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Chains of affection: The structure of adolescent romantic and sexual networks

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That is the title of this paper studying high-school dating. There are not too many academic papers that talk about spanning trees while having paragraphs like

" ...Consider four individuals, Bob, Carol, Ted, and Alice. Imagine that Bob and Carol
were once partners, but that Carol left Bob for Ted. Further imagine that Ted and Alice were
partners, but that Ted dumped Alice for Carol. Should Bob and Alice date? From Bob’s
perspective, Alice is his former partners’ former partner, or the former “lover” of his former
girlfriends’ current lover. Alice looks at Bob with the same lens. Her former boyfriend is dating
the girl who left Bob. These scenarios can be represented by a graph... "

Check out the associated graphic here.

I got this paper off Mark Newman's website.  Over the weekend, I've been indulging myself by catching up on reading with regards to social networks and communities. I've slacked off when it comes to reading of the academic sort after coming here to Hyderabad. Of course, I've also been kept busy by Whidbey - shipping a product is proving to be quite a remarkable experience.:-)

One paper that I found particularly fascinating was this one on communities among scientists. For a bit of background, read this paper on detecting communities in various spheres. I took printouts of all the papers linked to above and read them before going to bed yesterday. Bad idea - since I stayed up most of the night thinking of social computing ideas. There are quite a few applications of the paper on detecting communities, especially on today's Web 2.0, rich with social information. When I get some free time, there are a few ideas I want to turn into code.

Probably after we ship Whidbey :-)

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