A Theoretical Model for Measuring the Influence of Accessibility in Residential Choice Behaviour

Due to the renewed interest for Integrated Land-use and Transport models, the urge for sound models that describe the behaviour of the agents on the urban markets has grown. A preferred subject of study within this context is the empirical research into the influence of accessibility on the residential choice behaviour of households. However, despite of the effort of several researchers, this relationship seems hard to quantify. In this paper we present a theoretical design for a discrete choice model of the residential choice of households. From the existing knowledge from a literature review and new insights, we present a new approach for measuring the influence of accessibility on the residential choice process. This theoretical model exists of three main parts, namely: the unique information of households, the arrangement of households into certain destination groups and composing systematic choice sets to estimate a discrete choice model. Within this framework, an important role is set aside for the concept of subjective accessibility, being the individuals perception and utility of accessibility. Finally, we derived a Logit model that is able to combine the simultaneous influence of migration distance and commuting time.

Conflict and Computation on Wikipedia: a Finite-State Machine Analysis of Editor Interactions

What is the boundary between a vigorous argument and a breakdown of relations? What drives a group of individuals across it? Taking Wikipedia as a test case, we use a hidden Markov model to approximate the computational structure and social grammar of more than a decade of cooperation and conflict among its editors. Across a wide range of pages, we discover a bursty war/peace structure where the systems can become trapped, sometimes for months, in a computational subspace associated with significantly higher levels of conflict-tracking "revert" actions. Distinct patterns of behavior characterize the lower-conflict subspace, including tit-for-tat reversion. While a fraction of the transitions between these subspaces are associated with top-down actions taken by administrators, the effects are weak. Surprisingly, we find no statistical signal that transitions are associated with the appearance of particularly anti-social users, and only weak association with significant news events outside the system. These findings are consistent with transitions being driven by decentralized processes with no clear locus of control. Models of belief revision in the presence of a common resource for information-sharing predict the existence of two distinct phases: a disordered high-conflict phase, and a frozen phase with spontaneously-broken symmetry. The bistability we observe empirically may be a consequence of editor turn-over, which drives the system to a critical point between them.Comment: 23 pages, 3 figures. Matches published version. Code for HMM fitting available at http://bit.ly/sfihmm ; time series and derived finite state machines at bit.ly/wiki_hm

Territorial Behavior of Eastern Chipmunks (Tamias Striatus): Encounter Avoidance and Spatial Time‐Sharing

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/119105/1/ecy1981624915.pd

Influence of Urban Areas on Surface Water Loss in the Contiguous United States

Urbanization is one of the main drivers of surface water loss, which implies a transition from water to land. However, it is still unclear how urban areas affect the spatial pattern of surface water loss. Here, we use remotely sensed data to analyze and model the decrease of surface water extent and, in particular, the frequency of surface water loss as a function of distance from urban areas across the contiguous United States (CONUS). We employ an exponential distance-decay model that confirms the presence of a higher frequency of surface water loss in the proximity of human settlements and provides innovative insights on surface water loss patterns at different spatial scales (i.e., river basins, water resource regions, and the CONUS). These spatial patterns are found to be influenced by climatic conditions, with more widely distributed losses in arid regions with respect to temperate and continental climates. Our results provide a new and deeper understanding of the spatial influence of urban areas on surface water loss, which could be effectively integrated in the definition of sustainable strategies for urbanization, water management, and surface water restoration, focused on both human and environmental water needs

Economic Impact of COVID-19 on Seventh-day Adventist College of Education Students in Ghana: Did the Lockdown Status of a District Matter?

This article examined the economic effects of the coronavirus disease on college of education students based on their location in the lockdown and non-lockdown districts.  A total of 198 students from the Seventh-day Adventist College of Education, Agona-Ashanti, Ghana, were selected using a simple random sampling. A questionnaire and semi-structured thematic guide were used for data collection.  Quantitative data analysis was performed using IBM SPSS (version 25) while direct quotes from in-depth interviews were used to support quantitative data. The results show that students and parents mainly engaged in trading and farming as their main sources of income. The chi-square test of independence showed no statistically significant differences in the self-supporting livelihood activities pursued by students from lockdown and non-lockdown districts (P˃.05). It also showed no statistically significant differences in the effect of the pandemic on both parents' and students' livelihood activities based on their location (P˃.05). The economic consequences of the pandemic on students’ academic activities in both lockdown and non-lockdown districts were, thus, similar. It is recommended that the Ghanaian government's measures to mitigate the economic effects of the pandemic should not be limited to the lockdown districts but should be extended to all districts across the country

Modeling Human Mobility by Train on the Spread of COVID-19 in East Java Province Using Distance-Decay PageRank Algorithm

Since early 2020, the world has been dealing with the COVID-19 outbreak. A person who has been infected with COVID-19 has the potential to transmit the virus to others. This study aims to model human mobility by train using the spatial network in East Java Province. This research examines the relationship between human mobility by train and the spread of COVID-19 in East Java Province. The spatial network is formed based on train stations and train trips, and the model was created using the Distance-decay PageRank algorithm. This research has modeled human mobility using the train in East Java Province. The result shows that human mobility by train is highly correlated with the spread of COVID-19 in East Java Province, with a correlation coefficient of 0.7 (r = 0.7).Since early 2020, the world has been dealing with the COVID-19 outbreak. A person who has been infected with COVID-19 has the potential to transmit the virus to others. This study aims to model human mobility by train using the spatial network in East Java Province. This research examines the relationship between human mobility by train and the spread of COVID-19 in East Java Province. The spatial network is formed based on train stations and train trips, and the model was created using the Distance-decay PageRank algorithm. This research has modeled human mobility using the train in East Java Province. The result shows that human mobility by train is highly correlated with the spread of COVID-19 in East Java Province, with a correlation coefficient of 0.7 ( = 0.7)

The architecture of community: some new proposals on the social consequences of architectural and planning decisions

Summary: "Territorial" theories argue that spatial design can only play an important role in society by virtue of there being a "correspondence" between spatial zones and social identities. In this paper it is argued that "structured non-correspondence" can also play a positive social role, with quite different consequences for spatial design. To the extent that a system works on non-correspondences it functions more probabilistically. It relies on numbers and frequencies of events which take place to reproduce a statistically stable global system, rather than on the formal clarity of its structure. This gives non-correspondence systems a robustness which highly structured systems do not possess. They can thus tolerate much more local disorder and yet be reproducible

Modeling Human Mobility Entropy as a Function of Spatial and Temporal Quantizations

The knowledge of human mobility is an integral component of several different branches of research and planning, including delay tolerant network routing, cellular network planning, disease prevention, and urban planning. The uncertainty associated with a person's movement plays a central role in movement predictability studies. The uncertainty can be quantified in a succinct manner using entropy rate, which is based on the information theoretic entropy. The entropy rate is usually calculated from past mobility traces. While the uncertainty, and therefore, the entropy rate depend on the human behavior, the entropy rate is not invariant to spatial resolution and sampling interval employed to collect mobility traces. The entropy rate of a person is a manifestation of the observable features in the person's mobility traces. Like entropy rate, these features are also dependent on spatio-temporal quantization. Different mobility studies are carried out using different spatio-temporal quantization, which can obscure the behavioral differences of the study populations. But these behavioral differences are important for population-specific planning. The goal of dissertation is to develop a theoretical model that will address this shortcoming of mobility studies by separating parameters pertaining to human behavior from the spatial and temporal parameters