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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Maurício L. de Almeida,G. A. Mendes,G. Madras Viswanathan,G. Madras Viswanathan,Luciano R. da Silva +4 more
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Random Sierpinski network with scale-free small-world and modular structure
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TL;DR: In this paper, the authors investigated the combinational effects of non-uniform transmission of edges and the network structure in susceptible-infected-removed models of the epidemic spreading.