In this paper, we study the online path planning for khepera II mobile robot in an unknown environment. The well known heuristic A* algorithm is implemented to make the mobile robot navigate through static obstacles and find the shortest path from an initial position to a target position by avoiding the obstacles. The proposed path finding strategy is designed in a grid-map form of an unknown e...

This paper explores the spatial and temporal diffusion of political violence in North and West Africa. It does so by endeavoring to represent the mental landscape that lives in the back of a group leader’s mind as he contemplates strategic targeting. We assume that this representation is a combination of the physical geography of the target environment, and the mental and physical cost of follo...

In this paper we relate linguistic, geographic and social distances to each other in order to get a better understanding of the impact the DutchGerman state border has had on the linguistic characteristics of a sub-area of the Kleverlandish dialect area. This area used to be a perfect dialect continuum. We test three models for explaining today’s pattern of linguistic variation in the area. In ...

Assessing biodiversity and the spatial structures of forest ecosystems are important for forestry and nature conservation. However, tropical forests of Bangladesh are only sparsely investigated. Here we determined biodiversity (alpha, beta and gamma), spatial species turnover and stand characteristics of one of the few remnant tropical forests in Bangladesh. Two differently protected areas of S...

This paper describes a performance study of a trial Switched Multimegabit Data Service (SMDS) link from the perspective of customers evaluating the feasibility of the link for some target applications. The goals were to take all measurements on the customer premises and to develop a methodology general enough to be used by customers to evaluate the link. We measured a lightly loaded system and ...

This study investigates how foreign subsidiaries gain attention from corporate headquarters. Using detailed questionnaire and archival data on 283 subsidiaries of multinational enterprises, our analysis revealed three significant findings. First, attention decisions are partially based on the structural positions that subsidiary units occupy within a corporate system—their “weight.” Second, a s...

A substantial number of studies have extended the work on universal properties in physical systems to complex networks in social, biological, and technological systems. In this paper, we present a complex networks perspective on interfirm organizational networks by mapping, analyzing and modeling the spatial structure of a large interfirm competition network across a variety of sectors and indu...

—Despite efforts by researchers worldwide to assess the biodiversity of plant groups, many locations on Earth remain poorly surveyed, resulting in inadequate or biased knowledge. Robust estimates of inventory completeness could help alleviate the problem. This study aimed to identify areas representing gaps in current knowledge of African palms, with a focus on Benin (West Africa). We assessed ...

This paper discusses a new approach to controlling for the environment when estimating efficiency. In response to the literature on the international comparison of bank efficiency, we draw the attention to a local dimension of comparison. By introducing geographical weights and estimating local frontiers for each US savings bank for the 2001-09 period, we find that the bank technical performanc...