The Web of Human Sexual Contacts
TLDR
In this article, the authors analyze data on the sexual behavior of a random sample of individuals, and find that the cumulative distributions of the number of sexual partners during the twelve months prior to the survey decays as a power law with similar exponents for females and males.Abstract:
Many ``real-world'' networks are clearly defined while most ``social'' networks are to some extent subjective. Indeed, the accuracy of empirically-determined social networks is a question of some concern because individuals may have distinct perceptions of what constitutes a social link. One unambiguous type of connection is sexual contact. Here we analyze data on the sexual behavior of a random sample of individuals, and find that the cumulative distributions of the number of sexual partners during the twelve months prior to the survey decays as a power law with similar exponents $\alpha \approx 2.4$ for females and males. The scale-free nature of the web of human sexual contacts suggests that strategic interventions aimed at preventing the spread of sexually-transmitted diseases may be the most efficient approach.read more
Citations
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Journal ArticleDOI
The relevance of social network analysis on the epidemiology and prevention of sexually transmitted diseases
TL;DR: An overview is presented of social network analysis: the technique, its use, and its limitations, and ethical considerations regarding social network analyses are also briefly discussed.
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Modelling the spread of sexually transmitted diseases on scale-free networks
TL;DR: Analysis and simulated results are given to show that the proportional immunization strategy in the model is effective on SF networks, and the stability of the disease-free equilibrium is obtained.
Journal ArticleDOI
Determinants of sexual network structure and their impact on cumulative network measures.
TL;DR: It is found that epidemiological measures on disease prevalence in survey data can be used as a powerful tool for building accurate sexual contact networks, as these measures provide information on the level of mixing between individuals of different levels of sexual activity in the population, a parameter that is hard to acquire through surveying individuals.
Proceedings ArticleDOI
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Evolution of cooperation in a heterogeneous graph: fixation probabilities under weak selection.
TL;DR: A new state variable is introduced to measure the time evolution of cooperation in a heterogeneous graph and it is found that the fixation probability of a single cooperator depends crucially on the number of its neighbors.
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