Tuesday, November 22, 2011

Facebook Reduces 6 Degrees of Separation to 4.74—and the number’s still shrinking


A recent study by Facebook, the Università degli Studi di Milano, and other contributors revises the claim that every living person on earth is connected to any other person through only six intermediaries (friends, friends of friends, friends of friends of friends, and so on)--a.k.a. "six degrees of separation"--a theory previously developed by Hungarian author Frinyes Karinthy in the 1920s and American social psychologist Stanley Milgram in the 1960s. 

The new study reports that worldwide fully 92 per cent of all pairs of Facebook users are within five degrees of separation, with an average of just 4.74 intermediaries, and (here comes the part I love) the average number of degrees between users is getting smaller over time.  In a blog posting yesterday, Facebook reported that today's average of 4.74 degrees of separation is already smaller than the average distance of 5.28 degrees in 2008.

Friday, November 4, 2011

Postal horror story highlights need 2 assess contractors & effects of downsizing proactively

Today Monica Bugajski is incensed because she feels Ontario Court Justice Marjoh Agro handed down too light a sentence to a mail carrier who, while on contract to Canada Post,  illegally stashed 7,000 pieces of undelivered mail in her apartment and car after her mail route became too onerous.
http://news.sympatico.ca/oped/coffee-talk/canada_post_worker_hoarded_7000_pieces_of_mail/5b96ef13
My thoughts are that, at least from a strategic HR standpoint, the 2010 incident raises more issues than just the responsibility of the contractor to seek an appropriate remedy from the contractee if changes to her working conditions make her workload overwhelming.  
In practical terms, wouldn't it have served everyone's best interests better (including the recipients of the waylaid mail) if management had been more proactive by:  
(1) Assessing the contractor's capabilities (or those of a prospective employee, for that matter) carefully both before and after engaging her? 
(2) Reviewing the practical ramifications of downsizing both before and after the fact--and thus avoid overburdening a worker with circumstances that clearly exceeded her problem-solving abilities?