Cavan huang biography

The "friendship paradox" of social networks states that, on average, "your friends have more friends than you do." Here, we theoretically and empirically explore a related and overlooked paradox we refer to as the "enmity paradox." We use empirical data from 24,687 people living in 176 villages in rural Honduras. We show that, for a real negative undirected network (created by symmetrizing antagonistic interactions), the paradox exists as it does in the positive world. Specifically, a person’s enemies have more enemies, on average, than a person does. Furthermore, in a mixed world of positive and negative ties, we study the conditions for the existence of the paradox, both theoretically and empirically, finding that, for instance, a person’s friends typically have more enemies than a person does. We also confirm the "generalized" enmity paradox for nontopological attributes in real data, analogous to the generalized friendship paradox (e.g., the claim that a person’s enemies are richer, on average, than a person is). As a consequence, the naturally occurring variance in the degree distribution of both friendship and antagonism in social networks can skew people’s perceptions of the social world.

Cavan Huang

Biography
1977 Born in Toronto, Canada
1997-2000 Studied History and urban planning, McGill University, Montreal
2003-2005 Studied graphic design, Rhode Island School of Design, Providence

Words from the artist
“City and film are two words that describe my inspirations and approach to graphic design. I look to create challenging spatial experiences, shared by many, that continue to evolve and expand over time. There’s something beautiful about the inexhaustible variety of details cities have to offer: lights, traffic, sounds, people. I love how cities are designed with a sufficient level of complexity in order to sustain interest, without becoming chaotic or unmanageable. There is hardly any wasted or unused space. Motion pictures share a lot in common with cities, and are particularly great at portraying them too. In a single scene, you can experience the magnitude of a metropolis, then zero in on the stories and characters of a specific street corner.”