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
More filters
Journal ArticleDOI
The Structure and Function of Complex Networks
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.
Journal ArticleDOI
Statistical physics of social dynamics
TL;DR: In this article, a wide list of topics ranging from opinion and cultural and language dynamics to crowd behavior, hierarchy formation, human dynamics, and social spreading are reviewed and connections between these problems and other, more traditional, topics of statistical physics are highlighted.
Journal ArticleDOI
Evolution of networks
TL;DR: The recent rapid progress in the statistical physics of evolving networks is reviewed, and how growing networks self-organize into scale-free structures is discussed, and the role of the mechanism of preferential linking is investigated.
Journal ArticleDOI
Epidemic processes in complex networks
TL;DR: A coherent and comprehensive review of the vast research activity concerning epidemic processes is presented, detailing the successful theoretical approaches as well as making their limits and assumptions clear.
References
More filters
Journal ArticleDOI
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
A New Measure of Node Importance in Complex Networks with Tunable Parameters
TL;DR: This paper proposes a new measure of node importance in complex networks with tunable parameters that is more discriminative than degree, betweenness, and closeness centrality for the nodes of a network.
Journal ArticleDOI
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.
Journal ArticleDOI
Tails and Ties
TL;DR: This issue of The European Physical Journal B is devoted to the interdisciplinary field of Sociophysics and the synergy and richness of results obtained from the investigation of problems belonging to the area of complexity science from different perspectives clearly indicates future directions and research methodologies in this field.