Beyond the ‘Nation State’: the Quest for New Territorial Paradigms in an Interconnected World Economy

This paper addresses one neglected issue in the study of regional integration: the impact of a complex of transnational factors on a country’s development. Goods and productive factors move relatively unhindered and engender less visible (and quantifiable) linkages in the form of global value chains, regional productive clusters or social networks within areas of variable geometry. We refer to this regional partitioning that emerges in space and time within variable boundaries as a context of development. On the basis of this central premise, this study aims to contribute to the ongoing debate on the spatial complexity of economies with a mapping exercise delineating a self-supporting space for development. Paper’s key insight implies that development is informed as much by conventional tenets of economic theory as by new theses of social and cultural nature that makes the case for a space of development of variable geometry.     

Multi-criteria decision support and evaluation of strategies for nuclear remediation management

Environmental emergency situations can differ in many ways, for instance according to their causes and the dimension of their impacts. Yet, they share the characteristic of sudden onset and the necessity for a coherent and effective emergency management. In this paper we consider decision support in the event of a nuclear or radiological accident in Europe. RODOS, an acronym for real-time on-line decision support system, is a decision support system designed to provide support from the early phases through to the medium and long-term phases. This work highlights the role of multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA) within RODOS in ensuring the transparency of decision processes within emergency and remediation management. Special emphasis is placed on the evaluation of alternative remediation or countermeasure strategies using the multi-criteria decision support tool Web-HIPRE in scenario focused decision making workshops involving different stakeholder and expert groups. Decision support is enhanced by a module that generates natural language explanations to facilitate the understanding of the evaluation process, therefore contributing to the direct involvement of the decision makers, with the aim of increasing their confidence in the results of the analyses carried out, forming an audit trail for the decision making process and improving the acceptability of the system as a whole.     

On lower bounds for tail probabilities

Chebyshev's inequality and its generalizations make it possible to give upper bounds for the tail probabilities in the distribution of a random variable. We present a method of finding lower bounds for these probabilities . The method is based on improvements of the Lyapunov inequality for moments of a random variable.     

Transnational education and the remaking of social identity: Nepalese student migration to Denmark

There is no significant history of migration from Nepal to Denmark, but the post-conflict situation in Nepal and the expansion of an international, commercialised education market have resulted in a significant number of Nepalese students in Denmark. This article argues, first, that the current forms of student migration from Nepal must be examined within the context of broader class-based mobility practices and the consolidation of a relatively new middle-class in Nepal. Second, it examines the significance of education and educated status for people’s claims to belong to the middle-class in a transnational context where social status is at stake.     

Health and the structure of adolescent social networks

Much research has explored the role of social networks in promoting health through the provision of social support. However, little work has examined how social networks themselves may be structured by health. This article investigates the link between individuals' health and the characteristics of their social network positions. We first develop theoretical predictions for how health may influence the structure of adolescent networks. We then test these predictions using longitudinal analysis of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health). We find important relationships between the health status of adolescents and the characteristics of the social network positions within which they are embedded. Overall we find that adolescents in poor health form smaller local networks and occupy less central global positions than their healthy peers. These results also have implications for social network research, expanding the scope of factors responsible for the network positions individuals occupy.     

Optimal row–column design for three treatments

The A-optimality problem is solved for three treatments in a row–column layout. Depending on the numbers of rows and columns, the requirements for optimality can be decidedly counterintuitive: replication numbers need not be as equal as possible, and trace of the information matrix need not be maximal. General rules for comparing 3×3$3\times 3$ information matrices for their A-behavior are also developed, and the A-optimality problem is also solved for three treatments in simple block designs.     

Youth co-offending networks: An investigation of social and spatial effects

This research tests the relative contribution of social distance and spatial distance to the presence of ties between neighborhoods based on youth co-offending. Using official court data from a large U.S. metropolitan area, a set of dyad independence and exponential random graph models are estimated in order to investigate the characteristics of neighborhoods that foster co-offending. Results reveal significant effects of both social and spatial distance. Social distance contributes to network structure net of spatial proximity, though spatial factors better explain the overall network structure. These results have methodological implications for the analysis of spatial effects and criminal behavior.     

Large Deviations for Sums of Independent Non Identically Distributed Random Variables

This article considers large deviation results for sums of independent non identically distributed random variables, generalizing the result of Petrov (1968 Petrov , V. V. ( 1968 ). Asymptotic behavior of probabilities of large deviations . Theor. Probab. Appl. 13 : 408 – 420 . [Google Scholar]) by using a weaker and more natural condition on bounds of the cumulant generating functions of the sequence of random variables.