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
Extremum statistics in scale-free network models.
TL;DR: It is shown by means of extensive simulations that the exponential truncation of the degree distribution governs the scaling of the extreme values and that the distribution of maxima follows the Gumbel statistics.
Journal ArticleDOI
Preventives Versus Treatments
TL;DR: In this article, the authors show that the ratio of preventive to treatment producer surplus can be arbitrarily small, in particular when the distribution of consumer values has a Zipf shape and the disease is rare, and they find that proxies for the Zipf-similarity of the disease risk distribution are associated with a significantly lower likelihood of vaccine development but not drug development.
Journal ArticleDOI
Network of sexual contacts and sexually transmitted HIV infection in Burkina Faso
Vito Latora,André Nyamba,Jacques Simpore,Bahiré Sylvette,Sandwidi Diane,Bukiki Sylvére,Salvatore Musumeci +6 more
TL;DR: It has been found that the number of different sexual partners reported by males is a power law distribution with an exponent γ = 2.9 (0.1) which is consistent with the degree distribution of scale‐free networks.
Journal ArticleDOI
An empirical study of Chinese language networks
TL;DR: The results indicate that in many topological aspects Chinese language shapes complex networks with organizing principles similar to other previously studied language systems, which shows that different languages may have some common characteristics in their evolution processes.
Journal ArticleDOI
Degree correlations in directed scale-free networks.
TL;DR: This work considers the problem of building directed networks with a prescribed degree distribution, providing a method for proper generation of power-law-distributed directed degree sequences, and shows that scale-free networks are on average uncorrelated across directed links for three of the four possible degree-degree correlations.