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2011 IEEE Global Engineering Education Conference, EDUCON 2011, Amman, 4 - 6 April 2011, 606-611 ; Alumni connections are important resources that contribute to university evaluation. Even though alumni connections represent networks, they have been mostly evaluated as tabular data (e.g. by providing average salary, employment rate, etc.). This ironically disregards all qualities of a network, from which an alumni network gets its name. It is desirable to evaluate an alumni network as a network, because networks have the potential to provide very insightful information. Evaluation of alumni networks as a network has not been feasible in the past due to data fragmentation (neither universities nor companies willing to share meaningfully significant data in its entirety). Recently the feasibility of such analysis has changed, due to new trends towards democratization of information, accelerated by the Web 2.0 user-generated content phenomenon and crowd-sourcing mentality. Utilizing web-crawlers, we actively harvested data and assembled a dataset on alumni in leadership positions in technology-based industries. Moreover, we included a high proportion of startup companies, which allowed us to evaluate alumni networks with respect to entrepreneurial as well as technology involvement. We show that by analyzing alumni connections as networks, it is possible to uncover new patterns, as well as provide a new way of examining the old

This article contains supporting information online at www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi:10.1073/pnas.1714977115/-/DCSupplemental. ; Knowledge about the biogeographic affinities of the world's tropical forests helps to better understand regional differences in forest structure, diversity, composition, and dynamics. Such understanding will enable anticipation of region-specific responses to global environmental change. Modern phylogenies, in combination with broad coverage of species inventory data, now allow for global biogeographic analyses that take species evolutionary distance into account. Here we present a classification of the world's tropical forests based on their phylogenetic similarity. We identify five principal floristic regions and their floristic relationships: (i) Indo-Pacific, (ii) Subtropical, (iii) African, (iv) American, and (v) Dry forests. Our results do not support the traditional neo- versus paleotropical forest division but instead separate the combined American and African forests from their Indo-Pacific counterparts. We also find indications for the existence of a global dry forest region, with representatives in America, Africa, Madagascar, and India. Additionally, a northern-hemisphere Subtropical forest region was identified with representatives in Asia and America, providing support for a link between Asian and American northern-hemisphere forests. ; European Union's Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme under Marie Skłodowska-Curie Grant Agreement 660020, Instituto Bem Ambiental (IBAM), Myr Projetos Sustentáveis, IEF, and CNPq, CAPES FAPEMIG, German Research Foundation (DFG; Grants CRC 552, CU127/3-1, HO 3296/2-2, HO3296/4-1, and RU 816), UNAM-PAPIIT IN218416 and Semarnat-CONACYT 128136, Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnoloógico (CNPq, Brazil), Fundação Grupo Boticário de Proteção à Natureza/Brazil, PAPIIT-DGAPA-UNAM (Project IN-204215), National Geographic Society, National Foundation for Scientific and Technology Development Vietnam (Grant 106.11-2010.68), Operation Wallacea, and core funding for Crown Research Institutes from the New Zealand Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment's Science and Innovation Group. ; Peer-reviewed ; Publisher Version