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This article sounds a lot like Russian roulette. Increasing the number of chambers making it safer to play. It's not clear to me that the virus would just die o
by nkassis 16y ago
This article sounds a lot like Russian roulette. Increasing the number of chambers making it safer to play. It's not clear to me that the virus would just die out. I'll probably end up talking out of my hat but with graph of all the connections (sexual encounters). Would it not be possible to show that you'd need a very connected graph where most people have a small number of encounters and that almost everyone sticks to a low number. One hyper connected infected person (or multitple), could end up infecting a large part of the graph. I would assume that if he affects a large enough number of people, they (before discovering their infection) could infect their connection and ... snowball. In their model, they seem to say that even if their are very promiscuous people, getting non promiscuous people to get more connected would improve the odds. I don't see how that would reduce the number of infected people and kill the virus.
Like I said, I have no clue if this is correct or complete crap, never done anything related to disease and how they spread.
- lkozma 16y agoI think what the article argues is exactly this: there would be less hyper-connected nodes if the nodes would be more locally connected. The spreading of the disease would happen much more slowly in this case. This fits in with the theory of scale-free networks. links: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small-world_networks http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small-world_networks http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Degrees_of_separation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Degrees_of_separation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watts_and_Strogatz_model http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watts_and_Strogatz_model http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erd%C5%91s%E2%80%93R%C3%A9nyi_model http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erd%C5%91s%E2%80%93R%C3%A9nyi_m...
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- nkassis 16y agoI think I understand that now. Although, not sure that people who are very promiscuous would enjoy having more competition ;0) Thanks for the links, this article made me want to go back and look into this stuff more. Relevant to my current work also.
- lkozma 16y agoAlso, if you want a more readable and entertaining introduction, I highly recommend the book "Linked: The new science of networks" by Barabasi.
- JoeAltmaier 16y agoIts a dynamic function. At the beginning, infections go down but only because there was a pool of uninfected people. As time goes by, this pool diminishes (they are having more sex, right?) Eventually everyone is infected (markov chain). How is that better? Its just bad math.
- nkassis 16y agommm, that what I think would happen, at least it's what seems more intuitive. If you could remove the very promiscuous infected people from the pool of available partners quickly (better detection) that could solve the issues I think. The article does point out that increasing the encounters of monogamous people would reduce the amount of encounters from the most promiscuous people. Not sure this would occur, what says the promiscuous people would have more encounters now that the pool of available partners increased.