Berlin 2008 – scientific programme
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AKSOE: Arbeitskreis Physik sozio-ökonomischer Systeme
AKSOE 9: Social, information-, and production networks I
AKSOE 9.2: Talk
Tuesday, February 26, 2008, 14:30–15:00, EW 203
On recent trends to model and study social networks — •Pedro Lind1 and Hans Herrmann2 — 1Institute for Computational Physics, Universität Stuttgart, Pfaffenwaldring 27, D-70569 Stuttgart, Germany — 2Computational Physics, IfB, HIF E12, ETH Hönggerberg, CH-8093 Zürich, Switzerland
We describe and develop three recent novelties in network research which are particularly useful for studying social systems. First, we describe a simple model of mobile colliding agents, whose collisions define the connections between the agents which are the nodes in the underlying network, and develop some analytical considerations. In particular, we show that such an approach allows to reproduce all the fundamental features of social networks. Second, we address the particular feature of clustering and its relationship with global network measures, namely with the distribution of the size of cycles in the network. Since in social bipartite networks it is not possible to measure the clustering from standard procedures, we propose an alternative clustering coefficient that can be used to extract an improved normalized cycle distribution in any network. Third, we describe two properties to characterize the propagation of information in networks. We focus on gossip propagation which impose some restrictions in the propagation rules and find that there is an optimal non-trivial number of friends for which the spread factor is minimized.