Large scale analysis and statistics of socio-technical systems that just a few short years ago would have required the use of consistent economic and human resources can nowadays be conveniently performed by mining the enormous amount of digital data produced by human activities. Although a characterization of several aspects of our societies is emerging from the data revolution, a number of questions concerning the reliability and the biases inherent to the big data “proxies” of social life are still open. Here, we survey worldwide linguistic indicators and trends through the analysis of a large-scale dataset of microblogging posts. We show that available data allow for the study of language geography at scales ranging from country-level aggregation to specific city neighborhoods. The high resolution and coverage of the data allows us to investigate different indicators such as the linguistic homogeneity of different countries, the touristic seasonal patterns within countries and the geographical distribution of different languages in multilingual regions. This work highlights the potential of geolocalized studies of open data sources to improve current analysis and develop indicators for major social phenomena in specific communities.

Subcutaneous administration of BTX-A significantly decreased pain in PHN and reduced opioid use compared with lidocaine and placebo at day 7 and 3 months post-treatment. It also increased subjects' sleep times.

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Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), which collect complete records of all student interactions in an online learning environment, offer us an unprecedented opportunity to analyze students' learning behavior at a very fine granularity than ever before.Using dataset from xuetangX, one of the largest MOOCs from China, we analyze key factors that influence students' engagement in MOOCs and study to what extent we could infer a student's learning effectiveness. We observe significant behavioral heterogeneity in students' course selection as well as their learning patterns. For example, students who exert higher effort and ask more questions are not necessarily more likely to get certificates. Additionally, the probability that a student obtains the course certificate increases dramatically (3× higher) when she has one or more "certificate friends".Moreover, we develop a unified model to predict students' learning effectiveness, by incorporating user demographics, forum activities, and learning behavior. We demonstrate that the proposed model significantly outperforms (+2.03-9.03% by F1-score) several alternative methods in predicting students' performance on assignments and course certificates. The model is flexible and can be applied to various settings. For example, we are deploying a new feature into xuetangX to help teachers dynamically optimize the teaching process.

This study investigated the regional differences of China′s urban land expansion from the late 1980s to the year of 2008, based on the spatio-temporal analysis of CLCD (China′s land cover/land use database) datasets which were mainly produced from remote sensing imagery data. A newly defined urbanization level index (UI), based on urban land area, is proposed to describe Chinese urban expansion process at 1 kilometer, provincial, regional, and national scales, together with the absolute urban expansion index (UE a ) and the relative urbanization expansion index (UE r ). The results indicate that the percentages of total land area occupied by urban in the late 1980s, 1995, 2000, 2005, and 2008 were approximately 0.25%, 0.32%, 0.33%, 0.43% and 0.52% of China′s total land area, respectively. Between the late 1980s and 2008, the total urban expansion in the mainland of China was 2.645 × 10 4 km 2 , resulting in an annual urban expansion area of about 1322.7 km 2 /yr, with the UE r of 111.9%. This study also finds that there has been an obvious spatial gradient of urbanization ratio running from the east coast to the west inland, and the urbanization gaps among different regions have persisted over the past two decades. The study also reveals obvious temporal variations of the urbanization rates. There was very little urban growth during the period of 1995-2000 due to the governmental policy factors.Citation: Liu Jiyuan, Zhang Qian, Hu Yunfeng, 2012. Regional differences of China′s urban expansion from late 20th to early 21st century based on remote sensing information.

This paper explores the precarious working conditions in the Chinese restaurant industry in Sweden -a country considered to have one of Europe's most liberal labour immigration policies. Drawing upon a theoretical framework inspired by scholarship on precarious work and time geography, the paper argues that precarious work performed by migrant labour can be usefully understood through three interrelated temporal processes that, when they work together, produce and maintain precarious work-life situations. They are: (1) work-time arrangements: that is, actual working hours per day and over the annual cycle, the pace and intensity of work and the flexibility demanded of migrant workers in terms of when work is carried out, (2) the spatio-temporal 'waiting zones' indirectly produced by immigration policies that delay full access to labour markets and in which precarious work-time arrangements consequently arise, and (3) migrant workers' imagined futures, which motivate them to accept precarious work-time arrangements during a transitory period. The paper thus also illuminates that the Chinese chefs in Sweden's restaurant industry are not just passive victims of exploitative work-time arrangements. Rather, waiting -for a return to China or settlement in Sweden -may be part of migrants' strategies to achieve certain life course trajectories.Keywords: Sweden, Chinese migrant workers' strategies, liberal migration policies, migration status; permanent residence, precarious working conditions, temporalities 2 IntroductionIn recent years, labour geography has become increasingly concerned with the intersections between migration and precarious employment (e.g. Coe, 2013;Ellis, Wright and Parks, 2007;Lewis et al., 2014;May et al., 2007; Dyer, 2007, 2009;Vosko, 2006;Waite, 2009;Wills et al., 2010). Migrant workers, it is argued, are clustered in particular jobs and segments of the labour market characterised by low pay and insecure employment. In this literature, there is an often implicit discussion about the relationship between precarious work and time. The precarious working conditions of migrant workers are linked to the proliferation of short-term, temporary or casual contracts in advanced capitalist economies (e.g. May et al., 2007;McDowell, Batnitzky and Dyer, 2009;Wills et al., 2010; also see e.g. Amin, 1994;Peck and Theodore, 1998;Rogers and Rogers, 1989;Sassen, 1991).It is also implied that precarious working conditions are not only characterised by low status and low pay but also by uncertainty about working hours, which may be both too many or too few (e.g. McDowell, Batnitzky and Dyer, 2009), and by a lack of regularity and predictability about length of employment and when work will take place (Anderson, 2007). Thus, precarious work among migrant populations, as noted by Anderson (2007), has much to do with matters of time or, more precisely, with a range of temporal uncertainties -about how long employment will last, the number of hours of work each week, and when to be available for work -which ...

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