The value above which the exponential decay starts to set in is the truncation parameter. Naturally, when the degrees already had finite variance before truncation, they will remain to have so after truncation, so nothing much happens and graph distances ought to behave as in the finite-variance...
show that petitions have a 'rapid rise and decay' in interest, whereby they 'demonstrate very rapid early growth, which decelerates overtime' (Ibid., p. 5). Hence, given these findings, we use the creation date of petitions as a proxy for the time at which each petition receives ...