1. catdynamics
  2. High School Sex Networks

High School Sex Networks

By catdynamics on April 2, 2007.

Bee at Backreaction points to a use for graph theory

The topology of the High School Romance/Sexual network is interesting.
I'm a little bit surprised by the structure, and assume that the disconnected branches are real, and not illustrating sub-structure of the main graph.
I would have expected more tree like connection between the main side branches, not a ring topology.

I also assume the left out the isolated points and points that connect only to other networks...

BUT, there is at least one flaw - if the structure is romance, rather than physical sexual connection, then the graphs ought to be directional.

I suspect that an honest romance network with uni and bidirectional graphs would look quite different.

I suspect Bee is also correct in inferring dishonest reporting based on the sparseness of the homosexual links.

Of course it gets better when you go to College

Tags
Academia

More like this

PZ Has a Question: Is George Gilder Wrong About Network Theory?
PZ wrote about the latest nonsense from IDiot George Gilder. In this interview, Gilder tries to make some really horrible arguments about how everything is really hierarchical, and he uses "information theory, computer science, and network theory" as examples. I believe that the universe is…
Introducing Topology
Back when GM/BM first moved to ScienceBlogs, we were in the middle of a poll about the next goodmath topic for me to write about. At the time, the vote was narrowly in favor of topology, with graph theory as a very close second. We're pretty much done with category theory, so it's topology time!…
Weighted Graphs and the Minimum Spanning Tree
Moving on from simple graphs, one of the things you can do to make things more interesting is to associate numeric values with the edges, called the weights of those edges. This variation of a graph is called a weighted graph. Weighted graphs are extremely useful buggers: many real-world…
Topological Spaces
Yesterday, I introduced the idea of a *metric space*, and then used it to define *open* and *closed* sets in the space. (And of course, being a bozo, I managed to include a typo that made the definition of open sets equivalent to the definition of closed sets. It's been corrected, but if you're not…

Things get complicated as guys tend to overreport and girls tend to underreport. Apparently some guys can convince themselves they made it with a girl, instead of only wished they had, and some girls can convince themselves some couplings never happened.