It's amazing how at least some fields of science have been able to exponentially improve their experimental methodology, thanks to present-day social networks.<p>Milgram's 1967 small world experiment that introduced the "6 degrees of separation" term consisted of 300 people trying to send physical letters to 1 target, this stock broker in Boston. 80% of the letters never reached the target, and of the ones that reached, the average number of hops was 6.<p>Fast forward to 2008. A summer intern at Microsoft Research attempts to re-do this experiment. He constructs a graph with 180 million nodes and 1.3 billion undirected edges using MSN Messenger data, and finds the average path length between users to be 6.6. <a href="http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/horvitz/leskovec_horvitz_www2008.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/horvitz/leskov...</a>
I normally expect the Next and Previous buttons on sites like Cracked.com that want me to generate more ad revenue with more page loads, but why five clicks for a simple article with no ads, Nature? Why can't you let me just scroll through your content, particularly when this equates to a blog post (and a Top N formatted post, to boot)?