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Open AccessJournal ArticleDOI

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.

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Citations
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Proceedings ArticleDOI

Subcubic equivalences between graph centrality problems, APSP and diameter

TL;DR: The complexity of the mentioned centrality problems is related to two classical problems for which no truly subcubic algorithm is known, namely All Pairs Shortest Paths (APSP) and Diameter, and it is shown that Radius, Median and Betweenness Centrality are equivalent under sub cubic reductions to APSP, and Reach Centrality is equivalent to Diameter under subcUBic reductions.
Journal ArticleDOI

Polynomial growth in branching processes with diverging reproductive number.

TL;DR: Evidence is provided that the divergence of the second moment of the degree distribution carries as a consequence a qualitative change in the growth pattern, deviating from the standard exponential growth.
Journal ArticleDOI

Branching dynamics of viral information spreading

TL;DR: A detailed analysis of a study of real viral marketing campaigns where tracking the propagation of a controlled message allowed us to analyze the structure and dynamics of a diffusion graph involving over 31,000 individuals found that information spreading displays a non-Markovian branching dynamics that can be modeled by a two-step Bellman-Harris branching process.
Journal ArticleDOI

Hub nodes inhibit the outbreak of epidemic under voluntary vaccination

TL;DR: It is found that disease outbreak can be more effectively inhibited on scale-free networks than on random networks, indicating that real-world networks, which are often claimed to be scale free, can be favorably and easily controlled under voluntary vaccination.
Posted Content

Dynamics of interacting diseases

TL;DR: This work characterize analytically the epidemic thresholds of the two diseases for different scenarios and also compute the temporal evolution characterizing the unfolding dynamics and finds that the secondary thresholds for the SIS and SIR models are different, which results directly from the interaction between both diseases.
References
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Journal ArticleDOI

Collective dynamics of small-world networks

TL;DR: Simple models of networks that can be tuned through this middle ground: regular networks ‘rewired’ to introduce increasing amounts of disorder are explored, finding that these systems can be highly clustered, like regular lattices, yet have small characteristic path lengths, like random graphs.
Journal ArticleDOI

Emergence of Scaling in Random Networks

TL;DR: A model based on these two ingredients reproduces the observed stationary scale-free distributions, which indicates that the development of large networks is governed by robust self-organizing phenomena that go beyond the particulars of the individual systems.
Journal ArticleDOI

Statistical mechanics of complex networks

TL;DR: In this paper, a simple model based on the power-law degree distribution of real networks was proposed, which was able to reproduce the power law degree distribution in real networks and to capture the evolution of networks, not just their static topology.
Journal ArticleDOI

The Structure and Function of Complex Networks

Mark Newman
- 01 Jan 2003 - 
TL;DR: Developments in this field are reviewed, including such concepts as the small-world effect, degree distributions, clustering, network correlations, random graph models, models of network growth and preferential attachment, and dynamical processes taking place on networks.
Journal ArticleDOI

Complex networks: Structure and dynamics

TL;DR: The major concepts and results recently achieved in the study of the structure and dynamics of complex networks are reviewed, and the relevant applications of these ideas in many different disciplines are summarized, ranging from nonlinear science to biology, from statistical mechanics to medicine and engineering.
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