What is the relationship between civil war and terrorism? Recent attempts to unpack the similarities between these types of political violence have either focused on creating actor-based categories (terrorists vs. insurgents) and elucidating the different reasons for being one or the other or comparing and contrasting each to discern whether they have similar etiologies. In contrast to previous...

A computational scheme for fitting smoothing spline ANOVA models to large data sets with a (near) tensor product design is proposed. Such data sets are common in spatial-temporal analyses. The proposed scheme uses the backfitting algorithm to take advantage of the tensor product design to save both computational memory and time. Several ways to further speed up the backfitting algorithm, such a...

Social networking and network socialization provide abundant text information and social relationships into our daily lives. Making full use of these data in the big data era is of great significance for us to better understand the changing world and the information-based society. Though politics have been integrally involved in the hyperlinked world issues since the 1990s, the text analysis an...

Recently, we have presented the first exhaustive analysis of the world-wide airport network. Two important results of that study are that: (i) the world-wide airport network is a small-world network with power-law decaying degree and betweenness centrality distributions; (ii) the most connected cities (largest degree) are typically not the most central cities (largest betweenness centrality). T...

Over the past few years, analysts have begun to materialize the “Citizen as Sensors” principle by analyzing human movements, trends and opinions, as well as the occurrence of events from tweets. This study aims to use geo-tagged tweets to identify and visualize refugee migration patterns from the Middle East and Northern Africa to Europe during the initial surge of refugees aiming for Europe in...

Political districting is an intractable problem with significant ramifications for political representation. Districts often are required to satisfy some legal constraints, but these typically are not very restrictive, allowing decision makers to influence the composition of these districts without violating relevant laws. For example, while districts must often comprise a single contiguous are...

The evolution of studies of political parties of constitution: The first and second periods show that the evolution of parties indicates that researchers' attitude to political pheno-mena also coincide with the evolution of political realities has been transformed, and the consideration of ideologies in the analysis of the parties have replaced with religious perspectives and anti-authoritarian...

Sub-Saharan Africa is a highly diverse geo-political region. Any brief discussion of the progress made over the last 15 years towards the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) will therefore not do justice to the true complexity of context and events. Our focus will be MDG4-to reduce child mortality by 66% from 1990 levels. We will touch briefly on MDG1, to eradicate extreme poverty and hunger, M...