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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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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.
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
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Book

Epidemiology and demography in public health

TL;DR: This book focuses on the techniques of surveillance and investigation of disease, which includes biostatistics and analysis techniques and explores the ethics of disease studies.
Journal ArticleDOI

New results on computable efficiency and its stability for complex networks

TL;DR: This work considers how the efficiency changes as the network structure evolves, by introducing the concept of stability associated to the efficiency of a network as an accurate tool to measure the evolution of a dynamic complex network.
Dissertation

Approximate shortest path and distance queries in networks

TL;DR: This thesis investigates the problem of efficiently computing exact and approximate shortest paths in graphs, with the main focus being on shortest path query processing and proves that exploiting well-connected nodes yields efficient distance oracles for scale-free graphs.
Book ChapterDOI

Network Analysis of the SourceForge.net Community

TL;DR: The community network of the SourceForge.net is studied, especially the structure and evolution of the community network, to understand the Open Source Software movement and three different analyses on the network are applied, including structure analysis, centrality analysis and path analysis.
Journal ArticleDOI

Local-world evolving networks with tunable clustering

TL;DR: An extended local-world evolving network model including a triad formation (TF) step is proposed that can unify the generic properties of real-life networks: scale-free degree distribution, high clustering and small inter-node separation.
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