History, geography, environment, and technology influence the cultural practices and institutions of a society and vice versa. But how strongly do geography, environment, and technology correlate with culture and institutions? To add insight into this question, we use a new methodology which explores the relationship between a variety of bilateral proximity measures developed using the societie...

The permutation based index has shown to be very effective in medium and high dimensional metric spaces, even in difficult problems such as solving reverse k-nearest neighbor queries. Nevertheless, currently there is no study about which are the desirable features one can ask to a permutant set, or how to select good permutants. Similar to the case of pivots, our experimental results show that,...

Forests are experiencing significant changes; studying geographic patterns in forests is critical in understanding the impact of forest dynamics to biodiversity, soil erosion, water chemistry and climate. Few studies have examined forest geographic pattern changes other than fragmentation; however, other spatial processes of forest dynamics are of equal importance. Here, we study forest attriti...

Previous work by Tesser (1993) and Bourgeois (2002) found that heritable attitudes are more resistant to social influence and attitude change. The present study sought to replicate and extend previous work by utilizing attitudes and heritability estimates not previously used in studies examining the effect of heritable attitudes on social influence processes. It was hypothesized that attitudesw...

Poverty analysis is often based on national level indicators that are compared over time or across countries. The broad trends that can be identified using aggregate information are useful for evaluating and monitoring the overall performance of a country. For many policy and research applications, however, the information that can be extracted from aggregate indicators is not sufficient. Resea...

This paper examines the out-of-sample performance of various financial variables as predictors of U.S. recessions. Series such as interest rates and spreads, stock prices, and monetary aggregates are evaluated individually and in comparison with other financial and nonfinancial indicators. The analysis focuses on out-of-sample performance from one to eight quarters ahead. Results show that stoc...

In this paper, we investigate competition in banking systems in the EU27 as a whole for the period 2004– 2010, but also for old members’ banking systems compared with new members’ banking systems and for banking systems from countries member of euro zone compares with banking systems from countries non-member of euro zone. In order to investigate this issue, we estimate a non-structural indicat...

Understanding the neural basis of behaviour requires studying brain activity in behaving subjects using complementary techniques that measure neural responses at multiple spatial scales, and developing computational tools for understanding the mapping between these measurements. Here we report the first results of widefield imaging of genetically encoded calcium indicator (GCaMP6f) signals from...

It is widely recognized that citation counts for papers from different fields cannot be directly compared because different scientific fields adopt different citation practices. Citation counts are also strongly biased by paper age since older papers had more time to attract citations. Various procedures aim at suppressing these biases and give rise to new normalized indicators, such as the rel...

We present a modular approach for analyzing calcium imaging recordings of large neuronal ensembles. Our goal is to simultaneously identify the locations of the neurons, demix spatially overlapping components, and denoise and deconvolve the spiking activity from the slow dynamics of the calcium indicator. Our approach relies on a constrained nonnegative matrix factorization that expresses the sp...