The Sex Degrees of Separation - The Hollywood STD Network

In short:

We found 15 celebrities with confirmed herpes and the dates of their diseases. Starting with these nodes, we calculate the probability of the rest of the network having herpes and when those nodes were expected to be infected. We keep in mind that transmission only affects relationships that occur after the confirmed date of disease. Appendix B lists all 7000 nodes that have a chance of infection, ranked by probability having herpes. Looking at the network we generated, we see that Ashley Olsen (of the Olsen twins) has a 97% chance of having herpes. We expect her to have received the disease in 2005.

Conclusions and Future Work

We notice that the number of triangles (3-cliques) and pentagons (5-cliques) in the Hollywood sex network is much higher than what we would expect from a randomized network with same degree distribution. This makes sense as celebrities (particularly porn stars but also some Hollywood stars like Marlene Dietrich) have sex with a gay/lesbian partner more frequently than in a random network. The number of partner swaps (4-cliques) is also higher for the sex network.

Using Charlie Sheen as our seed proved very fruitful as our network included famous non-actors such as Adolf Hitler and John F. Kennedy. We hypothesize that we reached the majority of the actors in both Hollywood and the porn industry. Next steps would be to find correlations between this sex network and co-actor network from IMDB, and draw conclusions about probabilities of having sex based on whether actors worked together or not. We would also like to separate the Hollywood and porn networks from each other and analyze them individually. This way we could find the key nodes that bridge Hollywood stars to porn stars.

We would like to recalculate the STD propagation, and this time include the rate of condom and other contraceptives usage, the effectiveness rate of the contraceptives in preventing STD transmission, and other STDs besides herpes.