Since at least the sixteenth century, the areas of the present day regions of Harar and Wallo have been important centres of teaching and diffusion of Islam as well as of preservation of Islamic culture and education. Preachers and scholars from these areas played a decisive role in the introduction and dissemination of the faith in the country, especially in the eighteenth and nineteenth centu...

Online dating sites have become popular platforms for people to look for potential romantic partners. It is important to understand users’ dating preferences in order to make better recommendations on potential dates. The message sending and replying actions of a user are strong indicators for what he/she is looking for in a potential date and reflect the user’s actual dating preferences. We st...

Prior research suggests an inverse relationship between geographic distance and financial market linkages. In this paper, we examine whether and how cultural distance between countries mitigates this finding. We find that country-pairs exhibit higher linkages if they have smaller cultural distance. The result remains significant to alternative measures of linkage. Finally, the cultural effect s...

Telehea l th , b ro adly defined, is the use of telecommunications and information technologies to overcome geographic distances between health care practitioners or between practitioners and patients for the purpose of diagnosis, treatment, consultation, education and health information transfer. The vastness of Canada has made the delivery of health services to its widely dispersed population...

Online dating sites have become popular platforms for people to look for romantic partners, providing an unprecedented level of access to potential dates that is otherwise not available through traditional means. Characterization of the user online dating behavior helps us to obtain a deep understanding of their dating preference and make better recommendations on potential dates. In this paper...

This paper studies the impact of the R&D offshoring of multinational enterprises on the firms in host emerging economies. We develop a two-stage non-cooperative game to analyze the strategic interaction between multinational and host country enterprises engaged in R&D investment. An empirical analysis of 12,309 manufacturing firms in the ICT industry in China shows that R&D offshoring has a pos...

Valuable resources often exist at distant points from a firm’s current locations, so that strategic decisions such as growth have a spatial dimension in which firms seek information and choose between geographically distributed alternatives. Studies show that geographic proximity facilitates the flow of resources, but there is limited understanding of factors that exacerbate or ease the impact ...

We suggest that the proximity of a country to other countries is a factor that affects its choice as an MNE location. We introduce the concept of a country’s proximity to the global distribution of knowledge, markets and resources, and frame this concept as a function of both geographic distance and the worldwide spatial distribution of these factors. We test our location model on a dataset com...

Is the use of an online course delivery format, when compared with the more traditional face-to-face format, good or bad in the context of university education? Those who subscribe to the no-significant-difference perspective argue that online delivery is good, because it allows students with time and geographic distance constraints to obtain the education that they need, with no significant ne...

Point of Departure " First Law of Geography " : " Everything is related to everything else, but near things are more related than distant things. " — Waldo Tobler, 1970 Fundamental Dialectological Postulate: " Geographically proximate varieties tend to be more similar than distant ones. " — Nerbonne & Kleiweg, 2007 Tested on different types of data (surveys, corpora) Several kinds of geograph...