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In this global study, more than 60,000 people tried to get in touch with one of 18 people in 13 countries. The targets included a professor at Cornell University, a veterinarian in the Norwegian army and a police officer in Australia. Despite the ease of sending e-mail, the failure rate turned out much higher than what Dr. Milgram had found, possibly because many of the recipients ignored the messages as drips in a daily deluge of spam.
Of the 24,613 e-mail chains that were started, a mere 384, or fewer than 2 percent, reached their targets. The successful chains arrived quickly, requiring only four steps to get there. The rest foundered when someone in the middle did not forward the e-mail.
As in most social networks, it is not just a question of who knows whom, but who is willing to help.
Of the people who received an unsolicited e-mail message in the experiment, 37 percent sent it on, a relatively high participation rate. But with nearly two-thirds of the recipients not forwarding the message at all, the number of continuing e-mail chains dwindled quickly with each successive step.
When the researchers asked people why they did not participate, less than 1 percent replied that they could not think of anyone to send the e-mail message to, suggesting that most simply did not want to be bothered.
Thus, the researchers assumed that many more of the e-mail chains could have been completed. They calculated that half of them would have been finished in five steps or less if the first sender and the target lived in the same country, and seven steps otherwise.
Dr. Judith S. Kleinfeld, a professor of psychology at the University of Alaska who has described ''six degrees of separation'' as an ''academic equivalent of an urban myth,'' said the conclusion was not warranted.
The study cannot tell how many chains would have meandered indefinitely without reaching the target.
Instead, that success rate might reflect more about the participants. Eighty-five percent of them had a college education and more than half were American.
The social networks did not exhibit the hub-and-spoke structure of airline routes. When asked how they selected whom to send the messages to, participants reported that they looked for someone who lived in the same geographical area as the target or who worked in the same field, not to someone who knew lots of people.
For example, Eric Albert of Newton, Mass., received a message from his cousin that was aimed for a reporter at Bloomberg News in New York. He forwarded it to Will Shortz, the crossword puzzle editor of The New York Times, a fellow member of the National Puzzlers' League.
''I figured Will Shortz since he works in New York and he works at The New York Times and knows lots of people so he probably knows somebody who works at Bloomberg News or at least knows someone who knows someone who works at Bloomberg News,'' Mr. Albert said.
Dr. Albert-Laszlo Barabasi, a professor of physics at the University of Notre Dame who has advocated the idea of well-connected people who act as major social hubs, said the Columbia study did not argue against the existence of hubs.
Rather, he said, people use different channels of communication for different purposes. People might call on a busy, important acquaintance in an emergency, like seeking a organ donor, but not for trivial matters. ''What it nicely shows is that for the purpose of this particular experiment, they tend to avoid the hubs, or the hubs drop the message,'' he said.
The Columbia researchers have begun an improved experiment that will delve more deeply into how people decide whom to message. For the first time, participants will also be able to contact more than one acquaintance.
The follow-up experiment is at http://smallworld.columbia.edu.
Application files are piled high this month in colleges across the country. Admissions officers are poring over essays and recommendation letters, scouring transcripts and standardized test scores.
But something is missing from many applications: a class ranking, once a major component in admissions decisions.
In the cat-and-mouse maneuvering over admission to prestigious colleges and universities, thousands of high schools have simply stopped providing that information, concluding it could harm the chances of their very good, but not best, students.
Canny college officials, in turn, have found a tactical way to respond. Using broad data that high schools often provide, like a distribution of grade averages for an entire senior class, they essentially recreate an applicant's class rank.
The process has left them exasperated.
"If we're looking at your son or daughter and you want us to know that they are among the best in their school, without a rank we don't necessarily know that," said Jim Bock, dean of admissions and financial aid at Swarthmore College.
William M. Shain, dean of undergraduate admissions at Vanderbilt University, said, "There's a movement these days to not let anybody know that a kid has done better than other kids."
Admissions directors say the strategy can backfire. When high schools do not provide enough general information to recreate the class rank calculation, many admissions directors say they have little choice but to do something virtually no one wants them to do: give more weight to scores on the SAT and other standardized exams.
But high schools persist. The Miami-Dade County School Board decided last month to discontinue class rankings. Jeanne Friedman, the principal of Miami Beach High School and chairwoman of a committee of principals that lobbied to end ranking, said principals thought it would cut down on competition in schools and force college admissions officials to look more closely at each applicant.
"When you don't rank, then they have to look at the total child," Dr. Friedman said.
The shift away from class rank began with private schools making calculations that admissions officers might not look favorably on a student with an A-minus average and strong SAT scores who ranked 25th or 35th in a talented class of 150 students.
But the movement has accelerated over the past five years or so, many deans of admissions say. Now nearly 40 percent of all high schools have either stopped ranking their students or have ceased giving that information to colleges, according to a survey released last year by the National Association for College Admission Counseling, which represents high school guidance counselors and college admissions officers.
At Kenyon College in Ohio, 60 percent of the students who enrolled last fall as freshmen did not apply with a class ranking. At Vanderbilt, 57 percent of those who applied for admission this year did not have a class rank. Last year, 51 percent of the applicants at Swarthmore and at the University of Massachusetts had no class rank, as did 42 percent of applicants to the University of Oregon.
Many college deans deplore the trend, saying it forces them to either recreate class rank, make less informed decisions or overemphasize results on standardized tests.
That is because when a high school provides a student's grade point average without giving class rank or other information that puts the grade in context, it significantly diminishes the meaning of the grade, Mr. Shain and a dozen other admissions directors said.
"If a kid has a B-plus record, what does that mean?" said Jim Miller, the dean of admissions at Brown University. "If a school doesn't give any A's, it could be a very good record. You've got to position the kids in some relative environment."
Mr. Shain said the lack of information could result in judging the student more on standardized test results, something he said was counterproductive.
"The less information a school gives you, the more whimsical our decisions will be," he said. "And I don't know why a school would do that."
While admissions officials emphasize the need for class rankings to view a student in context, the impulse to do away with rankings came from parents and high school administrators who thought colleges were failing to view students in their full context when they used shortcuts like class rank.
Sometimes students are separated in class rankings by a few hundredths of a point in a four-point grading system, in which an A is worth four points and a B three points. In the most competitive private and public high schools, the gap between a student ranked second and one ranked 14th can be minuscule.
Private schools in particular make this argument.
"Especially in schools that are smaller, ranking is something that could hurt applicants," said Myronee A. Simpson, associate director of college guidance at the Ranney School, a private school in Tinton Falls, N.J. "Our top 10 percent of the class here, since we have 46 seniors, would be four or five students."
Some high schools have other motivations for eliminating class ranking: to restrain cutthroat competition among students and to encourage them to take challenging courses without worrying about their grades.
"The day that we handed out numerical rank was one of the worst days in my professional life," said Margaret Loonam, a co-principal and director of guidance at Ridgewood High School, a public school in northern New Jersey that stopped telling students and colleges about class rank a decade ago. "They were sobbing. Only one person is happy when you hand out rank: the person who is No. 1."
"In a school like this, where the top 30 percent of the class is strong academically, it was unfair to all of those students who are in that elite group," Mrs. Loonam said.
At some schools, including Ridgewood, officials continue to maintain class rankings in secret, disclosing them only when absolutely necessary, like when a student is applying to military academies, which require class rank, or when they are competing for merit scholarships that require the information.
When high schools do not provide rankings, the broad information they sometimes include about grades can come in many forms: a bar graph showing how many students in a class had grade averages of A-minus to A or B-plus to B; a table listing grade averages by deciles (which averages fell in the top 10 percent of a class, for example); and even a graphic device called a scattergram, which shows the distribution of grades by plotting a dot for each grade average in a graduating class.
That allows colleges to estimate where a student ranks.
Still, some institutions, especially larger universities, may not have the time for that.
"If we're looking at a particular student's file and we can't find a proxy for class rank, then we move on and we make a decision without it," said Martha F. Pitts, assistant vice president for enrollment management at the University of Oregon. "The question is, how good is that decision? Have we made a decision that is not as well informed as it could have been?"
For some, the decline of class rankings represents an opportunity. "I think it kind of frees us in some ways; it enables us to take the kids who are a joy to teach," said Jennifer Delahunty Britz, dean of admissions and financial aid at Kenyon College. "It allows you to tailor your admission process to what your institution strives for."
But that is a distinctly minority view. Mr. Shain of Vanderbilt said an internal review showed that the admission rate at Vanderbilt was highest for students with a class rank and lowest for those whose schools provided neither a rank nor general data about grades.
"You're saying your grades don't matter and that you won't tell us what they mean," Mr. Shain said. "I think it's an abdication of educational responsibility."
BLUFFS — A few decades ago, girls’ basketball was … well, kind of boring.
But that was before Brian Bettis got hold of it.
Bettis is one of the people who helped the game make that transition, at least in this part of the state. His teams have always pushed the tempo on offense, even when many teams were happy to score 35 points a game. His teams have always played tough defense, even when most sat back in a zone. His teams were among the first in the area to use a full-court press.
He didn’t invent any of those things, of course, but he incorporated them into his teams’ style of play. Bettis thinks of himself not so much as an innovator, but as a motivator.
Bettis has been getting the most out of his players for 21 years now as head coach of the former Bluffs-Meredosia and current West Central girls’ basketball teams. His career record stands at 442 wins, 177 losses. None of his teams has ever had a losing record. He’s won a state championship. And tonight he’ll be inducted into the Illinois Basketball Coaches Association Hall of Fame.
Coaching girls’ basketball was the last thing he wanted to do.
Bettis grew up in Murrayville, and played baseball and football for four years at Jacksonville High School. He played basketball through his sophomore year but gave it up after breaking his foot during football. He went on to play baseball at Lincoln Land and later at Northwestern State University in Natchitoches, La.
After college, Bettis was hired as a teacher at Bluffs High School — and as coach for junior high boys’ basketball, junior high baseball and high school baseball.
Still, it took some convincing to get Bettis to take on girls’ basketball. It was too slow. “I just didn’t think I would enjoy doing it,” he said.
He won games right away. Bettis’ first two girls’ basketball teams finished with 21 and 23 wins. His teams have won 11 regional championships, with sectional and super-sectional titles in 2009 and 2011. West Central finished second in the state tournament in 2009 and won the state championship in 2011.
Bettis-coached teams have never won fewer than 15 games in a single season. His worst record was 15-13 in 2000-01. Since Bluffs co-oped with Winchester in 2003, West Central has won at least 20 games in all but two seasons. The Cougars were 32-3 the year they won the state title.
Despite his early success, Bettis’ first few years were difficult.
He adjusted. Bettis said in general, girls can be more sensitive to criticism than boys. But at the same time, he said girls are easier to coach because when they’re trying to learn a new skill or concept, they don’t give up.
Bettis can still seem a little gruff at times and “voiceful,” as he calls it. But he’s a lot less controlling than he used to be. His practices are different than most. During free throws, players split into six groups with two players at each basket shooting and the rest rebounding. Players talk to one another as music blares over the sound system.
“I don’t care that they talk — as long as the two shooters are doing what they’re supposed to,” Bettis said. “And that goes back to that control thing. If I’d have been 20 years earlier doing junior high boys, I’d have been mad. I’d have been screaming. But there are things that you can control … You don’t want to make practice or a game where it seems like a job. It’s a game, and it should be fun, and that’s what we try to do.
Girls’ basketball in this area has improved across the board since Bettis started coaching. Teams are better. Coaching is better. And coaches stick with their programs longer than they used to.
Bettis considered quitting two years ago when he didn’t think his players were working as hard as he thought they should. By the end of the season, the players pulled together and won a regional, starting a run of three straight regional titles.
Now quitting is the last thing Bettis would want to do.
Investigators believe up to 100 shots could have been fired. One suspect, still armed with a shotgun, was found dead at the scene.
The homeowner, who was wounded during the shootout, was taken to Tacoma General Hospital.
A second suspect who was spotted walking down the road also suffered gunshot wounds.
As deputies descended on Lakebay late Thursday, three or four armed suspects remained on the loose.
“We believe they may have been shot because of the amount of rounds that were fired,” Troyer said.
Neighbors were urged to keep their doors locked and call 911 if they saw or heard anything suspicious. Deputies were kept close on hand to respond to any calls that came in.
Detectives were trying to get a search warrant to look around the home and get a closer look at the pot farm. They planned to work through the night gathering evidence and looking for the remaining suspects.
Ten years ago, George W. Bush assumed the presidency amid the biggest post-election controversy in modern times. He pledged to bring a “new tone” to Washington DC and it was generally accepted that without a real “mandate” from the electorate he would govern as a rather undistinguished, middle-of-the-road “compassionate conservative” much in the same way his own father had done a dozen years earlier.
But in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, a new George W. Bush emerged. A few days after those deadly attacks, atop a pile of rubble in downtown Manhattan, President Bush projected an image of strength, courage, determination, and leadership. When faced with a previously unimaginable crisis, the middle-of-the-road nice guy suddenly became the strong leader that America desperately needed.
But after two terms that brought prolonged conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq and associated problems in Abu Graib and Guantanamo Bay, domestic disasters like Hurricane Katrina, and a faltering economy, Americans had enough of Bush and the Republican Party. It its place they elected a bright, clean, articulate young African-American man who was sold to the country as a new kind of leader, a brilliant post-partisan intellectual who would unite and inspire Americans in ways that the old political class could only dream of. He was supposed to embody the most outstanding leadership traits of Lincoln, FDR, JFK, and Ronald Reagan.
But what we got was The Incredible Shrinking President.
We should have known the score after the killing of Osama bin Laden, when a White House photo of our government leaders watching the bin Laden raid in the White House situation room revealed a nervous and detached-looking Barack Obama shrinking into a corner. At the time the photo was taken, he was undeniably the smallest person in the room.
The fact is, he’s good at dismantling. He’s good at critiquing. He’s good at not being the last guy, the one you didn’t like. But he’s not good at building, creating, calling into being. He was good at summoning hope, but he’s not good at directing it and turning it into something concrete that answers a broad public desire.
And so his failures in the debt ceiling fight. He wasn’t serious, he was only shrewd—and shrewdness wasn’t enough. He demagogued the issue—no Social Security checks—until he was called out, and then went on the hustings spouting inanities. He left conservatives scratching their heads: They could have made a better, more moving case for the liberal ideal as translated into the modern moment, than he did. He never offered a plan. In a crisis he was merely sly. And no one likes sly, no one respects it.
He never offered a plan. Ditto on health care reform. Or Libya. Or the Federal Budget. Or Guantanamo. Or anything else that really matters. Maybe its due to his history of “hijacking” legislation– that is, having himself installed by state Democratic leadership as the chief sponsor of bills he never authored — in the Illinois State Senate. Or maybe it stems from his years as a university professor or board member for various non-profit organizations, which forms the bulk of his non-governmental professional experience, where he was tasked with listening to and critiquing ideas, but never saddled with the burden of working those ideas into an operational plan, implementing that plan, and then bearing full responsibility for the success or failure of that plan.
Remember a few weeks ago when President Obama reportedly said to House Majority Leader Eric Cantor: “Eric, don’t call my bluff”? Lots of commentators said that this was a “tell”–that by referring to “my bluff,” Obama was admitting he was bluffing.
Actually, his play was even worse than that. A bluff is a pretense. The bluffer knows he has a weak hand but bets as if he has a strong one in order to induce his opponents to fold. Obama had a weak hand but thought he had a strong one. His next words to Cantor, according to Politico, were a vow to “take his case ‘to the American people.’ ” He actually believed–for all we know, he still believes–all that World’s Greatest Orator nonsense.
Thus he ended up maximizing his losses.
We can at least be certain that when a crisis unfolds, President Obama will feel compelled to take the issue “to the American people” via yet another snooze-inducing Presidential address. And right now, it seems as if very few people will be interested in listening.
Sarah Palin: "If we were real domestic terrorists, President Obama would want to pal around with us wouldn't he?"
Why McDonald's Will Never Pay for Making Customers Fat -- At Least in the U.S.
Last week, nutrition advocates took glee in a legal ruling from Brazil, where a former McDonald's (MCD) store manager was awarded $17,500 for his claim that eating Big Macs and McNuggets on the job for over a dozen years caused him to put on 65 pounds. It's a landmark ruling, but McDonald's haters shouldn't get too excited, because the likelihood that anyone in the U.S. is ever going to get a similar payout is slim.
The Brazilian decision coincides with a ruling in a similar case in New York last week that went in McDonald's favor. In a lawsuit that's been kicking around the courts since 2002, lawyer Samuel Hirsch is suing McDonald's for making his teenage clients (now in their 20's) obese. A judge ruled against Hirsch's attempt to turn thousands of claims into a class action, explaining that cases linking fast food and childhood obesity are too distinct to be gathered in a single group lawsuit.
And that's the crux of the problem when it comes to suing food companies over obesity. Unlike third degree burns from hot spilled coffee, for which McDonald's was forced to cough up $640,000 to an Albuquerque woman (and which is the subject of a new documentary), obesity is a complex health problem with a variety of possible causes. Even if teenagers eat at McDonald's every day for lunch, it can always be argued that it was really the Pop-Tart's and Sunny D they had for breakfast or frozen pepperoni pizza and soda they scarfed at dinner, not to mention the lack of exercise, that made them fat.
The Brazilian judge apparently did not perceive the situation to be all that complex and agreed that it was, in fact, the fries and Egg McMuffins that caused the plaintiff, who hasn't been named, to pack on the pounds.
Besides the causality problem, the other issue with waging a U.S. legal battle over obesity is that it will run into our intractable belief in the virtues of personal responsibility, sentiments which run particularly deep when it comes to food. Hirsch's lawsuit never garnered much public support because very few Americans are going to feel sorry for people who decide to eat at McDonald's and then get fat.
The particular claims of the Brazilian manager -- that he was required to test the food because McDonald's sent regular mystery shoppers to check up on quality and that he was given free lunches -- still aren't likely to move the needle of public support. Unless McDonald's was actually force feeding the guy, Americans are likely to wonder why he couldn't have just taken one bite to test the food and thrown out the rest. Or why not just eat salads for lunch and not the more fattening stuff, the argument might go.
The picture only changes if there's compelling evidence about the addictiveness of fast food or processed food. Once it was discovered that cigarettes were impossibly hard to quit and that manufacturers knew it, things went downhill for tobacco companies. If there are similarly addictive ingredients or components in food people will start to feel duped and the personal responsibility argument goes right out the window. But so far hasn't happened.
More than 20 members of Burma’s ruling junta have resigned from the army in what is widely seen as a bid to run as civilians in forthcoming elections and thereby prolong military control.
The Prime Minister, General Thein Sein, and 22 other cabinet ministers were reported to have given up their uniforms on Monday. No official reason was given, but observers said the move was a precursor to running for election.
No date has been given for the vote, which will be the country’s first in two decades, but it is generally expected to take place in October or November. The elections will bring into force a new constitution in which a new national legislature will be made up of 330 elected civilians and 110 military representatives.
The junta members who have resigned would be counted as civilians.
“They will be wearing suits rather than uniforms, but it’s just the first stage in the transition from a military dictatorship to a civilian dictatorship,” said Mark Farmaner, the director of the Burma Campaign UK, a pro-democracy pressure group.