Who Cares About Kevin Bacon?

So I just read this article in the Washington Post, confirming that anyone on earth is only about six (in reality its more like seven) degrees of separation from Kevin Bacon. Ignoring for a moment the facets of Kevin Bacon that make him, to me, a eerily creepy individual (I'm sure he's a nice guy, but there's just something about him...), let's go to how the grand conclusion was made.

Researchers initially did this through mathematical computations (ok).

And then decided to confirm it with a month-long study of our Instant Messaging habits.

The study was conducted by Eric Horvitz and Jure Leskovec, and published in June 2007. They state that they did not have access to the content of the IMs, but instead, " (1) user demographic information, (2) time and user stamped events describing the presence of a particular user, and (3) communication session logs, where, for all participants, the number of exchanged messages and the periods of time spent participating in sessions is recorded."

Does this freak anyone else out? How did they obtain this demographic information, etc.? Was I unintentionally a part of this study? I don't want to be anywhere near Kevin Bacon, period. Thank you.

Okay, now that I'm done ranting, they did find some interesting things:

1) Some IM conversations contained more than 50 participants (I cannot even imagine that. I can't imagine even a normal conversation with that many people. I would actually like to see the demographic for that conversation. I imagine it is teenyboppers, but that's just me).

2) Of course, 99% of the conversations were between only 2 people.

3) One of the pitfalls of many experiments is the lack of large enough sampling size. In this study, this does not seem to be the case. Need proof? "We gathered data for 30 days of June 2006. Each day yielded about 150 gigabytes of compressed text logs (4.5 terabytes in total). Copying the data to a dedicated eight-processor server with 32 gigabytes of memory took 12 hours. Our log-parsing system employed a pipeline of four threads that parse the data in parallel, collapse the session oin/leave events into sets of conversations, and save the data in a compact ompressed binary format. This process compressed the data down to 45 gigabytes per day. Processing the data took an additional 4 to 5 hours per day."

4) For users submitting an age (6.5% chose not too), the age group of 15-35 represents a larger share of the IM population when compared to the planetary population. See the chart pictured for a comparison with the world population (The bars are IM population; the lines down the center world population).


5) Some population demographics: People tend to talk to people of similar age, and older people tend to talk longer. People who are further apart geographically communicate via Messenger more often than those who are closer. Also, people tend to communicate more with people of the opposite gender.

6) The average social distance (i.e. degrees of separation) was measured to be seven between IM users. The longest social distance measured was 29.

They took their information during the month of June 2006. Think to yourself now, were you using IM during that time? If so, you were a part of this study.

So, how many degrees from Kevin Bacon are you? And are you ok with that?