Figure 4 shows more clearly these friendship blocs, which. However, Figure 3 does contain several visually apparent friendship blocs, composed of nearby countries which vote for each other. Conclusions about individual countries from distances in Figure 3 should be made with care. Figure 3 should therefore be interpreted with care, particularly since the correlation between friendship scores FXY and distances in the diagram is a relatively weak –0.38. A consequence of the lack of symmetry in friendship is that the concept of link distance between people which we introduced in previous work (Dekker, 2005) must be used with caution, since it is based on symmetrical rela- tionships.
In our experience, a correlation of 0.6 or more would indicate a symmetric relationship (Dekker, 2005). In this network, friendship tends not to be re- turned: the correlation between FXY and its inverse FYX is a weak 0.40 (we will discuss the reasons for this later in the returned: the correlation between FXY and its inverse FYX is a weak 0.40 (we will discuss the reasons for this later in the paper). For clarity, Figure 3 shows only arrows corresponding to votes with a high friendship score FXY > 12. Figure 3 shows the friendship network, laid out using Spring Embedding (Freeman, 2000), a process equivalent to Multidi- mensional Scaling (Brandes, 2001). However, by adjusting for SY, we are also compensating for that factor. (2005) have found that, as well as song quality, the order of performance also determines country Y’s total score SY. These numbers form a social network with a structure similar to that obtained by asking a group of people how much they like each other, and we therefore refer to it as a friendship network, in the sense that countries like Norway and Denmark can be informally described as “friends.” However, the biases between countries are naturally more complex than friendship between individuals, being influenced by cultural, political, and other factors. subtracted the shared perception of song “quality” from the votes, the numbers FXY which remain provide an indication of the bias that country X has towards country Y.