Researchers Map The Sexual Network Of An Entire High School
researchnews.osu.edu
researchnews.osu.edu
I sent an email to James Moody pointing out this obvious flaw in the conclusions, and he responded saying that he agreed. His original work was not intended to show the chronology, and the article draws conclusions that he didn't claim.
http://sexchart.org/sexchart.9.15
(This charts the relationships of the informal collection of people from #hack, #phreak, and god knows what other EFNet "underground" channels).
A smart guy we hired wrote a traceroute for this (including an FSM parser for the ASCII art); in an attempt to one-up that, I wrote one that did all-points shortest path and could answer questions like "how many hops am I from X if you take Y out of the picture". We used it to test our routing code at Sonicity; it was handy.
I really ought to use this thing for C class.
Also I wonder if 2 homosexual relationships (that I can see) is in any way accurate or due to embarrassment to admit such a thing even on an anonymous survey.
Two things:
1. Yes they are sexually active. They just have to be more discrete.
2. You don't "discover" that you're gay any more than you "discover" that you're straight, and if it does happen it happens before high school. I can think of things going back to third grade that pointed towards me being gay. Now, whether people choose to accept their sexual orientation is a different matter.
I think the homosexual numbers are accurate, at least for the guys. The gay high school students I knew seemed to be more actively engaged with older men.
It looks like most of the vertices here have degree 1 or 2. Do those adjacent to vertices with degree 5+ actually tend more towards low degree than the rest of the population? (I haven't gone through and counted, but I'm skeptical)
One interesting pattern that I saw was that, other than the threesome, there only seem to be four cycles--one is extremely long and the other three all involve the same guy who is of degree 9 and serves as a cut vertex to no less than seven subgraphs.
It would be of far more educational value to the group that was studied and all their peers.
Side note: In the US there are about 750,000 teen pregnancies annually.
These days, getting pregnant is one of the nicest things that can happen. At least it's neither fatal nor contagious...
Don't want to minimize the seriousness of teen pregnancy - it's a really huge problem, but, at least, the baby doesn't kill its host and a couple friends ;-)
And that's why I am a very careful parent. I tell my kids I wish them an uneventful life and death from old age.
Yes, hence my suggestion to ask the question about safe-sex and to add two more sets of dots.
> Don't want to minimize the seriousness of teen pregnancy - it's a really huge problem,
ok
> but, at least, the baby doesn't kill its host
Teen pregnancies are a serious risk to both mother and child.
In developing countries the risks are much higher still.
It is much less rare for a teen-age pregnancy to have complications which may even result in fatalities.
> And that's why I am a very careful parent.
Good :)
> I tell my kids I wish them an uneventful life and death from old age.
Not sure about uneventful, but if by that you mean unscheduled hospital visits then I'm all for it.
Not to minimize the seriousness of STDs, but I'm pretty certain there is a very long laundry list of STDs that have a lower mortality rate than pregnancy.
The best data I could track from the CDC is from 2007:
http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/womens_health.htm
"In 2007, a total of 548 women were reported to have died of maternal causes (Tables 33 and 34). As in previous years, the number of maternal deaths does not include all deaths occurring to pregnant women, but only those deaths reported on the death certificate that were assigned to causes related to or aggravated by pregnancy or pregnancy management"
"The maternal mortality rate for 2007 was 12.7 deaths per 100,000 live births. Black women have a substantially higher risk of maternal death than white women. The maternal mortality rate for black women was 26.5, roughly 2.7 times the rate for white women (10.0 deaths per 100,000 live births)."
Of course, there are varying rates at different ages, so...
From: http://www.cdc.gov/NCHS/data/nvsr/nvsr58/nvsr58_19.pdf, Table 11, pg 37+ (unfortunately they don't have a breakout for women at various ages, but I eyeballed Table 12, to see if there was a gender bias and noted)
All Causes for ages 15-24 (all causes 79.9 Deaths per 100,000)
Syphillis: none
HIV: 0.4 (2.5x greater chance for men)
Pregnancy: 0.4 (Always female, so 0.8 per 100,000 for a woman)
Motor Vehicle Accidents: 24.9 (2x Greater chance for men)
Suicide: 9.7 (4x greater chance for men)
Homicide: 13.1 (4x Greater chance for men)
Admittedly, this is just a statistical survey, and actions like proper medical attention can sway these statistics (though that is the case for STDs as well as pregnancy)
> "It would be of far more educational value to the group that was studied and all their peers."
How is that so?
I realize that.
> The point of the study was to examine the relational map within the high school. It was not to examine sexual hygiene of students in the school.
No disagreement there.
>> "It would be of far more educational value to the group that was studied and all their peers." > How is that so?
Because it would show them in a fairly easy to understand graph how STDs spread through such a network.
Having the 'outside world' connected wouldn't hurt either.
One thing the researchers noted is that they chose a large-ish but relatively isolated community with a single high school that's about an hour from a major city. This means that geography dictates that students are relatively unlikely to date people from other high schools.
See also: "The web of human sexual contacts" http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v411/n6840/full/411907a...
(Non pay-wall version: http://arxiv.org/abs/cond-mat/0106507 )
That said, I have no idea if they discuss that in the paper either.
I once amused myself for a few minutes by dreaming up an app for Facebook that would let you claim a relationship with someone and send that person a message allowing them to confirm. It would then collect statistics like false claims, and potentially produce graphs like the one in this article about your social circle.
It was enlightening for everyone.
Interesting. I wonder whether the "save sex till marriage" movement is having much of an impact in slowing the spread of STDs.
My impression is that they don't change many teenagers' behavior in the long run. But for this specific effect they wouldn't have to change more than a few to have a big impact.
It also keeps the relationships within the school, which is not a realistic picture whatsoever, and once you add in the outside world (especially to that larger chunk of the graphic) all bets are off.
Couldn't something like this be quickly built with a school-wide hot-or-not website? People publish far worse stuff on Facebook.
Hmm... Orkut has a network like this, in the form of crush-lists. In fact, I know two couples who were "aided" by this feature.
Here's a link (PDF!): http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.131...
The interesting part to me is that if you look at individual students in the big group, most have only 1-3 relationships. They just so happen to link up into a massive web.