Category Archives: Complex Networks

Bitcoin is intriguing, a digital currency where the entire transaction history of economy is held in common by all participants. I think that this will be a great observatory for research for someone. I read a recent paper that has some of the elements of this, An Analysis of Anonymity in the Bitcoin System by Fergal Reid and Martin Harrigan recently. As the name implies, it is mostly about the anonymity of the system. But it also includes a description of “the alleged theft of Bitcoins, which, at the time of the theft, had a market value of approximately half a million U.S. dollars”. That could be the plot of a good heist movie.

The paper led me to the bitcoin tools repository, which I’ll have to look into in more detail in the future.

Two papers in the Arxiv caught my eye recently, (I have time to keep up on papers again!) both about networks and cooking.  Both came out around Thanksgiving, too, but maybe that is just a coincidence.

Chun-Yuen Teng, Yu-Ru Lin, Lada A. Adamic, Recipe recommendation using ingredient networks
Yong-Yeol Ahn, Sebastian E. Ahnert, James P. Bagrow, Albert-László Barabási, Flavor network and the principles of food pairing

They both have wonderfully complex network graphics, although the lack of information in these beautiful figures is acknowledged:

I’d love to combine this sort of analysis with the work on nutritional risk factors that has been going on around here recently. Did either of these papers come with a dataset I can explore?