The distribution of impact factors has been modeled in the recent informetric literature using twoexponent law proposed by Mansilla et al. (2007). This paper shows that two distributions widelyused in economics, namely the Dagum and Singh-Maddala models, possess several advantages over the two-exponent model. Compared to the latter, the former give as good as or slightly better fit to data on i...

There is a growing need for acoustic channel simulators. Among the reasons for this is the increased interest in underwater acoustic communications, but also the fact that measuring the characteristics of the underwater channel is very expensive. A channel simulator provides access to realistic channels, and allows us to compare algorithms and modulations under identical conditions. Channel sim...

We examine a long-standing research program in empirical Political Science, fact-pattern analysis (FPA). We connect FPA to definitions of legal rules in jurisprudence and positive political theory. Foundationally, theoretical treatments view rules as functions partitioning case spaces into equivalence classes. Connecting FPA to formal theory has two advantages: first, many elements of the tradi...

Declarative approaches to process modeling are regarded well suited for highly volatile environments as they provide a high degree of flexibility. However, problems in understanding and maintaining declarative process models impede their usage. To compensate for these shortcomings, Test Driven Modeling (TDM) has been proposed. This paper reports on an empirical investigation in which TDM is vie...

Modeling social-ecological systems is difficult due to the complexity of ecosystems and of individual and collective human behavior. Key components of the social-ecological system are often over-simplified or omitted. Generalized modeling is a dynamical systems approach that can overcome some of these challenges. It can rigorously analyze qualitative system dynamics such as regime shifts despit...

The improved empirical fragility model addresses statistical dependence among observations of seismic performances, which arises from common but unknown factors influencing the observations. The proposed model accounts for this dependence by explicitly including common variables in the formulation of the limit state for individual components. Additionally, the fact that observations of the same...

Software process simulation modeling is increasingly being used to address a variety of issues from the strategic management of software development, to supporting process improvements, to software project management training. The scope of software process simulation applications ranges from narrow focused portions of the life cycle to longer-term product evolutionary models with broad organiza...

Studying the acceptance of Information Systems (IS) artifacts is classic to the IS research discipline, as is the study of conceptual modeling and associated phenomena. However, research has not yet sufficiently combined these two lines of inquiry to explore user acceptance of conceptual modeling. The paucity of such research has motivated our study on the acceptance of modeling grammars. In th...

Searle's celebrated Chinese Room Argument has shaken the foundations of Artificial Intelligence. Many refutations have been attempted, but none seem convincing. This paper is an attempt to sort out explicitly the assumptions and the logical, methodological and empirical points of disagreement. Searle is shown to have underestimated some features of computer modeling, but the heart of the issue ...

We study in this paper the consequences of using the Mean Absolute Percentage Error (MAPE) as a measure of quality for regression models. We show that finding the best model under the MAPE is equivalent to doing weighted Mean Absolute Error (MAE) regression. We show that universal consistency of Empirical Risk Minimization remains possible using the MAPE instead of the MAE.