Spurred boldly on, and dashed through thick and thin...

As the title quote by John Dryden (1682) implies, this short post is going to be about the "thick and thin" of the BioFabric World Bank Major Contract Awards network, as the following two subgraphs from the network will show. First is the set of contracts associated with all the countries in Africa:

African countries (click on image to enlarge)

Second is the set of contracts associated with all the countries in Central and South America:

Central and South American countries (click on image to enlarge)

(Again, I apologize for the substandard quality of the images; I think they are really too light. I need to work on optimizing the image export function for small scales when I get the time to handle this.)

When I first started looking over the BioFabric version of the contracts network, something jumped out at me pretty quickly, and that was the striking visible differences between the thicknesses of what I have been calling the "umbilical links" going from each country down to the bottom of the network. To recap from a previous post, the node lines at the bottom of the graph represent the "global players", i.e. supplier companies who have contracts with more than one country. Looking at these two different sets of countries, there certainly appears that a typical African country has much larger fraction of contracts with these global players than does a typical Central/South American country. With the latter, these contracts seem to form only a tiny fraction of the total.

Is this a real effect? I don't know, and I'm not planning to dive in here and show that this observation is, or is not, statistically significant. But I find it notable that after spending just a few minutes simply browsing across a global view of a network with 44,213 nodes and 66,021 edges, I could easily glean an interesting observation about the data that could warrant further investigation. I think this is another case where the visual impact of BioFabric's edge wedges can reveal important insights into the network structure.

Dryden's quote, by the way, was actually part of a satirical jab aimed at the "heroically mad" work of a marginally talented rival poet, so maybe I am ill-advised to use it here. But it seemed appropriate, since I think I'm being driven a little mad by this series of posts on the World Bank network even as I'm spurred on to finish it. Thankfully, I think there is only one more to go!