Online Social Networks (OSNs) are increasingly becoming one of the key media of communication over the Internet. The potential of these services as the basis to gather statistics and exploit information about user behavior is appealing and, as a consequence, the number of applications developed for these purposes has been soaring. At the same time, users are now willing to share information abo...

A common belief among educators is that international students are insufficiently adjusted to higher education in their host country, both academically and socially. Furthermore, several groups of international students experience considerable amounts of stress while adapting to the culture of the host-institute, but limited research has addressed whether and how transitional issues influence a...

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...

We investigate the determinants of geographical distances to parents. We focus on the role of family members who live outside the household (the parents themselves, and siblings), and on the distinction between the effects of life events and effects related to the timing with which these events have been experienced in the life course. We use data from the Netherlands Kinship Panel Study and li...

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 ...

Abstract: A procedure for determining the probability distribution of the rth order statistic, Gr:L, r 1⁄4 1, 2, . . . , L, among a set of L correlated Nakagami diversity branch gains G1, G2, . . ., GL has been described in David and Nagaraja (2003) and Elkashlan et al. (2008). The results are used to evaluate the bit error rate (BER) of general order selection (GOS), a diversity method in whic...

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 ...

There are hereditary differences among human beings. Some of these differences have geographical correlates. Some genetic variants that produce physical or behavioral deficits occur significantly more often in some areas, or in some ethnic groups, than in others. However, none of these facts provides any intellectual support for the race concept, for racial classifications, or for social hierar...

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...