Simulations of physicists for the competition between adult languages since 2003 are reviewed. How many languages are spoken by how many people? How many languages are contained in various language families? How do language similarities decay with geographical distance, and what effects do natural boundaries have? New simulations of bilinguality are given in an appendix.

Point-of-interest (POI) recommendation has been well studied in recent years. However, most of the existing methods focus on the recommendation scenarios where users can provide explicit feedback. In most cases, however, the feedback is not explicit, but implicit. For example, we can only get a user’s check-in behaviors from the history of what POIs she/he has visited, but never know how much s...

Luleå University of Technology has for the last few years deployed a net-based learning environment, mStar, to distribute courses to students independent of time and geographic distance. The mStar enviroment gives remotely attending students equal possibilities as traditionally attending students to take an active part of a course, as well as enhancing the learning experience for all students. ...

Overview: From an initial small core of 4 people who could identify, treat, track and monitor heart failure patients for the hospital (including home assessment visits for high risk patient population) there grew a desire to utilize the hospital infrastructure to further develop pathways and protocols to better care for heart failure patients. Contributing factors included:  Cost ineffectivene...

This note revisits the role of migrant social networks as determinants of bilateral-migration flows. We do so using a new database that covers about 190 world countries and features more accurate estimates of bilateral flows than those employed so far. Our battery of gravitymodel exercises show that the impact of social networks is consistent and significant over different specifications, and i...

This paper begins to explore the determinants of the topological properties of the international-trade network (ITN). We fit bilateral-trade flows using a standard gravity equation to build a " residual " ITN where trade-link weights are depurated from geographical distance, size, border effects, trade agreements, and so on. We then compare the topological properties of the original and residua...

The requirements elicitation process is particularly difficult in Global Software Development (GSD) environments owing principally to cultural differences and communication problems derived from the geographical distance that separates stakeholders. For this reason it is necessary to train professionals in the skills needed to confront a requirements elicitation process in a GSD environment. In...

Internet commerce has brought forward a new spectrum of business practice. It radically changes the way we do business. These changes have been fairly impulsive and inevitable. Limitations caused by traditional commercial practices, such as barriers to reach the whole target market due to geographical distance,and high transaction costs due to engagement costs for attorney, agent and broker inv...

There are many reasons why an organisation should consider adopting distributed development of software systems and applications, including access to a larger labour pool and a broader skills base, cost advantages, and round the clock working. However, distributed development presents many challenges stemming from the complexity of maintaining good communication, coordination and control when t...

We find that the location of corporate headquarters significantly affects the firm’s bondholders. Similar to Loughran and Schultz (2006) and others, who show that investors are better able to obtain information on nearby companies, we look at firms located in large metropolitan cities, small cities, and rural areas and find that firms located in remote rural areas exhibit significantly higher c...