Email experiments confirm six degrees, Milgram didn't

Joi points out a new scientist story about Duncan Watts' experiment that shows 6 degrees of separation, even though Milgram didn't - most of his messages didn't get through.



As well as getting this backwards, the article says:

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.



This is a common misunderstanding - the hubs are a simplifications, and don't really exist; with enough elements, power law distributions are fairly smooth, and the variety of scales of connectedness is important.