We synthesize the financial crisis contagion literature through the gravity model from physics and test the hypothesis that the severity of contagion relates positively to trade and financial linkages but negatively to psychic distance between countries, when macroeconomic fundamentals and institutional factors are controlled. The psychic distance variable, a behavioral predictor constructed al...

The Internet’s tremendous value is undoubtedly dependent on its universal connectivity among a great number of heterogeneous networks that are distributed over the world. In recent years, while the Internet’s scale has expanded exponentially, the current status of its connectivity is still in the lack of comprehensive and formal study. In this paper, we contribute to the understanding of Intern...

The Internet revolution has made long-distance communication dramatically faster, easier, and cheaper than ever before. This, it has been argued, has decreased the importance of geographic proximity in social interactions, transforming our world into a “global village” with a "borderless society". We argue for the opposite: while technology has undoubtedly increased the overall level of communi...

Designing large scale real estate projects often requires collaboration between consultants and agencies that are located in different geographical areas. The added constraint of geographical distance to a design approach that already involves multiple participants makes design collaboration a particularly challenging task. This study hypothesizes that design collaboration could benefit from ha...

1. Suitability of the local habitat (‘habitat filtering’) and dispersal between stream reaches determines the composition of insect communities, and urban land use may affect both processes. While urban streams are often poor habitats for insects and dispersal between them is often hindered, conservation and restoration activities generally focus solely on the local (in-stream) environment. 2. ...

An ordered probit regression model estimated using 15 years’ data is used to model English league football match results. As well as past match results data, the significance of the match for end-ofseason league outcomes; the involvement of the teams in cup competition; the geographical distance between the two teams’ home towns; and the average attendances of the two teams all contribute to th...

City size distributions are known to be well approximated by power laws across many countries. By far the most popular explanation for such power-law regularities is in terms of random growth processes, where power laws arise asymptotically from the assumption of iid growth rates among all cities within a given country. But this assumption has additional consequences. Since all subsets of citie...

We present LOLA (LOw LAtency audio visual streaming system), a system for distributed performing arts interaction over advanced packet networks. It is intended to operate on high performance networking infrastructures, and is based on low latency audio/video acquisition hardware and on the integration and optimization of audio/video data acquisition, presentation and transmission. The extremely...

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...

The paper demonstrates a following robot with omni-directional wheels, which is able to take action to avoid obstacles. The robot design is based on both fuzzy and extension theory. Fuzzy theory was applied to tune the PMW signal of the motor revolution, and correct path deviation issues encountered when the robot is moving. Extension theory was used to build a robot obstacle-avoidance model. V...