YOUR FRIENDS' ACTIVITY

    • Just Explain It: Six Degrees of Separation

      How many people are really six introductions away from someone like Brad Pitt, Oprah or someone they have yet to meet? The idea of six degrees of separation has been around for over 80 years. And, with social networking sites booming, more people are connecting across the globe than ever before.  The world is shrinking…figuratively speaking. 

      We’ll take a look at whether six degrees of separation is fact or fiction, and give it a test-run ourselves. That's the topic of today's "Just Explain It." 

      First, let’s take a look back.  The Hungarian writer Frigyes Karinthy in a short story called “Chains” first proposed the theory of six degrees in 1929.  Karinthy’s belief was that we are all connected to each other by a string of friends, and that string was made up of six or less people.  But he had little evidence to back up his suggestion. 

      Over the years, many attempts have been made to prove that mutual friends might connect two random people. 

      In the 1960s, social psychologist Stanley

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    • The Social Network Most Recruiters Use

      If you are looking for a job and aren't on LinkedIn, you may want to hurry up and join: 97 percent of recruiters are using the self-proclaimed "world's largest professional network" as a place to find new employees, a new study has found.

      Other social networks were much less popular among recruiters, the research by Bullhorn Reach found. Twitter, the second most popular network for recruiters, was used by just 27 percent of recruiters. An even smaller percentage — 22 percent — of recruiters turned to Facebook as a source for recruiting.

      For the most part, recruiters aren't focusing their recruiting efforts on more than one social network. Just 12 percent of recruiters said they utilize all three major social networks — Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. However, 14 percent of respondents said they use a combination of LinkedIn and Twitter, compared to just 8 percent who said they use LinkedIn and Facebook.    

      [Social Recruiting Becomes the Norm]

      Though most recruiters do not use a

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    • Workers Say Bosses Cause Them to Quit Facebook

      Workers really don’t want to be friends with their bosses … at least on Facebook. New research has found that workers say they have suspended their accounts or left Facebook altogether to avoid being friended by a boss on the social network.

      That finding was a part of research by researchers from Cornell University that examined the reasons why  people leaft Facebook or suspended their accounts.

      Concerns about privacy and misuse of data were also cited as reasons why users were making the choice to close their accounts.  Facebook users also say that addiction to the social network and the negative productivity associated with it were also reasons to leave Facebook. However, others were also more fearful of being friended by former romantic partners in their decision to leave the network.

      [6 Signs You're Addicted to Facebook]

      "In some cases, people reported feeling pressured to leave based on an institutional status, such as being a military officer or parolee," said Eric Baumer, lead

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    • Just Explain It: Crowdsourcing To Solve Crimes

      You may have heard of crowdsourcing when it comes to raising money, like the popular website Kickstarter allows. But at its core, crowdsourcing is getting a lot of people to help solve a single problem.

      After the attack at the Boston Marathon, law enforcement asked the public for help to find the perpetrators. As usual, authorities asked people to report if they saw anything suspicious and they asked for help identifying the suspects in the surveillance tapes that the FBI released.

      But in what’s becoming a new trend, officials also asked the public for photos and video. The response was overwhelming. Within days, local police and federal agents received thousands of images and many terabytes of digital data captured on smartphones and other mobile devices

      So, how well has using “the crowd” to solve crimes worked? And what are the downsides of the public getting involved? That's the subject of today's Just Explain It.

      The Boston Marathon bombing may be a high-profile case where we’re seeing

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