(2002-04-30) g

Stanley Milgram's SmallWorld (Six Degrees Of Separation) study may be bogus. Judith Kleinfeld, a psychologist at the University of Alaska, found that in Milgram's first study, only three in 60 documents actually reached their targets, taking on average eight mailings (suggesting nine degrees of separation)... Moreover, two attempts by Milgram to replicate the findings of that study were never published because chain-completion rates were so low. A group at Columbia is trying to replicate the experiment now.