematician Steven Strogatz had suggested
that such "hubs" were important to all social chains.
Interesting. But the experiment depends so much on the strategies subjects
choose--and on the constraint that they pick someone to e-mail--that
conclusions about modalities of social ties seem to me tenuous at best.
For example, if I draw the Australian policeman, maybe I send the message
to someone I know in Sydney, if that's the paradigm laid before me to
exploit. And then I'm almost surely still several hops away, since someone
in Sydney isn't all that much more likely to know the person than I am, in
the scheme of things, but will surely have a better developed RL social
network of Aussies. But, for all I know, I'm acquainted with someone in
London, or Austin, or Caracas who knows the police officer, or someone in
the police officer's town, but I don't know that. So, other strategies
would be to post in an appropriate topic on
The Well, a computer-conferencing system
I use, or to post a note on my weblog, or to send it to a likely ''hub''
person. These might all be much shorter paths.
I don't see all that much more to inform me at the
Small World
Project Web site. (Although there is a place for anyone to
sign up to start a new chain. Maybe I'll try it.)
Here's an earlier New Scientist piece:
Email to test "six degrees of separation", from January. And these
other pieces on A blog doesn't need a clever name on
''six degrees
of separation''.
_
3:21:30 PM
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Housekeeper
says she'll publish Ramsey book despite bar
on use of her grand jury testimony (AP -- thanks, Publishers Lunch!)
A federal appeals court ruled Wednesday that the state's grand
jury secrecy law prevents Linda Hoffman-Pugh from using the testimony in a
book as long as there's a chance another grand jury could be called to
investigate the case.
Hoffman-Pugh's lawyer said the planned book, "The Death of an Innocent,"
would contain a blank, 32-page chapter in place of the testimony.
Buyers would receive postcards to send their names and addresses to the
publisher to receive copies of the chapter if it is ever published,
attorney Darnay Hoffman, said.
_
2:21:22 PM
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EU confirms intent to fine Microsoft for antitrust abuses (AP).
We are minded to impose a fine for the past and minded to
impose remedies for the future, and we will adopt a final decision which
does exactly that, said Tilman Lueder, a spokesman for the EU's
antitrust office, the European Commission.
The EU can fine violators up to 10 percent of their worldwide sales --
which would be more than $3 billion in Microsoft's case. In practice, fines
have never exceeded 1 percent, which would still be an EU record but easily
managed by a company with cash reserves of $49 billion.
2:21:19 PM
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On those sixteen little words Bush spoke in the State of the Union address and whether he really, really, really lied or not: Steve Martin weighs in, and scores in multiple games at once.
It All Depends on What You Mean by 'Have'. It seems that so many words with the letter "v" are difficult to use and spell. By Steve Martin. [New York Times: Opinion]
9:35:49 AM
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Gamers Struggle to Preserve Past. Thousands still long to play video game classics like Joust and Tempest. Unfortunately, the originals are becoming harder to find. Some are actually in danger of being lost forever. And the industry isn't willing to help preserve them. By Suneel Ratan. [Wired News]
I loved Joust!
9:31:13 AM
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Maukie is a simply darling, Shockwave kittie.
5:30:32 AM
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