Characterizing the connectivity tendency of a network is a fundamental problem in network science. The traditional and well-known assortativity coefficient is calculated on a per-network basis, which is of little use to partial connection tendency of a network. This paper proposes a universal assortativity coefficient (UAC), which is based on the unambiguous definition of each individual edge's...

Smartphones are becoming ubiquitous and are owned by youngsters and oldsters alike. However, how many of them really use the "smart" functions of the mobile phone, such as mobile Internet services? Is there a generation gap in the adaptation to smartphone applications? This preliminary study suggests a novel perspective on adoption, by defining smartphone adoption as the free choice of its owne...

In many animal groups, coordinated activity is facilitated by the emergence of leaders and followers. Although the identity of leaders is to some extent predictable, most groups experience frequent changes of leadership. How do group members cope with such changes in their social role? Here, we compared the foraging behaviour of pairs of stickleback fish after a period of either (i) role reinfo...

The literature contains many examples of utopian predictions stemming from the widespread adoption of Internet technology, including extended democracy, personal liberation, enhanced powers of organization and coordination, and renewal of community. These are briefly described in this paper. However, more recently, researchers have begun to provide more critical, dystopian predictions for this ...

This paper focuses on factors related to consumer complaint behavior tendency in Internet. Current literatures from home and abroad focus on how to improve consumer’s satisfaction and loyalty, while there are still relatively few researches on consumer dissatisfaction and complaint behavior. Based on the analysis of consumer complaint behavior tendency in Internet, this paper discusses the fact...

In the modelling of ordinal responses in psychological measurement and survey-based research, response styles that represent specific answering patterns of respondents are typically ignored. One consequence is that estimates of item parameters can be poor and considerably biased. The focus here is on the modelling of a tendency to extreme or middle categories. An extension of the Partial Credit...

The main goal of this study was to investigate the way of affecting of water in production of cucumber. From aspect of econometrics, mutual relationships of production function and expenses have been analyzed in which Translog cost function has been used. This function has been estimated using the conditional input demand functions, the shefard theorem, chemical fertilizer, animal fertilizer, l...

OBJECTIVE To examine the effect of child age and number of response choices on children's tendency to respond at the extremes of Likert-type scales rating emotional states. METHODS Sixty children (5-6 years, 7-9 years, 10-12 years) were randomly assigned to use either three or five response choices in providing ratings in three different task conditions. Tasks were designed to have correct ch...