DgtizeD

To think that people actually get paid to make relationship webs: Sex in High School Involves Long Chains of Relations

Of course actually knowing exactly how intimate the connections on the web were was the subject of heated discussion. Bringing facts into the matter, or even attempting to bring them in might have resulted in problems.

I am curious why the “A girl is loath to date her old boyfriend’s new girlfriend’s old boyfriend” rule seems to end after high school. Or at least according to the researchers data. Perhaps it appears necessary when the scene or pool of people is too small? It makes sense, but I am curious what makes it trigger, and what removes it.

Reminds me of research I once saw into the resiliency of graphs. The paper was discussing how many random nodes from a graph would need be removed before the graph “shattered.” It was interesting because the researcher was actually from the physics department and had some neat experiment about that that he wanted to model in physics and as a side jaunt decided to test the resiliency of the internet. If I remember correctly he created a metric to describe how interconnected a graph was, and then tested how easy it was to shatter a graph at each degree of interconnectivity. He determined that while the ARPA design for the internet was supposed to include the potential for nuclear strike, the resulting resiliency was not so much due to the design, but that it was simply a property of graphs of that type. Amusingly, the strongest graph that he had data for was a graph of sexual contact in a group of ~1000 adults.

Given the propensity for humanity to boast, hide, and gossip about sexual relations, I am very curious how accurate those datasets are. I suppose that is a different study for a different day.