A couple of new papers on networks crossed my desk this week. Well, more than a couple, since I’m PC-ing for the Web Algorithms Workshop (WAW) right now. But a couple crossed my desk that I’m not reviewing, which means I can write about them.
Brendan Nyhan writes:
Just came across your blog post on Christakis/Fowler and the various critiques – thought this paper I just posted to arXiv with Hans Noel might also be of interest: The “Unfriending” Problem: The Consequences of Homophily in Friendship Retention for Causal Estimates of Social Influence
Unfriending is interesting, and an area that seems understudied. In online social networks, there is often no cost to keep a tie in place. The XBox Live friend network is not such a case: an XBox gamer sees frequent updates about their friends’ activities. That’s why I thought it made sense when I learned that the XBox Live social network does not exhibit the heavy tailed degree-distribution phenomenon that has been widely reported in real-world networks. Someone should talk Microsoft into releasing an anonymized edition of this graph (if such an anonymization is possible…).
Meanwhile, Anton Westveld and Peter Hoff’s paper on modeling longitudinal network data caught my eye on arxiv: A Mixed Effects Model for Longitudinal Relational and Network Data, with Applications to International Trade and Conflict.
All the things I’d like to read… I could write a book about it. Before I even had time to finish writing this post, I saw another one: On the Existence of the MLE for a Directed Random Graph Network Model with Reciprocation.
Healthy Algorithms 
Two things: PC-ing means “program-committee-ing”, or being on the program committee for that conference. And how did I forget to mention the less technical, but much more widely consumed Facebook, the movie, and new Malcolm Gladwell article in the New Yorker?