Increasing plant diversity with border crops reduces insecticide use and increases crop yield in urban agriculture.

Science.gov (United States)

Wan, Nian-Feng; Cai, You-Ming; Shen, Yan-Jun; Ji, Xiang-Yun; Wu, Xiang-Wen; Zheng, Xiang-Rong; Cheng, Wei; Li, Jun; Jiang, Yao-Pei; Chen, Xin; Weiner, Jacob; Jiang, Jie-Xian; Nie, Ming; Ju, Rui-Ting; Yuan, Tao; Tang, Jian-Jun; Tian, Wei-Dong; Zhang, Hao; Li, Bo

2018-05-24

Urban agriculture is making an increasing contribution to food security in large cities around the world. The potential contribution of biodiversity to ecological intensification in urban agricultural systems has not been investigated. We present monitoring data collected from rice fields in 34 community farms in mega-urban Shanghai, China, from 2001 to 2015, and show that the presence of a border crop of soybeans and neighboring crops (maize, eggplant and Chinese cabbage), both without weed control, increased invertebrate predator abundance, decreased the abundance of pests and dependence on insecticides, and increased grain yield and economic profits. Two 2 year randomized experiments with the low and high diversity practices in the same locations confirmed these results. Our study shows that diversifying farming practices can make an important contribution to ecological intensification and the sustainable use of associated ecosystem services in an urban ecosystem. © 2018, Wan et al.

Using the World Wide Web To Teach Francophone Culture.

Science.gov (United States)

Beyer, Deborah Berg; Van Ells, Paula Hartwig

2002-01-01

Examined use of the World Wide Web to teach Francophone culture. Suggests that bolstering reading comprehension in the foreign language and increased proficiency in navigating the Web are potential secondary benefits gained from the cultural Web-based activities proposed in the study.(Author/VWL)

Can the future, world-wide energy supply be achieved without nuclear energy?

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Kugeler, K.

1995-01-01

In the future the world-wide energy demand is going to increase considerably. The use of nuclear energy will continuously grow if the demand of climate researchers for a reduction of the world-wide CO 2 emission is fulfilled and if the possible contribution of regenerative energy sources is assessed realistically. In the future a world-wide use of nuclear energy will be realised according to even higher safety standards. The modification of the German Atom Law, which determines the limitation of damage caused to the reactor plant for future reactors fulfils this demand. The efforts in the field of nuclear technical development will concentrate on the proof of the required safety properties. (orig.) [de

Emergency Medicine for medical students world wide!

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Perinpam, Larshan; Thi Huynh, Anh-Nhi

2015-01-01

A guest blog from Larshan Perinpam (President of ISAEM) and Anh-Nhi Thi Huynh (Vice president of external affairs, ISAEM) - http://blogs.bmj.com/emj/2015/04/17/emergency-medicine-for-medical-students-world-wide/......A guest blog from Larshan Perinpam (President of ISAEM) and Anh-Nhi Thi Huynh (Vice president of external affairs, ISAEM) - http://blogs.bmj.com/emj/2015/04/17/emergency-medicine-for-medical-students-world-wide/...

WorldWideScience.org: Bringing Light to Grey

OpenAIRE

Hitson, Brian A. (OSTI-DOE); Johnson, Lorrie A. (OSTI-DOE); GreyNet, Grey Literature Network Service

2008-01-01

WorldWideScience.org and its governance structure, the WorldWideScience Alliance, are putting a brighter spotlight on grey literature. Through this new tool, grey literature is getting broader exposure to audiences all over the world. Improved access to and sharing of research information is the key to accelerating progress and breakthroughs in any field, especially science. Includes: Conference preprint, Powerpoint presentation, Abstract and Biographical notes, Pratt student commentary ...

Increasing public understanding of transgenic crops through the World Wide Web.

Science.gov (United States)

Byrne, Patrick F; Namuth, Deana M; Harrington, Judy; Ward, Sarah M; Lee, Donald J; Hain, Patricia

2002-07-01

Transgenic crops among the most controversial "science and society" issues of recent years. Because of the complex techniques involved in creating these crops and the polarized debate over their risks and beliefs, a critical need has arisen for accessible and balanced information on this technology. World Wide Web sites offer several advantages for disseminating information on a fast-changing technical topic, including their global accessibility; and their ability to update information frequently, incorporate multimedia formats, and link to networks of other sites. An alliance between two complementary web sites at Colorado State University and the University of Nebraska-Lincoln takes advantage of the web environment to help fill the need for public information on crop genetic engineering. This article describes the objectives and features of each site. Viewership data and other feedback have shown these web sites to be effective means of reaching public audiences on a complex scientific topic.

Business use of the World Wide Web: a report on further investigations

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Hooi-Im Ng

1998-01-01

Full Text Available As a continuation of a previous study this paper reports on a series of studies into business use of the World Wide Web and, more generally the Internet. The use of the World Wide Web as a business tool has increased rapidly for the past three years, and the benefits of the World Wide Web to business and customers are discussed, together with the barriers that hold back future development of electronic commerce. As with the previous study we report on a desk survey of 300 randomly selected business Web sites and on the results of an electronic mail questionnaire sent to the sample companies. An extended version of this paper has been submitted to the International Journal of Information Management

Interoperation of World-Wide Production e-Science Infrastructures

CERN Document Server

Riedel, M; Soddemann, T; Field, L; Navarro, JP; Casey, J; Litmaath, M; Baud, J; Koblitz, B; Catlett, C; Skow, D; Wang, S; Saeki, Y; Sato, H; Matsuoka, S; Geddes, N

Many production Grid and e-Science infrastructures have begun to offer services to end-users during the past several years with an increasing number of scientific applications that require access to a wide variety of resources and services in multiple Grids. Therefore, the Grid Interoperation Now—Community Group of the Open Grid Forum—organizes and manages interoperation efforts among those production Grid infrastructures to reach the goal of a world-wide Grid vision on a technical level in the near future. This contribution highlights fundamental approaches of the group and discusses open standards in the context of production e-Science infrastructures.

Increasing the Supply of Affordable Housing in Urban India - Mumbai

OpenAIRE

Viswanathan, Upasna

2014-01-01

The need for housing in today's world is irrefutable. The growing population, accompanied with the fast pace of urbanization, are producing great housing demand, in urban areas in particular. This study focused on one segment of housing - affordable housing, in Mumbai, India, the demand for which has been on a steady rise over the past decade. Though traditionally the State was the provider of affordable housing, private sector has been increasingly involved in the segment, beginning the econ...

World-Wide Web: The Information Universe.

Science.gov (United States)

Berners-Lee, Tim; And Others

1992-01-01

Describes the World-Wide Web (W3) project, which is designed to create a global information universe using techniques of hypertext, information retrieval, and wide area networking. Discussion covers the W3 data model, W3 architecture, the document naming scheme, protocols, document formats, comparison with other systems, experience with the W3…

WorldWide Telescope Ambassadors, a Year 3 Update

Science.gov (United States)

Udomprasert, Patricia S.; Goodman, A. A.; Wong, C.

2013-01-01

The WorldWide Telescope Ambassadors (WWTA) Program has a track record of inspiring middle school students and getting them excited about science. The WorldWide Telescope (WWT) is a stunningly beautiful and freely available data visualization environment developed by Microsoft Research in collaboration with professional astronomers. Trained volunteer Ambassadors show teachers and students how to use WWT in their classrooms to explore and learn about our Universe. Our initial study has shown that WWT increases student understanding of astrophysical concepts and interest in astronomy and science. As an example of how excited students feel about learning astronomy with WWT, one middle school boy exclaimed, “This is way cooler than Call of Duty!” Our vision is to capitalize on the demonstrated inspirational and educational potential of WWT to increase the number of students who express interest in STEM fields. In this oral presentation, we provide a status update on the WWTA program, including ongoing results from our work with over 700 middle school students to date, and preliminary results from a new NSF-funded study comparing learning and interest gains for students studying Moon phases with WWT vs with the 2-dimensional simulator activity that accompanies their textbook. More information is available at wwtambassadors.org

World Wide Web Homepage Design.

Science.gov (United States)

Tillman, Michael L.

This paper examines hypermedia design and draws conclusions about how educational research and theory applies to various aspects of World Wide Web (WWW) homepage design. "Hypermedia" is defined as any collection of information which may be textual, graphical, visual, or auditory in nature and which may be accessed via a nonlinear route.…

The World Wide Web of War

National Research Council Canada - National Science Library

Smith, Craig A

2006-01-01

Modern communications, combined with the near instantaneous publication of information on the World Wide Web, are providing the means to dramatically affect the pursuit, conduct, and public opinion of war on both sides...

U.S. Geological Survey World Wide Web Information

Science.gov (United States)

,

2003-01-01

The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) invites you to explore an earth science virtual library of digital information, publications, and data. The USGS World Wide Web sites offer an array of information that reflects scientific research and monitoring programs conducted in the areas of natural hazards, environmental resources, and cartography. This list provides gateways to access a cross section of the digital information on the USGS World Wide Web sites.

Remote sensing education and Internet/World Wide Web technology

Science.gov (United States)

Griffith, J.A.; Egbert, S.L.

2001-01-01

Remote sensing education is increasingly in demand across academic and professional disciplines. Meanwhile, Internet technology and the World Wide Web (WWW) are being more frequently employed as teaching tools in remote sensing and other disciplines. The current wealth of information on the Internet and World Wide Web must be distilled, nonetheless, to be useful in remote sensing education. An extensive literature base is developing on the WWW as a tool in education and in teaching remote sensing. This literature reveals benefits and limitations of the WWW, and can guide its implementation. Among the most beneficial aspects of the Web are increased access to remote sensing expertise regardless of geographic location, increased access to current material, and access to extensive archives of satellite imagery and aerial photography. As with other teaching innovations, using the WWW/Internet may well mean more work, not less, for teachers, at least at the stage of early adoption. Also, information posted on Web sites is not always accurate. Development stages of this technology range from on-line posting of syllabi and lecture notes to on-line laboratory exercises and animated landscape flyovers and on-line image processing. The advantages of WWW/Internet technology may likely outweigh the costs of implementing it as a teaching tool.

A Galaxy Zoo - WorldWide Telescope Mashup: Expanding User Defined Exploration

Science.gov (United States)

Luebbert, Jarod; Sands, M.; Fay, J.; Smith, A.; Gay, P. L.; Galaxy Zoo Team

2010-01-01

We present a new way of exploring your favorite Galaxy Zoo galaxies within the context of the sky using Microsoft Research's WorldWide Telescope. Galaxy Zoo has a fantastic community that is eager to learn and contribute to science through morphological classifications of galaxies. WorldWide Telescope is an interactive observatory that allows users to explore the sky. WorldWide Telescope uses images from the world's best telescopes, including the galaxies of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. WorldWide Telescope provides a fantastic sense of size and distance that is hard to experience in Galaxy Zoo. Creating tours from favorite galaxies directly from Galaxy Zoo aims to solve this dilemma.The incorporation of Galaxy Zoo and WorldWide telescope provides a great resource for users to learn more about the galaxies they are classifying. Users can now explore the areas around certain galaxies and view information about that location from within WorldWide Telescope. Not only does this encourage self-motivated research but after tours are created they can be shared with anyone. We hope this will help spread citizen science to different audiences via email, Facebook, and Twitter.Without the WorldWide Telescope team at Microsoft Research this project would not have been possible. Please go start exploring at http://wwt.galaxyzoo.org. This project was funded through the Microsoft Research Academic Program.

Playing with the internet through world wide web

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Kim, Seon Tae; Jang, Jin Seok

1995-07-01

This book describes how to use the internet with world wide web. It is divided into six chapters, which are Let's go to the internet ocean, the internet in information superhighway are, connecting the world with a telephone wire such as link with the internet cable and telephone modem, internet service providers, text mode connection, Domain and IP address, the principle and use of world wide web ; business, music, fashion, movie and photo, internet news and e-mail, making internet map with web language, and from installation to application of base program such as TCP/IP, SLIP/PPP 3270 Emulator, Finger and NCSA Mosaic.

Urban waterfront rehabilitation: can it contribute to environmental improvements in the developing world?

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Vollmer, Derek

2009-01-01

This paper examines urban waterfront rehabilitation as a sustainable development strategy in Chinese cities. Though waterfront rehabilitation is increasingly being employed in developed world cities, the environmental benefits are not always clear. Nonetheless, China, like other developing countries, has shown interest in this strategy, for improving its local water quality, upgrading environmental management, and improving quality of life for urban residents. As developing world cities struggle to break from the traditional model of 'pollute first, clean up later', it is critical that they employ strategies which minimize or remediate environmental impacts while still promoting economic development. This paper analyzes three such projects: the Qinhuai River Environmental Improvement Project in Nanjing, the Suzhou Creek Rehabilitation in Shanghai, and the Wuli Lake Rehabilitation in Wuxi. A critical analysis indicates that these projects have served numerous purposes which contribute to the cities' sustainable development. Though waterways may not be restored to pristine conditions, the incremental improvements appear to be a necessary catalyst for sustainable urban development.

Urban waterfront rehabilitation: can it contribute to environmental improvements in the developing world?

Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

Vollmer, Derek [National Academies, 500 5th Street NW, Washington, DC 20001 (United States)], E-mail: dvollmer@nas.edu

2009-04-15

This paper examines urban waterfront rehabilitation as a sustainable development strategy in Chinese cities. Though waterfront rehabilitation is increasingly being employed in developed world cities, the environmental benefits are not always clear. Nonetheless, China, like other developing countries, has shown interest in this strategy, for improving its local water quality, upgrading environmental management, and improving quality of life for urban residents. As developing world cities struggle to break from the traditional model of 'pollute first, clean up later', it is critical that they employ strategies which minimize or remediate environmental impacts while still promoting economic development. This paper analyzes three such projects: the Qinhuai River Environmental Improvement Project in Nanjing, the Suzhou Creek Rehabilitation in Shanghai, and the Wuli Lake Rehabilitation in Wuxi. A critical analysis indicates that these projects have served numerous purposes which contribute to the cities' sustainable development. Though waterways may not be restored to pristine conditions, the incremental improvements appear to be a necessary catalyst for sustainable urban development.

The World Meteorological Organization Focus on Urban Issues

Science.gov (United States)

Terblanche, D. E.

2015-12-01

Many of the milestones of human development can be traced back to people assembled in urban settings where economies of scale, competition and social interaction stimulated innovation. Considering that more than half the global pollution now lives in cities and towns and that most of the growth in the global pollution in the remainder of this century will continue to take place in the urban environment, the question could be asked whether humankind will continue to capitalize on the traditional benefits of city life to find solutions for growing environmental challenges? In the past cities developed organically. They evolved through trial and error into livable environments. Things have now changed. The global population is larger, urbanization is rapid, pressure on Earth's limited resources is constraining and we are faced with a changing climate. If cities are now allowed to develop in a haphazard manner, the fight for survival in the city will overshadow its entrepreneurial spirit. It is for this reason that the 11th Sustainable Development Goal will focus on: 'Making cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable'. There is now a window of opportunity for weather, climate, water and environmental scientists to contribute towards a more sustainable urban future by ensuring that science based services form an integrated part of urban planning, development and management. WMO recognizes that rapid urbanization will require new types of new and enhanced services. Such integrated urban weather, environment and climate services will assist cities to deal better with hazards such as storm surge, flooding, heat waves, and air pollution episodes, especially in a changing climate. From a research perspective the World Climate Research Programme, the World Weather Research Programme and the Global Atmosphere Watch Programme all have a unique contribution to make in this regard.

The World-Wide Web: An Interface between Research and Teaching in Bioinformatics

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

James F. Aiton

1994-01-01

Full Text Available The rapid expansion occurring in World-Wide Web activity is beginning to make the concepts of ‘global hypermedia’ and ‘universal document readership’ realistic objectives of the new revolution in information technology. One consequence of this increase in usage is that educators and students are becoming more aware of the diversity of the knowledge base which can be accessed via the Internet. Although computerised databases and information services have long played a key role in bioinformatics these same resources can also be used to provide core materials for teaching and learning. The large datasets and arch ives th at have been compiled for biomedical research can be enhanced with the addition of a variety of multimedia elements (images. digital videos. animation etc.. The use of this digitally stored information in structured and self-directed learning environments is likely to increase as activity across World-Wide Web increases.

Bitcoin – the World-Wide Currency

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Shuba Olena А.

2017-11-01

Full Text Available The article is aimed at researching bitcoin, the digital currency. It has been found that Bitcoin is a cryptocurrency, that is, the virtual money, which has no material equivalent. The history of creation and development of cryptocurrency was reviewed. There is a reduction in volatility, which guarantees the security of currency, as well as the increase in currency volume and the inability to estimate the profitability of bitcoins. The dynamics of the value of digital currency in US dollars over recent years has been analyzed. Improvement of attitude of many countries to the considered cryptocurrency, in particular the USA, Germany, Spain, Canada, Australia, Israel and Scandinavian countries has been identified. The reasons of Ukraine’s interest in Bitcoin have been considered. Possibilities of creation of cryptocurrency on the territory of Ukraine have been analyzed, i.e. cost of electricity for mining, the legal status of mining firms, and the attitude of the National Bank of Ukraine to the digital currency. It has been concluded that the recognition of Bitcoin by the world countries in the future will allow it to be granted the status of world-wide currency.

GeoCENS: a geospatial cyberinfrastructure for the world-wide sensor web.

Science.gov (United States)

Liang, Steve H L; Huang, Chih-Yuan

2013-10-02

The world-wide sensor web has become a very useful technique for monitoring the physical world at spatial and temporal scales that were previously impossible. Yet we believe that the full potential of sensor web has thus far not been revealed. In order to harvest the world-wide sensor web's full potential, a geospatial cyberinfrastructure is needed to store, process, and deliver large amount of sensor data collected worldwide. In this paper, we first define the issue of the sensor web long tail followed by our view of the world-wide sensor web architecture. Then, we introduce the Geospatial Cyberinfrastructure for Environmental Sensing (GeoCENS) architecture and explain each of its components. Finally, with demonstration of three real-world powered-by-GeoCENS sensor web applications, we believe that the GeoCENS architecture can successfully address the sensor web long tail issue and consequently realize the world-wide sensor web vision.

Use of World Wide Web and NCSA Mcsaic at Langley

Science.gov (United States)

Nelson, Michael

1994-01-01

A brief history of the use of the World Wide Web at Langley Research Center is presented along with architecture of the Langley Web. Benefits derived from the Web and some Langley projects that have employed the World Wide Web are discussed.

GeoCENS: A Geospatial Cyberinfrastructure for the World-Wide Sensor Web

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Steve H.L. Liang

2013-10-01

Full Text Available The world-wide sensor web has become a very useful technique for monitoring the physical world at spatial and temporal scales that were previously impossible. Yet we believe that the full potential of sensor web has thus far not been revealed. In order to harvest the world-wide sensor web’s full potential, a geospatial cyberinfrastructure is needed to store, process, and deliver large amount of sensor data collected worldwide. In this paper, we first define the issue of the sensor web long tail followed by our view of the world-wide sensor web architecture. Then, we introduce the Geospatial Cyberinfrastructure for Environmental Sensing (GeoCENS architecture and explain each of its components. Finally, with demonstration of three real-world powered-by-GeoCENS sensor web applications, we believe that the GeoCENS architecture can successfully address the sensor web long tail issue and consequently realize the world-wide sensor web vision.

Re-Framing the World Wide Web

Science.gov (United States)

Black, August

2011-01-01

The research presented in this dissertation studies and describes how technical standards, protocols, and application programming interfaces (APIs) shape the aesthetic, functional, and affective nature of our most dominant mode of online communication, the World Wide Web (WWW). I examine the politically charged and contentious battle over browser…

Urban containment policies and the protection of natural areas: the case of Seoul's greenbelt

Science.gov (United States)

David N. Bengston; Yeo-Chang Youn

2006-01-01

Countries around the world have responded to the problems associated with rapid urban growth and increasingly land-consumptive development patterns by creating a wide range of policy instruments designed to manage urban growth. Of the array of growth management techniques, urban containment policies are considered by some to be a promising approach. This paper focuses...

WorldWide Web: Hypertext from CERN.

Science.gov (United States)

Nickerson, Gord

1992-01-01

Discussion of software tools for accessing information on the Internet focuses on the WorldWideWeb (WWW) system, which was developed at the European Particle Physics Laboratory (CERN) in Switzerland to build a worldwide network of hypertext links using available networking technology. Its potential for use with multimedia documents is also…

Internet and The World Wide Web

Indian Academy of Sciences (India)

Home; Journals; Resonance – Journal of Science Education; Volume 2; Issue 2. Internet and The World Wide Web. Neelima Shrikhande. General Article Volume 2 Issue 2 February 1997 pp 64-74. Fulltext. Click here to view fulltext PDF. Permanent link: https://www.ias.ac.in/article/fulltext/reso/002/02/0064-0074 ...

Urban ecology in a developing world: why advanced socioecological theory needs Africa.

Science.gov (United States)

McHale, Melissa R; Bunn, David N; Pickett, Steward Ta; Twine, Wayne

2013-12-01

Socioecological theory, developed through the study of urban environments, has recently led to a proliferation of research focusing on comparative analyses of cities. This research emphasis has been concentrated in the more developed countries of the Northern Hemisphere (often referred to as the "Global North"), yet urbanization is now occurring mostly in the developing world, with the fastest rates of growth in sub-Saharan Africa. Countries like South Africa are experiencing a variety of land-cover changes that may challenge current assumptions about the differences between urban and rural environments and about the connectivity of these dynamic socioecological systems. Furthermore, questions concerning ecosystem services, landscape preferences, and conservation - when analyzed through rural livelihood frameworks - may provide insights into the social and ecological resilience of human settlements. Increasing research on urban development processes occurring in Africa, and on patterns of kinship and migration in the less developed countries of the "Global South", will advance a more comprehensive worldview of how future urbanization will influence the progress of sustainable societies.

Managing rapid urbanization in the third world: some aspects of policy.

Science.gov (United States)

Hope, K R

1989-01-01

A priority task for developing countries is the formulation of national urbanization policies that: 1) foster the full development of national resources; 2) promote cohesion among regions, especially where there are striking inequities in per capita output; 3) prevent or correct the overconcentration of economic activity in a few urban centers; and 4) create a more efficient, equitable management of growth within cities. Although urban households tend to be served better by the health and educational sectors than their rural counterparts, the urban poor are denied these benefits in the absence of special programs to ensure universal access. The urban poor are further denied access to the benefits of urban centers through a transportation policy that is oriented more toward roads and cars than public transit systems. Of major concern are the overcrowded squatter settlements that have developed in response to massive rural-urban migration. Since the landlessness, joblessness, and demoralization in rural areas and the consequent urban influx are at the root of the urban crisis in the Third World, integrated rural development is essential to retain substantial new additions to the urban labor force in rural areas. Land reform is the single strategy with the greatest potential to improve the quality of life of the landless poor and small holders. Other needs include programs of labor-intensive rural public works to provide supplementary income-earning opportunities and improve the rural infrastructure and more widespread participation of the rural poor in the development process. Increasingly sophisticated administrative and financing systems will be required to carry out a national urbanization policy, and current politicized bureaucracies must be replaced by a reliance on technically skilled professional administrators.

Chapter 11: City-Wide Collaborations for Urban Climate Education

Science.gov (United States)

Snyder, Steven; Hoffstadt, Rita Mukherjee; Allen, Lauren B.; Crowley, Kevin; Bader, Daniel A.; Horton, Radley M.

2014-01-01

Although cities cover only 2 percent of the Earth's surface, more than 50 percent of the world's people live in urban environments, collectively consuming 75 percent of the Earth's resources. Because of their population densities, reliance on infrastructure, and role as centers of industry, cities will be greatly impacted by, and will play a large role in, the reduction or exacerbation of climate change. However, although urban dwellers are becoming more aware of the need to reduce their carbon usage and to implement adaptation strategies, education efforts on these strategies have not been comprehensive. To meet the needs of an informed and engaged urban population, a more systemic, multiplatform and coordinated approach is necessary. The Climate and Urban Systems Partnership (CUSP) is designed to explore and address this challenge. Spanning four cities-Philadelphia, New York, Pittsburgh, and Washington, DC-the project is a partnership between the Franklin Institute, the Columbia University Center for Climate Systems Research, the University of Pittsburgh Learning Research and Development Center, Carnegie Museum of Natural History, New York Hall of Science, and the Marian Koshland Science Museum of the National Academy of Sciences. The partnership is developing a comprehensive, interdisciplinary network to educate urban residents about climate science and the urban impacts of climate change.

Utilization of the world wide web

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Mohr, P.; Mallard, G.; Ralchenko, U.; Schultz, D.

1998-01-01

Two aspects of utilization of the World Wide Web are examined: (i) the communication of technical data through web cites that provide repositories of atomic and molecular data accessible through searchable databases; and (ii) the communication about issues of mutual concern among data producers, data compilers and evaluators, and data users. copyright 1998 American Institute of Physics

Review of stellarator research world wide

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Shonet, J.L.

1987-01-01

The world-wide effort in stellarators has evolved considerably during the past few years. Stellarator facilities are located in the Australia, Federal Republic of Germany, Japan, the Soviet Union, Spain, the United Kingdom and the United States. Dimensions of stellarators range from less than 20 centimeters in major radius to more than 2 meters, and magnetic field values between 0.2 Tesla to more than 3.0 Tesla. Stellarators are made in a variety of magnetic configurations with wide ranges of toroidal aspect ratios and methods of generating the stellarator magnetic surfaces. In particular, continuous helical coils, twisted modular coils, or twisted vacuum chambers all provide different means to generate nested toroidal magnetic surfaces without the need for currents flowing in the plasma. The goal of present day experiments is to accumulate a physics data base. This is being done by increasing electron and ion temperatures with non-ohmic heating, by transport and scaling studies considering neoclassical scaling, global scaling, effects of electric fields, the bootstrap current and magnetic islands. Higher betas are being attempted by designing suitable magnetic configurations, pellet injection and/or minimizing transport losses. Plasma-wall interactions and particle control are being examined by divertor, pumped-limiter and carbonization experiments

Tim Berners-Lee, World Wide Web inventor

CERN Multimedia

1998-01-01

The "Internet, Web, What's next?" conference on 26 June 1998 at CERN: Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web and Director of the W3C, explains how the Web came to be and gave his views on the future.

World Wide Web of Your Wide Web? Juridische aspecten van zoekmachine-personalisatie

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Oostveen, M.

2012-01-01

Het world wide web is een enorme bron van informatie. Iedere internetgebruiker maakt gebruik van zoekmachines om die informatie te kunnen vinden. Veel gebruikers weten echter niet dat zoekresultaten behorende bij een bepaalde zoekterm niet voor iedereen hetzelfde zijn. Dit personaliseren van

Om SIDAs rapport: "Towards an urban world - urbanization and development assistance"

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Eskemose Andersen, Jørgen

1996-01-01

Byerne i ulandene har et dårligt ry. De er centre for prostitution, kriminalitet og arbejdsløshed. Befolkningerne lever i armod i elendige endeløse slumområder uden udsigt til forbedrede levevilkår. Byernes infrastruktur er mangelfuld, nedslidt og fungere stort set kun i de nedarvede koloniale de...... udkommet rapport: Towards an Urban World af den svenske bistandsorganisation Sida.   Udgivelsesdato: 1996...

News Resources on the World Wide Web.

Science.gov (United States)

Notess, Greg R.

1996-01-01

Describes up-to-date news sources that are presently available on the Internet and World Wide Web. Highlights include electronic newspapers; AP (Associated Press) sources and Reuters; sports news; stock market information; New York Times; multimedia capabilities, including CNN Interactive; and local and regional news. (LRW)

Telepresence Robots in the Wide Wild World

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Bruijnes, Merijn; van Delden, Robby; Vroon, Jered Hendrik

2017-01-01

Mobile remote presence systems (MRPs) are the logical next step in telepresence, but what are the ethical, social, legal, and technical implications of such systems going into the wide wild world? We explored these potential issues by immersing ourselves in a range of possible applications by

Happy 20th Birthday, World Wide Web!

CERN Multimedia

2009-01-01

On 13 March CERN celebrated the 20th anniversary of the World Wide Web. Check out the video interview with Web creator Tim Berners-Lee and find out more about the both the history and future of the Web. To celebrate CERN also launched a brand new website, CERNland, for kids.

Golden Jubilee Photos: World Wide Web

CERN Multimedia

2004-01-01

At the end of the 1980s, the Internet was already a valuable tool to scientists, allowing them to exchange e-mails and to access powerful computers remotely. A more simple means of sharing information was needed, however, and CERN, with its long tradition of informatics and networking, was the ideal place to find it. Moreover, hundreds of scientists from all over the world were starting to work together on preparations for the experiments at the Large Electron-Positron (LEP) collider. In 1989, Tim Berners-Lee (see photo), a young scientist working at CERN, drafted a proposal for an information-management system combining the internet, personal computers and computer-aided document consultation, known as hypertext. In 1990 he was joined by Robert Cailliau and the weaving of the World Wide Web began in earnest, even though only two CERN computers were allocated to the task at the time. The Web subsequently underwent a steady expansion to include the world's main particle physics institutes. The Web was not the...

The Topological Analysis of Urban Transit System as a Small-World Network

OpenAIRE

Zhaosheng Yang; Huxing Zhou; Peng Gao; Hong Chen; Nan Zhang

2011-01-01

This paper proposes a topological analysis of urban transit system based on a functional representation network constructed from the urban transit system in Beijing. The representation gives a functional view on nodes named a transit line. Statistical measures are computed and introduced in complex network analysis. It shows that the urban transit system forms small-world networks and exhibits properties different from random networks and regular networks. Furthermore, the topological propert...

Urban and peri-urban precipitation and air temperature trends in mega cities of the world using multiple trend analysis methods

Science.gov (United States)

Ajaaj, Aws A.; Mishra, Ashok K.; Khan, Abdul A.

2018-04-01

Urbanization plays an important role in altering local to regional climate. In this study, the trends in precipitation and the air temperature were investigated for urban and peri-urban areas of 18 mega cities selected from six continents (representing a wide range of climatic patterns). Multiple statistical tests were used to examine long-term trends in annual and seasonal precipitation and air temperature for the selected cities. The urban and peri-urban areas were classified based on the percentage of land imperviousness. Through this study, it was evident that removal of the lag-k serial correlation caused a reduction of approximately 20 to 30% in significant trend observability for temperature and precipitation data. This observation suggests that appropriate trend analysis methodology for climate studies is necessary. Additionally, about 70% of the urban areas showed higher positive air temperature trends, compared with peri-urban areas. There were not clear trend signatures (i.e., mix of increase or decrease) when comparing urban vs peri-urban precipitation in each selected city. Overall, cities located in dry areas, for example, in Africa, southern parts of North America, and Eastern Asia, showed a decrease in annual and seasonal precipitation, while wetter conditions were favorable for cities located in wet regions such as, southeastern South America, eastern North America, and northern Europe. A positive relationship was observed between decadal trends of annual/seasonal air temperature and precipitation for all urban and peri-urban areas, with a higher rate being observed for urban areas.

WorldWideScience.org: the global science gateway.

Science.gov (United States)

Fitzpatrick, Roberta Bronson

2009-10-01

WorldWideScience.org is a Web-based global gateway connecting users to both national and international scientific databases and portals. This column will provide background information on the resource as well as introduce basic searching practices for users.

Urban climate archipelagos: a new framework for urban impacts on climate

Science.gov (United States)

J. Marshall Shepherd; T. Andersen; Chris Strother; A. Horst; L. Bounoua; C. Mitra

2013-01-01

Earth is increasingly an “urbanized” planet. The “World Population Clock” registered a Population of 7,175,309,538 at 8:30 pm (LST) on Oct. 6, 2013. Current and future trends suggest that this population will increasingly reside in cities. Currently, 52 percent of the world population is urban, which means we are a majority “urbanized” society. Figure 1 indicates...

An information filtering system prototype for world wide web; Prototipo di sistema di information filtering per world wide web

Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

Bordoni, L [ENEA Centro Ricerche Casaccia, S. Maria di Galeria, RM (Italy). Funzione Centrale Studi

1999-07-01

In this report the architecture of an information filtering system for world wide web, developed by the Rome Third University (Italy) for ENEA (National Agency for New Technology, Energy and the Environment), is described. This prototype allows for selecting documents in text/HTML format from the web according to the interests of users. A user modeling shell allows ro build a model of user's interests, obtained during the interaction. The experimental results support the choice of embedding methods for this kind of application. [Italian] In questo rapporto viene descritta l'architettura di un sistema adattivo di information filtering su world wide web, sviluppato dall'universita' di Roma III in collaborazione con l'ENEA. Il prototipo descritto e' in grado di selezionare documenti in formato testo/html, raccolti dal web, in accordo con le caratteristiche e gli interessi degli utenti. Una shell di modellazione utente consente di costruire un modello degli interessi dell'utente, ottenuto nel corso dell'interazione. I risultati sperimentali rafforzano la scelta di usare metodi di modellazione utente per questo genere di applicazioni.

Introduction to the World Wide Web and Mosaic

Science.gov (United States)

Youngblood, Jim

1994-01-01

This tutorial provides an introduction to some of the terminology related to the use of the World Wide Web and Mosaic. It is assumed that the user has some prior computer experience. References are included to other sources of additional information.

Wood Utilization Research Dissemination on the World Wide Web: A Case Study

Science.gov (United States)

Daniel L. Schmoldt; Matthew F. Winn; Philip A. Araman

1997-01-01

Because many research products are informational rather than tangible, emerging information technologies, such as the multi-media format of the World Wide Web, provide an open and easily accessible mechanism for transferring research to user groups. We have found steady, increasing use of our Web site over the first 6-1/2 months of operation; almost one-third of the...

Wired World-Wide Web Interactive Remote Event Display

Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

De Groot, Nicolo

2003-05-07

WIRED (World-Wide Web Interactive Remote Event Display) is a framework, written in the Java{trademark} language, for building High Energy Physics event displays. An event display based on the WIRED framework enables users of a HEP collaboration to visualize and analyze events remotely using ordinary WWW browsers, on any type of machine. In addition, event displays using WIRED may provide the general public with access to the research of high energy physics. The recent introduction of the object-oriented Java{trademark} language enables the transfer of machine independent code across the Internet, to be safely executed by a Java enhanced WWW browser. We have employed this technology to create a remote event display in WWW. The combined Java-WWW technology hence assures a world wide availability of such an event display, an always up-to-date program and a platform independent implementation, which is easy to use and to install.

2010 World Expo and Urban Life Quality in Shanghai in Terms of Sustainable Development

Institute of Scientific and Technical Information of China (English)

Zhu Dajian; Peter P.Rogers

2006-01-01

Based on sustainable development theory and the UN's Human Development Index, this thesis puts forward what the quality of urban life implies,makes a study of the world Expo's potential influences on the urban life of Shanghai and advances the strategy and measures to strengthen the life-quality-facing urban management

Exploratory Analysis of the Effect of Consultants on the Use of World Wide Web Sites in SMEs

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Sigi Goode

2002-11-01

Full Text Available There is little published research on the role of consultants in technology adoption. Given the increasing popularity of the World Wide Web in commercial environments and the number of consultants now offering web development services, some analysis into the effects of their engagement would be of benefit. In an extension of an ongoing study, an existing sample of 113 World Wide Web adopters was used to examine the nature of World Wide Web site use with respect to consultant and Internet Service Provider (ISP engagement. Analysis was also conducted into the use of consultants and ISPs as developers and maintainers of these sites. This preliminary research finds a number of interesting outcomes. No significant relationship is found between consultant or ISP engagement and World Wide Web site use, regardless of whether the consultant was engaged as site developer or site maintainer. The study raises a number of additional findings that are of interest but are not directly related to this study. These findings merit further research.

Mapping urban impervious surface using object-based image analysis with WorldView-3 satellite imagery

Science.gov (United States)

Iabchoon, Sanwit; Wongsai, Sangdao; Chankon, Kanoksuk

2017-10-01

Land use and land cover (LULC) data are important to monitor and assess environmental change. LULC classification using satellite images is a method widely used on a global and local scale. Especially, urban areas that have various LULC types are important components of the urban landscape and ecosystem. This study aims to classify urban LULC using WorldView-3 (WV-3) very high-spatial resolution satellite imagery and the object-based image analysis method. A decision rules set was applied to classify the WV-3 images in Kathu subdistrict, Phuket province, Thailand. The main steps were as follows: (1) the image was ortho-rectified with ground control points and using the digital elevation model, (2) multiscale image segmentation was applied to divide the image pixel level into image object level, (3) development of the decision ruleset for LULC classification using spectral bands, spectral indices, spatial and contextual information, and (4) accuracy assessment was computed using testing data, which sampled by statistical random sampling. The results show that seven LULC classes (water, vegetation, open space, road, residential, building, and bare soil) were successfully classified with overall classification accuracy of 94.14% and a kappa coefficient of 92.91%.

76 FR 46854 - Hewlett Packard Company, Imaging and Printing Group, World Wide Product Data Management...

Science.gov (United States)

2011-08-03

..., Imaging and Printing Group, World Wide Product Data Management Operations, Including On-Site Leased... Company, Imaging and Printing Group, World Wide Products Data Management Operations, Boise, Idaho and Fort... of Hewlett Packard Company, Imaging and Printing Group, World Wide Product Data Management Operations...

Status of research reactor spent fuel world-wide

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Ritchie, I.G.

2004-01-01

Results compiled in the research reactor spent fuel database are used to assess the status of research reactor spent fuel world-wide. Fuel assemblies, their types, enrichment, origin of enrichment and geological distribution among the industrialised and developed countries of the world are discussed. Fuel management practices in wet and dry storage facilities and the concerns of reactor operators about long-term storage of their spent fuel are presented and some of the activities carried out by the International Atomic Energy Agency to address the issues associated with research reactor spent fuel are outlined. (author)

Basic support for cooperative work on the World Wide Web

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Bentley, R.; Appelt, W.; Busbach, U.; Hinrichs, E.; Kerr, D.; Sikkel, Nicolaas; Trevor, J.; Woetzel, G.

The emergence and widespread adoption of the World Wide Web offers a great deal of potential in supporting cross-platform cooperative work within widely dispersed working groups. The Basic Support for Cooperative Work (BSCW) project at GMD is attempting to realize this potential through development

Learning about the "Real World" in an Urban Arts Youth Program

Science.gov (United States)

Larson, Reed W.; Walker, Kathrin C.

2006-01-01

To make the transition to adulthood, youth must learn to function in the complex and unpredictable "real world" of adult life. This is an intensive case study of an urban arts program that sought to provide youth with experiences that prepared them for the real world of arts careers. We conducted 75 interviews with 12 youth and their adult leader…

An information filtering system prototype for world wide web; Prototipo di sistema di information filtering per world wide web

Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

Bordoni, L. [ENEA Centro Ricerche Casaccia, S. Maria di Galeria, RM (Italy). Funzione Centrale Studi

1999-07-01

In this report the architecture of an information filtering system for world wide web, developed by the Rome Third University (Italy) for ENEA (National Agency for New Technology, Energy and the Environment), is described. This prototype allows for selecting documents in text/HTML format from the web according to the interests of users. A user modeling shell allows ro build a model of user's interests, obtained during the interaction. The experimental results support the choice of embedding methods for this kind of application. [Italian] In questo rapporto viene descritta l'architettura di un sistema adattivo di information filtering su world wide web, sviluppato dall'universita' di Roma III in collaborazione con l'ENEA. Il prototipo descritto e' in grado di selezionare documenti in formato testo/html, raccolti dal web, in accordo con le caratteristiche e gli interessi degli utenti. Una shell di modellazione utente consente di costruire un modello degli interessi dell'utente, ottenuto nel corso dell'interazione. I risultati sperimentali rafforzano la scelta di usare metodi di modellazione utente per questo genere di applicazioni.

World-Wide Web the information universe

CERN Document Server

Berners-Lee, Tim; Groff, Jean-Francois; Pollermann, Bernd

1992-01-01

Purpose - The World-Wide Web (W-3) initiative is a practical project designed to bring a global information universe into existence using available technology. This paper seeks to describe the aims, data model, and protocols needed to implement the "web" and to compare them with various contemporary systems. Design/methodology/approach - Since Vannevar Bush's article, men have dreamed of extending their intellect by making their collective knowledge available to each individual by using machines. Computers provide us two practical techniques for human-knowledge interface. One is hypertext, in which links between pieces of text (or other media) mimic human association of ideas. The other is text retrieval, which allows associations to be deduced from the content of text. The W-3 ideal world allows both operations and provides access from any browsing platform. Findings - Various server gateways to other information systems have been produced, and the total amount of information available on the web is...

Contemporary Approaches to Critical Thinking and the World Wide Web

Science.gov (United States)

Buffington, Melanie L.

2007-01-01

Teaching critical thinking skills is often endorsed as a means to help students develop their abilities to navigate the complex world in which people live and, in addition, as a way to help students succeed in school. Over the past few years, this author explored the idea of teaching critical thinking using the World Wide Web (WWW). She began…

Advanced use of World-Wide Web in the online system of DELPHI

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Doenszelmann, M.; Carvalho, D.; Du, S.; Tennebo, F.

1996-01-01

The World-Wide Web technologies used by the DELPHI experiment at CERN to provide easy access to information of the On-line System. WWW technology on both client and server side is used in five different projects. The World-Wide Web has its advantages concerning the network technology, the practical user interface and its scalability. It however also demands a stateless protocol and format negotiation. (author)

Urban Agriculture: Search for Agricultural Practice in Urbanized Rural Areas

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Celile Özçiçek Dölekoğlu

2017-12-01

Full Text Available Rapid urbanization in developing countries involves unplanned migration, unemployment and poverty. The steady shrinking of rural areas and the use of agricultural land for other purposes are progressively increasing the pressure on natural resources. This development on the one hand increases the risk to food security, and on the other triggers climate change. The rural population who migrate to the cities or who are absorbed into urban areas continue their agricultural activities in the urban in order to provide themselves with an income or to maintain their food security. In the big cities of the developed world, contact with nature is kept by means of hobby gardens, recreational areas and urban and suburban plant and animal farming, and creative ideas such as roof gardens can be found. This development, known as urban agriculture, is practiced by 800 million people in the world. Urban agriculture has many economic, social and environmental benefits, but it may also have risks and adverse effects. In this study, the developments in this area in Turkey and the world are presented, and all aspects of its effects and outcomes are discussed.

Sustainable Urban Transport in the Developing World: Beyond Megacities

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Dorina Pojani

2015-06-01

Full Text Available Megacities have frequently received a disproportionate amount of attention over other sizes of cities in recent discourse on urban sustainability. In this article, the authors argue that a focus on smaller and medium-sized cities is crucial to achieving substantial progress towards more sustainable urban development, not only because they are home to at least a quarter of the world’s population but because they also offer great potential for sustainable transformations. In principle, their size allows for flexibility in terms of urban expansion, adoption of “green” travel modes, and environmental protection. At the same time, smaller and medium-sized cities often have fewer resources to implement new transport measures and can be more vulnerable to fluctuations in the world economy. This article critically reviews the potential role and impact of nine commonly considered options for sustainable urban transport in cities in developing countries: (1 road infrastructure; (2 rail-based public transport; (3 road-based public transport; (4 support for non-motorized travel modes; (5 technological solutions; (6 awareness-raising campaigns; (7 pricing mechanisms; (8 vehicle access restrictions; and (9 control of land-uses. Drawing on international research and examples of policies to reduce the environmental impacts of transport in urban areas, this article identifies some key lessons for sustainable urban transport in smaller and medium-sized cities in developing countries. These lessons are certainly not always identical to those for megacities in the global south.

WorldWide Telescope in High School Astronomy Competitions

Science.gov (United States)

Constantin, Ana-Maria; Goodman, A. A.; Udomprasert, P. S.

2014-01-01

This project aims to improve astronomy education at the high school level, and to increase awareness in astronomy for pre-university students, on an international scale. In 2013, the WorldWide Telescope Ambassadors Program began a collaboration with the International Olympiad in Astronomy and Astrophysics (IOAA), which was held in the city of Volos, Greece in August 2013. Now at its VIIth edition, IOAA is the largest annual astronomy competition for high school students, and it consists of one team task and three individual ones - Theoretical, Data Analysis, and Observational. Each of the participating countries (35 in 2013, compared to 21 in 2007) is responsible for selecting up to five representative students for the International round. IOAA is meant to promote future collaborations between these students, and to encourage friendships inside a global scientific community. Ana-Maria Constantin, a current Harvard undergraduate student and a former medalist of IOAA, represented WorldWide Telescope Ambassadors in Greece by giving a talk on the advantages of using WWT as a tool for research and education. As a result, the President and the International Board of the Olympiad have expressed support for including WWT in the competition for future editions. WWTA is working with the Organizing Board for next year’s competition in Romania, to include WWT as a testing tool. This poster will summarize key points from the WWTA presentation in Greece, present ideas for WWT-based activities in future IOAA competitions, and outline plans for new collaborations from representatives of Sri Lanka, Poland, Bangladesh, and Colombia. Given the positive feedback we have received after the presentation in Greece, we are also considering future implementations of WWT in summer research camps for high school students, such as the Summer Science Program.

Tim Berners-Lee: inventor de la World Wide Web

OpenAIRE

Universidad de Granada. Biblioteca

2015-01-01

El presente Cat??logo contiene la exposici??n organizada por la Biblioteca de la ETSIIT de la Universidad de Granada durante los meses de noviembre-diciembre de 2015 y titulada: "Tim Berners-Lee: inventor de la World Wide Web"

Contribution of urbanization to the increase of extreme heat events in an urban agglomeration in east China: Urbanization and the Increase of EHEs

Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

Yang, Xuchao [Institute of Island and Coastal Ecosystems, Ocean College, Zhejiang University, Zhoushan China; Ruby Leung, L. [Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, Richland Washington USA; Zhao, Naizhuo [Department of Geosciences, Texas Tech University, Lubbock Texas USA; Zhao, Chun [School of Earth and Space Sciences, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei China; Qian, Yun [Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, Richland Washington USA; Hu, Kejia [Institute of Island and Coastal Ecosystems, Ocean College, Zhejiang University, Zhoushan China; Liu, Xiaoping [School of Geography and Planning, Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou China; Chen, Baode [Shanghai Typhoon Institute of China Meteorological Administration, Shanghai China

2017-07-03

The urban agglomeration of Yangtze River Delta (YRD) is emblematic of China’s rapid urbanization during the past decades. Based on homogenized daily maximum and minimum temperature data, the contributions of urbanization to trends of extreme temperature indices (ETIs) during summer in YRD are evaluated. Dynamically classifying the observational stations into urban and rural areas, this study presents unexplored changes in temperature extremes during the past four decades in the YRD region and quantifies the amplification of the positive trends in ETIs by the urban heat island effect. Overall, urbanization contributes to more than one third in the increase of intensity of extreme heat events in the region, which is comparable to the contribution of greenhouse gases. Compared to rural stations, more notable shifts to the right in the probability distribution of temperature and ETIs were observed in urban stations.

The World Wide Web and the Television Generation.

Science.gov (United States)

Maddux, Cleborne D.

1996-01-01

The hypermedia nature of the World Wide Web may represent a true paradigm shift in telecommunications, but barriers exist to the Web having similar impact on education. Some of today's college students compare the Web with "bad TV"--lengthy pauses, links that result in error messages, and animation and sound clips that are too brief.…

Natural background radiation exposures world-wide

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Bennett, B.G.

1993-01-01

The average radiation dose to the world's population from natural radiation sources has been assessed by UNSCEAR to be 2.4 mSv per year. The components of this exposure, methods of evaluation and, in particular, the variations in the natural background levels are presented in this paper. Exposures to cosmic radiation range from 0.26 mSv per year at sea level to 20 times more at an altitude of 6000 m. Exposures to cosmogenic radionuclides ( 3 H, 14 C) are relatively insignificant and little variable. The terrestrial radionuclides 40 K, 238 U, and 232 Th and the decay products of the latter two constitute the remainder of the natural radiation exposure. Wide variations in exposure occur for these components, particularly for radon and its decay products, which can accumulate to relatively high levels indoors. Unusually high exposures to uranium and thorium series radionuclides characterize the high natural background areas which occur in several localized regions in the world. Extreme values in natural radiation exposures have been estimated to range up to 100 times the average values. (author). 15 refs, 3 tabs

Tim Berners-Lee, World Wide Web inventor

CERN Multimedia

1994-01-01

Former physicist, Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web as an essential tool for high energy physics at CERN from 1989 to 1994. Together with a small team he conceived HTML, http, URLs, and put up the first server and the first 'what you see is what you get' browser and html editor. Tim is now Director of the Web Consortium W3C, the International Web standards body based at INRIA, MIT and Keio University.

Embedded Web Technology: Applying World Wide Web Standards to Embedded Systems

Science.gov (United States)

Ponyik, Joseph G.; York, David W.

2002-01-01

Embedded Systems have traditionally been developed in a highly customized manner. The user interface hardware and software along with the interface to the embedded system are typically unique to the system for which they are built, resulting in extra cost to the system in terms of development time and maintenance effort. World Wide Web standards have been developed in the passed ten years with the goal of allowing servers and clients to intemperate seamlessly. The client and server systems can consist of differing hardware and software platforms but the World Wide Web standards allow them to interface without knowing about the details of system at the other end of the interface. Embedded Web Technology is the merging of Embedded Systems with the World Wide Web. Embedded Web Technology decreases the cost of developing and maintaining the user interface by allowing the user to interface to the embedded system through a web browser running on a standard personal computer. Embedded Web Technology can also be used to simplify an Embedded System's internal network.

Beyond Piñatas, Fortune Cookies, and Wooden Shoes: Using the World Wide Web to Help Children Explore the Whole Wide World

Science.gov (United States)

Kirkwood, Donna; Shulsky, Debra; Willis, Jana

2014-01-01

The advent of technology and access to the internet through the World Wide Web have stretched the traditional ways of teaching social studies beyond classroom boundaries. This article explores how teachers can create authentic and contextualized cultural studies experiences for young children by integrating social studies and technology. To…

Urbanization and Third World stability

Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

Bienen, H

1984-07-01

This essay reviews images of urbanization that have been held by academics and activists, including revolutionary leaders. It examines the methodology and findings of case studies in Nigeria, Mexico, Peru, Brazil, Kenya, Turkey, Malaysia and other countries with the aim of determining how well suited are the data and theories for assessing the relationship between urbanization and political stability. The review examines the following topics: migration; political participaton and the urban poor; radical parties and urban violence; the over-urbanization thesis; class and ethnicity. It especially evaluates the role of so-called urban marginals in urban political life and concludes that the evidence is overwhelming that there is no widespread culture of poverty or culture of apathy among the urban poor in developing countries. 119 references.

Air quality and its integration within urban planning: Mexicali, Baja California, Mexico

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Elva Alicia Corona–Zambrano

2009-07-01

Full Text Available As a result of world wide urbanization and industrialization, urban air pollution shows a growing trend directly proportional to increasing demands on energy for domestic and industrial activities. From this point of view, cities along with their urban, functional and morphological structure are not being planned with pollution prevention or minimum environmental impacts in mind. This work has two purposes: first, it sets an assessment of air quality in Mexicali by analyzing O3, CO, SO2, NO2 and PM10 emissions in relation to urban structure. And second, the assessment of already implemented urban strategies aimed to minimize environmental impacts. This work also presents a scheme that incorporates air quality issues into town planning and urban management.

Manhattan-World Urban Reconstruction from Point Clouds

KAUST Repository

Li, Minglei; Wonka, Peter; Nan, Liangliang

2016-01-01

Manhattan-world urban scenes are common in the real world. We propose a fully automatic approach for reconstructing such scenes from 3D point samples. Our key idea is to represent the geometry of the buildings in the scene using a set of well-aligned boxes. We first extract plane hypothesis from the points followed by an iterative refinement step. Then, candidate boxes are obtained by partitioning the space of the point cloud into a non-uniform grid. After that, we choose an optimal subset of the candidate boxes to approximate the geometry of the buildings. The contribution of our work is that we transform scene reconstruction into a labeling problem that is solved based on a novel Markov Random Field formulation. Unlike previous methods designed for particular types of input point clouds, our method can obtain faithful reconstructions from a variety of data sources. Experiments demonstrate that our method is superior to state-of-the-art methods. © Springer International Publishing AG 2016.

Manhattan-World Urban Reconstruction from Point Clouds

KAUST Repository

Li, Minglei

2016-09-16

Manhattan-world urban scenes are common in the real world. We propose a fully automatic approach for reconstructing such scenes from 3D point samples. Our key idea is to represent the geometry of the buildings in the scene using a set of well-aligned boxes. We first extract plane hypothesis from the points followed by an iterative refinement step. Then, candidate boxes are obtained by partitioning the space of the point cloud into a non-uniform grid. After that, we choose an optimal subset of the candidate boxes to approximate the geometry of the buildings. The contribution of our work is that we transform scene reconstruction into a labeling problem that is solved based on a novel Markov Random Field formulation. Unlike previous methods designed for particular types of input point clouds, our method can obtain faithful reconstructions from a variety of data sources. Experiments demonstrate that our method is superior to state-of-the-art methods. © Springer International Publishing AG 2016.

PENYEBARAN INFORMASI MENGGUNAKAN WWW (WORLD WIDE WEB

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Ika Atman Satya

2011-12-01

Full Text Available Media Informasi secara tradisional telah kita kenai dengan menggunakan koran, televisi, radio dan buku referensi. Media informasi tersebut untuk penyebarannya memerlukan penunjang agar informasi tersebut dapat disebarkan secara lutis. Selain penggunaan media tradisional tersebut penyebaran informasi dengan menggunakan jaringan komputer Internet juga berkembang. Salah satu cara penyebaran informasi dengan menggunakan aplikasi WWW (World Wide Web yang mempunyai kemampuan menggabungkan gambar, text dan suara secara interaktif. Pada tulisan ini akan dibahas tentang kemampuan, penggunaan dan pengembangan server WWW.

The International Energy Agency`s role in world-wide wind energy development

Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

Rangi, R. [Natural Resources Canada, Ottawa, Ontario (Canada); Ancona, D. [Dept. of Energy, Washington, DC (United States)

1997-12-31

Wind energy is now being deployed world-wide at a rapidly increasing rate and the International Energy Agency (IEA) has a changing role in its growth. IEA was founded in 1974 within the framework of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) to collaborate on comprehensive international energy programs. IEA membership consists of eighteen parties from sixteen countries and the European Commission. Recently there has been increasing interest in IEA participation from both OECD and non-OECD countries. Non-OECD countries participating in various IEA Agreements include: China, India, Israel, Korea, and Russia. Because of its diverse international makeup, the IEA is viewed as a source of reliable technical and economic information. The World Bank has approached the Executive Committee for Wind Energy R & D, through the IEA Renewable Energy Working Party, to assist in the expansion of wind deployment. In addition, IEA is moving from R & D programs to include tracking of implementation incentives offered by its members.

Queer worldings in the urban age. Die sub\\urban Journal Lecture beim Deutschen Kongress für Geographie im Oktober 2015 in Berlin

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Natalie Oswin

2015-11-01

Full Text Available Der Beitrag stellt die Frage, in welchem Bezug die vieldiskutierte globale Urbanisierung, die sich in den vergangenen Jahrzehnten besonders im Globalen Süden weiter beschleunigt hat, mit einer ebenfalls zu beobachtenden verstärkten Thematisierung sexueller und geschlechtlicher Identitäten weltweit steht. Denn Kämpfe um Sichtbarkeit, Anerkennung und nicht-normative Lebensweisen artikulieren sich gerade in städtischen Kontexten mit besonderer Virulenz. Ein bislang weitgehend vernachlässigtes Potenzial wird dabei in Überschneidungen von Kritiken tradierter eurozentrischer Stadtkonzepte in den Urban Studies einerseits und der Infragestellung sexueller und geschlechtlicher – und ebenfalls oft an westlichen Standards orientierter – Normen in den Queer Studies andererseits gesehen. Sowohl Urban Studies als auch Queer Studies treiben ein worlding, eine Verweltlichung der untersuchten Probleme voran. Die Fragestellungen, die aus einer Zusammenführung von urban worlding und queer worlding entstehen, ermöglichen neue Blicke auf die Rolle, die gerade marginalisierte Subjekte in Prozessen von Urbanisierung und Globalisierung spielen.

A World Wide Web Region-Based Image Search Engine

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Kompatsiaris, Ioannis; Triantafyllou, Evangelia; Strintzis, Michael G.

2001-01-01

In this paper the development of an intelligent image content-based search engine for the World Wide Web is presented. This system will offer a new form of media representation and access of content available in WWW. Information Web Crawlers continuously traverse the Internet and collect images...

World-wide online monitoring interface of the ATLAS experiment

CERN Document Server

Kolos, S; The ATLAS collaboration; Mineev, M; Hauser, R; Salnikov, A

2014-01-01

The ATLAS collaboration accounts for more than 3000 members located all over the world. The efficiency of the experiment can be improved allowing system experts not present on site to follow the ATLAS operations in real-time, spotting potential problems which otherwise may remain unattended for a non-negligible time. Taking into account the wide geographical spread of the ATLAS collaboration, the solution of this problem is to have all monitoring information with minimal access latency available world-wide. We have implemented a framework which defines a standard approach for retrieving arbitrary monitoring information from the ATLAS private network via HTTP. An information request is made by specifying one of the predefined URLs with some optional parameters refining data which has to be shipped back in XML format. The framework takes care of receiving, parsing and forwarding such requests to the appropriate plugins. The plugins retrieve the requested data and convert it to XML (or optionally to JSON) format...

Climate Change Resilience in the Urban Environment

Science.gov (United States)

Kershaw, Tristan

2017-12-01

Between 1930 and 2030, the world's population will have flipped from 70% rural to 70% urban. While much has been written about the impacts of climate change and mitigation of its effects on individual buildings or infrastructure, this book is one of the first to focus on the resilience of whole cities. It covers a broad range of area-wide disaster-level impacts, including drought, heatwaves, flooding, storms and air quality, which many of our cities are ill-adapted to cope with, and unless we can increase the resilience of our urban areas then much of our current building stock may become uninhabitable. Climate Resilience in Urban Environments provides a detailed overview of the risks for urban areas, including those risks to human health as well as to building integrity, the physical processes involved, and presents key information in which way the risks can be reduced and urban areas made more resilient.

Urban ecology in a developing world: why advanced socioecological theory needs Africa

OpenAIRE

McHale, Melissa R; Bunn, David N; Pickett, Steward TA; Twine, Wayne

2013-01-01

Socioecological theory, developed through the study of urban environments, has recently led to a proliferation of research focusing on comparative analyses of cities. This research emphasis has been concentrated in the more developed countries of the Northern Hemisphere (often referred to as the “Global North”), yet urbanization is now occurring mostly in the developing world, with the fastest rates of growth in sub-Saharan Africa. Countries like South Africa are experiencing a variety of lan...

Teaching Critical Evaluation Skills for World Wide Web Resources.

Science.gov (United States)

Tate, Marsha; Alexander, Jan

1996-01-01

Outlines a lesson plan used by an academic library to evaluate the quality of World Wide Web information. Discusses the traditional evaluation criteria of accuracy, authority, objectivity, currency, and coverage as it applies to the unique characteristics of Web pages: their marketing orientation, variety of information, and instability. The…

White Supremacists, Oppositional Culture and the World Wide Web

Science.gov (United States)

Adams, Josh; Roscigno, Vincent J.

2005-01-01

Over the previous decade, white supremacist organizations have tapped into the ever emerging possibilities offered by the World Wide Web. Drawing from prior sociological work that has examined this medium and its uses by white supremacist organizations, this article advances the understanding of recruitment, identity and action by providing a…

Judging nursing information on the world wide web.

Science.gov (United States)

Cader, Raffik

2013-02-01

The World Wide Web is increasingly becoming an important source of information for healthcare professionals. However, finding reliable information from unauthoritative Web sites to inform healthcare can pose a challenge to nurses. A study, using grounded theory, was undertaken in two phases to understand how qualified nurses judge the quality of Web nursing information. Data were collected using semistructured interviews and focus groups. An explanatory framework that emerged from the data showed that the judgment process involved the application of forms of knowing and modes of cognition to a range of evaluative tasks and depended on the nurses' critical skills, the time available, and the level of Web information cues. This article mainly focuses on the six evaluative tasks relating to assessing user-friendliness, outlook and authority of Web pages, and relationship to nursing practice; appraising the nature of evidence; and applying cross-checking strategies. The implications of these findings to nurse practitioners and publishers of nursing information are significant.

Trends in Urbanization and Implications for Peri-Urban Livelihoods in Accra, Ghana

Science.gov (United States)

Adom, Cynthia

Urbanization is a common occurrence in both developed and developing worlds. Similar to occurrences in other developing world cities, Accra's urbanization is marked by fast, unplanned and uneven growth into mostly peripheral lands (Grant and Yankson 2002; Yeboah 2001; Ghana Statistical Service (GSS) 2002). Such trends in urbanization in places where data on the urbanization process is seriously inadequate and infrequent, (Rakodi 1997a; Ohadika 1991; Fasona and Omojola 2004) pose a major challenge to urban planning and management (Henderson 2002), and affect the livelihood base of several peri-urban households. Properly monitoring the urbanization process in the developing world and understanding its effects on people's lives depends on the availability of useful and up-to- date data (Weber and Puissant 2003; Mundia and Aniya 2006) that could be obtained using new and robust analytical techniques (Yang 2003). In addition, in the urban environment, differences in rates of urbanization, income, employment status, and gender dynamics across neighborhoods suggest that the impacts of increasing urbanization on peri-urban livelihoods are likely to vary across peoples and places. Against this backdrop, this dissertation uses Accra as a case study to, first, measures the nature and extent of urban expansion using a non-conventional technique, and then analyzes neighborhood - and gender-differentiated impacts of increasing urbanization on household livelihoods in peri-urban Accra. Study findings reveal: 1) major conversion of vegetated land to urban lands uses and support the effectiveness of the Self-Organizing Map and Landsat data to map complex and hazy urban tropical environments; 2) that the impacts of urbanization on peri-urban livelihoods are structured along the lines of neighborhood-level urbanization; changes brought by a higher rate of urbanization are more beneficial than harmful to household livelihoods; 3) that positive livelihood outcomes in high

Touring the Campus Library from the World Wide Web.

Science.gov (United States)

Mosley, Pixey Anne; Xiao, Daniel

1996-01-01

The philosophy, design, implementation and evaluation of a World Wide Web-accessible Virtual Library Tour of Texas A & M University's Evans Library is presented. Its design combined technical computer issues and library instruction expertise. The tour can be used to simulate a typical walking tour through the library or heading directly to a…

Surfing the World Wide Web to Education Hot-Spots.

Science.gov (United States)

Dyrli, Odvard Egil

1995-01-01

Provides a brief explanation of Web browsers and their use, as well as technical information for those considering access to the WWW (World Wide Web). Curriculum resources and addresses to useful Web sites are included. Sidebars show sample searches using Yahoo and Lycos search engines, and a list of recommended Web resources. (JKP)

The Brussels-Capital Region. Increasing the Density of Urban Spaces and Preserving the Quality of Life

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Ioulia Pankratieva

2013-01-01

Full Text Available Since its foundation in 1989, Region of Brussels Capital has its own government and conducts an independent urban policy. With the constant increase in population the main objectives for the Region are concentrated on development of housing and infrastructure objects, transport security, and improvement of functioning of urban structures.Urban policy is based on the Regional Plan for Sustainable Development (Plan Régional de Développement Durable - PRDD, which is a strategic tool for urban planning and deals with a wide range of issues related to the economy, demographics, construction, transport.A new Regional Plan for Sustainable Development was adopted in December 2012. It will direct the development of the Region for the next 25 years. Densification of urban environment was highlighted in a separate section. Development of this section was entrusted to the Bureau COOPARCH.ru.

Collaborative Information Agents on the World Wide Web

Science.gov (United States)

Chen, James R.; Mathe, Nathalie; Wolfe, Shawn; Koga, Dennis J. (Technical Monitor)

1998-01-01

In this paper, we present DIAMS, a system of distributed, collaborative information agents which help users access, collect, organize, and exchange information on the World Wide Web. Personal agents provide their owners dynamic displays of well organized information collections, as well as friendly information management utilities. Personal agents exchange information with one another. They also work with other types of information agents such as matchmakers and knowledge experts to facilitate collaboration and communication.

Distributing Congestion Management System Information Using the World Wide Web

Science.gov (United States)

1997-01-01

The Internet is a unique medium for the distribution of information, and it provides a tremendous opportunity to take advantage of peoples innate interest in transportation issues as they relate to their own lives. In particular, the World Wide Web (...

Student participation in World Wide Web-based curriculum development of general chemistry

Science.gov (United States)

Hunter, William John Forbes

1998-12-01

This thesis describes an action research investigation of improvements to instruction in General Chemistry at Purdue University. Specifically, the study was conducted to guide continuous reform of curriculum materials delivered via the World Wide Web by involving students, instructors, and curriculum designers. The theoretical framework for this study was based upon constructivist learning theory and knowledge claims were developed using an inductive analysis procedure. This results of this study are assertions made in three domains: learning chemistry content via the World Wide Web, learning about learning via the World Wide Web, and learning about participation in an action research project. In the chemistry content domain, students were able to learn chemical concepts that utilized 3-dimensional visualizations, but not textual and graphical information delivered via the Web. In the learning via the Web domain, the use of feedback, the placement of supplementary aids, navigation, and the perception of conceptual novelty were all important to students' use of the Web. In the participation in action research domain, students learned about the complexity of curriculum. development, and valued their empowerment as part of the process.

Urban air pollution in megacities of the world

Science.gov (United States)

Mage, David; Ozolins, Guntis; Peterson, Peter; Webster, Anthony; Orthofer, Rudi; Vandeweerd, Veerle; Gwynne, Michael

Urban air pollution is a major environmental problem in the developing countries of the world. WHO and UNEP created an air pollution monitoring network as part of the Global Environment Monitoring System. This network now covers over 50 cities in 35 developing and developed countries throughout the world. The analyses of the data reported by the network over the past 15-20 yr indicate that the lessons of the prior experiences in the developed countries (U.S.A., U.K.) have not been learned. A study of air pollution in 20 of the 24 megacities of the world (over 10 million people by year 2000) shows that ambient air pollution concentrations are at levels where serious health effects are reported. The expected rise of population in the next century, mainly in the developing countries with a lack of capital for air pollution control, means that there is a great potential that conditions will worsen in many more cities that will reach megacity status. This paper maps the potential for air pollution that cities will experience in the future unless control strategies are developed and implemented during the next several decades.

Wikinews interviews World Wide Web co-inventor Robert Cailliau

CERN Multimedia

2007-01-01

"The name Robert Caillau may not ring a bell to the general pbulic, but his invention is the reason why you are reading this: Dr. Cailliau together with his colleague Sir Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web, making the internet accessible so it could grow from an academic tool to a mass communication medium." (9 pages)

World-wide termination of nuclear energy application

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Quirin, W.

1991-01-01

It is easy to require the widely discussed termination of nuclear energy application, but it is hardly possible to realise it, unless one is prepared to accept enormous economic and ecological problems. The article investigates, whether the other energy carriers or energy saving methods, respectively, would be in a position to replace the nuclear energy. Thereby the aspects of securing the supply and its economy are of considerable importance. The author describes furthermore the effects of terminating nuclear energy on the growing world population and the economy of trading countries. Ecological problems that may also be aggravated are dealt with, too. (orig.) [de

World-wide anthropogenic climate changes: facts, uncertainties and open questions

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Schoenwiese, C.D.

1994-01-01

Various human activities are, without a doubt, leading to a steady increase world-wide in the emissions of trace gases which affect the climate into the atmosphere. As a result, the global climate is also forced to change. The evidence from climate models regarding this is uncertain, however, both with respect to the quantitative aspect and the regional aspect, especially concerning climatic elements apart from temperature. It is therefore important to examine the data of climate history for anthropogenic climate signals. It is difficult, though, to distinguish between natural and anthropogenic climate effects. Despite these uncertainties, however, which result in many questions remaining open, estimations of risk and the principle of responsibility lead to immediate, international climate protection measures being demanded. (orig.) [de

WorldWide Telescope Ambassadors: A Year 3 Update

OpenAIRE

Udomprasert, Patricia S; Goodman, Alyssa A.; Wong, Curtis

2013-01-01

We give a brief overview of some key features of WorldWide Telescope and its Ambassadors Program, and we describe two goals for expanding the program in the coming year: scaling up training efforts; and developing “plug and play” Visualization Lab modules that teach key Earth and Space Science concepts to students while emphasizing important scientific processes and skills. We discuss several different ways that members of the astronomy education and outreach community can incorporate WWT-bas...

Process Support for Cooperative Work on the World Wide Web

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Sikkel, Nicolaas; Neumann, Olaf; Sachweh, Sabine

The World Wide Web is becoming a dominating factor in information technology. Consequently, computer supported cooperative work on the Web has recently drawn a lot of attention. Process Support for Cooperative Work (PSCW) is a Web based system supporting both structured and unstructured forms of

Urban mental health: Challenges and perspectives

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Okkels, Niels

2018-01-01

Purpose of review: To provide an update on urban mental health and highlight the challenges that require urgent attention. Recent findings: The majority of the world's population live in towns and urbanization is expected to increase in all areas of the world. Challenges to mental health in urban...... services. Fast and unstructured urbanization, such as that seen in many developing countries, further exacerbates these challenges. There are promising initiatives emerging including initiatives to end homelessness, to improve access to green areas in urban environments, to provide emergency psychiatric...

Designing green and blue infrastructure to support healthy urban living

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Gehrels, H.; Meulen, S. vsn der; Schasfoort, F.; Bosch, P.R.; Brolsma, R.; Dinter, D. van; Geerling, G.J.; Goossen, M.; Jacobs, C.; Jong, M. de; Kok, S.; Massop, H.; Oste, L.; Perez-Soba, M.; Rovers, V.; Smit, A.; Verweij, P.; Vries, B. de; Weijers, E.

2016-01-01

There is a growing awareness in cities throughout the world that green and blue infrastructure can offer a wide range of ecosystem services to support a healthy urban environment. For example, landscape architects explore possibilities in their design of the urban landscape to use the potential of

Evolving partnerships in the collection of urban solid waste in the developing world

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Post, J.; Baud, I.S.A.; Furedy, C.; Post, J.

2004-01-01

-Post, Johan. (2004) Evolving Partnerships in the Collection of Urban Solid Waste in the Developing World, in: Baud, Isa., Johan. Post and Christine Furedy (2004) Solid Waste Management and Recycling; Actors, Partnerships and Policies in Hyderabad, India

Incidence of real-world automotive parent and halogenated PAH in urban atmosphere.

Science.gov (United States)

Gao, Pan-Pan; Zhao, Yi-Bo; Ni, Hong-Gang

2018-06-01

This study reports results from a tunnel experiment impact of real-world traffic-related particle and gas parent and halogenated polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs and HPAHs) on urban air. The traffic related emission characteristics and subsequent environmental behavior of these compounds were investigated. To understand the significance of real-world transport emissions to the urban air, traffic-related mass emissions of PAHs and HPAHs were estimated based on measured emission factors. According to our results, PAHs and HPAHs emissions via particulate phase were greater than those via gaseous phase; particles in 2.1-3.3 μm size fraction, have the major contribution to particulate PAHs and HPAHs emissions. Over all, contribution of traffic-related emission of PAHs (only ∼3% of the total PAHs emission in China) is an overstated source of PAHs pollution in China. Actually, exhaust pipe emission contributed much less than the total traffic-related emission of pollutants. Copyright © 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Urbanization and Condition of Urban Slums in India

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Digambar Abaji Chimankar

2016-08-01

Full Text Available The present paper attempted to study the urbanization in India and condition of urban slums in terms of water, sanitation, electricity, garbage collection and health care, and education which are supposed to be basic minimum needs for the slum dwellers. India is going through the process of rapid urbanization because of industrialization like other third world countries.  The percent of urbanization increase from 27.8 percent in 2001 to 31.1 percent in 2011 census. The increase in the percentage of population in urban areas is because of natural growth, rural to urban migration and the reclassification of village and towns. The share of the slum population in the total urban population of the country was 18.3 percent in 2001 while in 2011 it was 17.4 percent. The condition of urban slums in India is to be improved so as to make them better for living.

Urbanization and Inequality/Poverty

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Brantley Liddle

2017-11-01

Full Text Available The level of world urbanization has crossed the 50% mark, and nearly all future population growth is projected to occur in cities. Cities are disproportionately wealthy, but are associated with poverty, too. Addressing the dual challenges of urbanization and poverty is key to achieving sustainable development. This paper performs cross-sectional regressions, based on Kuznets, as a starting point for understanding the relationship between urbanization and poverty/inequality indicators. Increases in gross domestic product per capita unambiguously lowered poverty and narrowed rural-urban gaps. By contrast, levels of urbanization were either unrelated to poverty/inequality indicators and measures of rural-urban gaps, or had a nonlinear effect where, initially, increases in urbanization likewise led to improvements in those areas, while at higher levels of urbanization, increases in urbanization exacerbated poverty and rural-urban gaps.

Exploring Geology on the World-Wide Web--Volcanoes and Volcanism.

Science.gov (United States)

Schimmrich, Steven Henry; Gore, Pamela J. W.

1996-01-01

Focuses on sites on the World Wide Web that offer information about volcanoes. Web sites are classified into areas of Global Volcano Information, Volcanoes in Hawaii, Volcanoes in Alaska, Volcanoes in the Cascades, European and Icelandic Volcanoes, Extraterrestrial Volcanism, Volcanic Ash and Weather, and Volcano Resource Directories. Suggestions…

Collaborative Design of World Wide Web Pages: A Case Study.

Science.gov (United States)

Andrew, Paige G; Musser, Linda R.

1997-01-01

This case study of the collaborative design of an earth science World Wide Web page at Pennsylvania State University highlights the role of librarians. Discusses the original Web site and links, planning, the intended audience, and redesign and recommended changes; and considers the potential contributions of librarians. (LRW)

Educational use of World Wide Web pages on CD-ROM.

Science.gov (United States)

Engel, Thomas P; Smith, Michael

2002-01-01

The World Wide Web is increasingly important for medical education. Internet served pages may also be used on a local hard disk or CD-ROM without a network or server. This allows authors to reuse existing content and provide access to users without a network connection. CD-ROM offers several advantages over network delivery of Web pages for several applications. However, creating Web pages for CD-ROM requires careful planning. Issues include file names, relative links, directory names, default pages, server created content, image maps, other file types and embedded programming. With care, it is possible to create server based pages that can be copied directly to CD-ROM. In addition, Web pages on CD-ROM may reference Internet served pages to provide the best features of both methods.

[State of the world population, 1986].

Science.gov (United States)

1987-01-01

The majority of the world population will soon reside in urban areas. At present, over 40% of the world's people are urban, and 50% will be urban soon after the year 2000. The proportion urban in developed countries has exceeded 50% since the mid-20th century, and in developing countries this level will be reached in the 1st quarter of the next century. Developing countries in Asia and Africa have less than 30% of their population urban. While over 70% of Latin America's population is urban. Within the next 50 years, the predominantly rural character of the developing countries will disappear forever. Currently the majority of the world's urban population lives in developing countries. In 1970, 695 million urban dwellers were in developed countries vs. 666 million in developing countries, but by 1985, there were only 849 million urban dwellers in developed countries vs. 1164 million in developing countries. By the year 2025, there will be nearly 4 times as many urban dwellers in developing countries. An increasing proportion of the urban population will reside in the largest cities. Around 2025, almost 30% of the urban population in developing countries will live in cities of over 4 million. Around 2000 there will be 5 cities of 15 million or more, 3 of them in developing countries. The proportion of the 20 largest cities in developing countries will increase from 9 in 1970 to 16 in 2000. The close relationship between city size and economic development that existed until the recent past is disappearing. It is possible that the very largest cities will no longer be at the center of international political and economic networks. Many developing countries will have to develop plans for cities of sizes never imagined in the developed countries of today. High rates of population increase in the developing countries are an inseparable aspect of their urbanization. Growth of the urban population in developing countries will continue to be rapid until well into the 21st

What is WorldWide Telescope, and Why Should Researchers Care?

Science.gov (United States)

Goodman, Alyssa A.

2016-01-01

As of 2015, about 20 million people have downloaded the computer program called "WorldWide Telescope," and even more have accessed it via the web, at http://worldwidetelescope.org. But, the vast majority of these millions are not professional astronomers. This talk will explain why WorldWide Telescope (WWT) is also a powerful tool for research astronomers. I will focus on how WWT can be, and is, being built-in to Journals, and into day-to-day research environments. By way of example, I will show how WWT already: allows users to display images, including those in Journals, in the context of multi-wavelength full-sky imagery; allows for the display of which parts of the Sky have been studied, when, how, and for what reason (see http://adsass.org); allows, via right-click, immediate access to ADS, SIMBAD, and other professional research tools. I will also highlight new work, currently in development, that is using WWT as a tool for observation planning, and as a display mode for advanced high-dimensional data visualization tools, like glue (see http://glueviz.org). WWT is now well-known in the education community (see http://wwtambassadors.org), so the explicit goal of this talk will be to make researchers more aware of its full power. I will explain how WWT transitioned, over 8 years, from a Microsoft Research project to its current open-source state (see https://github.com/WorldWideTelescope), and I will conclude with comments on the future of WWT, and its relationship to how research should be carried out in the future (see http://tinyurl.com/aas-potf).

Business use of the World-Wide Web

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

C. Cockburn

1995-01-01

Full Text Available Two methods were employed in this study of the use of the World Wide Web by business: first, a sample of 300 businesses with Web sites, across a wide range of industry types, was examined, by selecting (rather than sampling companies from the Yahoo! directory. The sites were investigated in relation to several areas - the purpose of the Web site, the use being made of electronic mail and the extent to which multi-media was being utilised. In addition, any other aspects of the site which were designed to make it more interesting to potential customers were also noted. Secondly, an electronic-mail questionnaire was sent to 222 of the 300 companies surveyed: that is, those that provided an e-mail address for contact. 14 were returned immediately due to unknown addresses or technical problems. Of the remaining 208, 102 replies were received, five of which were of no relevance, leaving 97 completed questionnaires to examine; a response rate of 47%, which is surprisingly good for a survey of this kind.

The Contributions of Urban Landscape to Urban Life

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Ahmet Tuğrul Polat

2017-06-01

Full Text Available The issues of urban and urbanization emerged after the industrial revolution. Thus, cities that have increased rapidly in population have become points of attraction for people. Over the past century, the world population has begun to gather quickly in urban areas. Cities are transforming into unhealthy living environments with distorted ecological balance, lost green areas and aesthetic qualities. The value of accessible green spaces in urban areas is increasing to the unprecedented levels. The green space system seen as a necessity in the cities have provided the emergence of the "urban landscape" phenomenon. The issue of urban landscape is now a very serious concept. The landscape change is moving along with the level of civilization. Primarily, guidance service should be offered for more efficient, comfortable and protective areas. An interdisciplinary approach is needed in the creation of urban spaces. In this study, the term of urban landscape was explained and the researches about the contributions of urban landscape to urban life were examined and suggestions were made about the subject.

The Relationship of the World Wide Web to Thinking Skills.

Science.gov (United States)

Bradshaw, Amy C.; Bishop, Jeanne L.; Gens, Linda S.; Miller, Sharla L.; Rogers, Martha A.

2002-01-01

Discusses use of the World Wide Web in education and its possibilities for developing higher order critical thinking skills to successfully deal with the demands of the future information society. Suggests that teachers need to provide learning environments that are learner-centered, authentic, problem-based, and collaborative. (Contains 61…

Interactivity, Information Processing, and Learning on the World Wide Web.

Science.gov (United States)

Tremayne, Mark; Dunwoody, Sharon

2001-01-01

Examines the role of interactivity in the presentation of science news on the World Wide Web. Proposes and tests a model of interactive information processing that suggests that characteristics of users and Web sites influence interactivity, which influences knowledge acquisition. Describes use of a think-aloud method to study participants' mental…

Status of research reactor spent fuel world-wide: Database summary

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Ritchie, I.G.

1996-01-01

Results complied in the research reactor spent fuel database are used to assess the status of research reactor spent fuel world-wide. Fuel assemblies, their types, enrichment, origin of enrichment and geological distribution among the industrialized and developed countries of the world are discussed. Fuel management practices in wet and dry storage facilities and the concerns of reactor operators about long-term storage of their spent fuel are presented and some of the activities carried out by the International Atomic Energy Agency to address the issues associated with research reactor spent fuel are outlined. (author). 4 refs, 17 figs, 4 tabs

Basic Services for All in an Urbanizing World: GOLD III

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Claire Frost

2014-07-01

Full Text Available Basic Services for All in an Urbanizing World is the third instalment in United Cities and Local Government’s (UCLG flagship series of global reports on local democracy and decentralisation (GOLD III. In the context of rapid urbanisation, climate change and economic uncertainty the report is an impressive attempt to analyse local government’s role in the provision of basic services, the challenges they are facing, and make recommendations to improve local government’s ability to ensure access for all. Published in 2014, the report is well positioned to feed into the current debate on what will follow the UN Millennium Development Goals, and examines the role of local government in the provision of basic services across the world regions.

The World Wide Web Revisited

Science.gov (United States)

Owston, Ron

2007-01-01

Nearly a decade ago the author wrote in one of the first widely-cited academic articles, Educational Researcher, about the educational role of the web. He argued that educators must be able to demonstrate that the web (1) can increase access to learning, (2) must not result in higher costs for learning, and (3) can lead to improved learning. These…

Service Learning and Building Community with the World Wide Web

Science.gov (United States)

Longan, Michael W.

2007-01-01

The geography education literature touts the World Wide Web (Web) as a revolutionary educational tool, yet most accounts ignore its uses for public communication and creative expression. This article argues that students can be producers of content that is of service to local audiences. Drawing inspiration from the community networking movement,…

Perspectives for Electronic Books in the World Wide Web Age.

Science.gov (United States)

Bry, Francois; Kraus, Michael

2002-01-01

Discusses the rapid growth of the World Wide Web and the lack of use of electronic books and suggests that specialized contents and device independence can make Web-based books compete with print. Topics include enhancing the hypertext model of XML; client-side adaptation, including browsers and navigation; and semantic modeling. (Author/LRW)

Mapping world-wide science at the paper level.

Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

Klavans, Richard (SciTech Strategies, Inc., Berwyn, PA); Boyack, Kevin W.

2005-01-01

This article describes recent improvements in mapping a highly representative set of the world-wide scientific literature. The process described in this article extends existing work in this area in three major ways. First, we argue that a separate structural analysis of current literature vs. reference literature is required for R&D planning. Second, visualization software is used to improve coverage of the literature while maintaining structural integrity. Third, quantitative techniques for measuring the structural integrity of a map are introduced. Maps with high structural integrity, covering far more of the available literature, are presented.

Analysis of Global Urban Temperature Trends and Urbanization Impacts

Science.gov (United States)

Lee, K. I.; Ryu, J.; Jeon, S. W.

2018-04-01

Due to urbanization, urban areas are shrinking green spaces and increasing concrete, asphalt pavement. So urban climates are different from non-urban areas. In addition, long-term macroscopic studies of urban climate change are becoming more important as global urbanization affects global warming. To do this, it is necessary to analyze the effect of urbanization on the temporal change in urban temperature with the same temperature data and standards for urban areas around the world. In this study, time series analysis was performed with the maximum, minimum, mean and standard values of surface temperature during the from 1980 to 2010 and analyzed the effect of urbanization through linear regression analysis with variables (population, night light, NDVI, urban area). As a result, the minimum value of the surface temperature of the urban area reflects an increase by a rate of 0.28K decade-1 over the past 31 years, the maximum value reflects an increase by a rate of 0.372K decade-1, the mean value reflects an increase by a rate of 0.208 decade-1, and the standard deviation reflects a decrease by rate of 0.023K decade-1. And the change of surface temperature in urban areas is affected by urbanization related to land cover such as decrease of greenery and increase of pavement area, but socioeconomic variables are less influential than NDVI in this study. This study are expected to provide an approach to future research and policy-planning for urban temperature change and urbanization impacts.

The online discourse on the Demjanjuk trial. New memory practices on the World Wide Web?

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Vivien SOMMER

2012-01-01

Full Text Available In this article I want to discuss the question if and how the World Wide Web changes social memory practices. Therefore I examine the relationship between the World Wide Web, social memory practices and public discourses. Towards discussing mediated memory processes I focus on the online discourse about the trial against the former concentration camp guard John Demjanjuk.

El creador de World Wide Web gana premio Millennium de tecnologia

CERN Multimedia

Galan, J

2004-01-01

"El creador de la World Wide Web (WWW), el fisico britanico Tim Berners-Lee, gano hoy la primera edicion del Millennium Technology Prize, un galardon internacional creado por una fundacion finlandesa y dotado con un millon de euros" (1/2 page)

U.S. Navy Marine Climatic Atlas of the World. Volume IX. World-Wide Means and Standard Deviations

Science.gov (United States)

1981-10-01

TITLE (..d SobtII,) S. TYPE OF REPORT & PERIOD COVERED U. S. Navy Marine Climatic Atlas of the World Volume IX World-wide Means and Standard Reference...Ives the best estimate of the population standard deviations. The means, , are com~nuted from: EX IIN I 90 80 70 60" 50’ 40, 30 20 10 0 1070 T- VErr ...or 10%, whichever is greater Since the mean ice limit approximates the minus two de l temperature isopleth, this analyzed lower limit was Wave Heights

World-wide architecture of osteoporosis research: density-equalizing mapping studies and gender analysis.

Science.gov (United States)

Brüggmann, D; Mäule, L-S; Klingelhöfer, D; Schöffel, N; Gerber, A; Jaque, J M; Groneberg, D A

2016-10-01

While research activities on osteoporosis grow constantly, no concise description of the global research architecture exists. Hence, we aim to analyze and depict the world-wide scientific output on osteoporosis combining bibliometric tools, density-equalizing mapping projections and gender analysis. Using the NewQIS platform, we analyzed all osteoporosis-related publications authored from 1900 to 2012 and indexed by the Web of Science. Bibliometric details were analyzed related to quantitative and semi-qualitative aspects. The majority of 57 453 identified publications were original research articles. The USA and Western Europe dominated the field regarding cooperation activity, publication and citation performance. Asia, Africa and South America played a minimal role. Gender analysis revealed a dominance of male scientists in almost all countries except Brazil. Although the scientific performance on osteoporosis is increasing world-wide, a significant disparity in terms of research output was visible between developed and low-income countries. This finding is particularly concerning since epidemiologic evaluations of future osteoporosis prevalences predict enormous challenges for the health-care systems in low-resource countries. Hence, our study underscores the need to address these disparities by fostering future research endeavors in these nations with the aim to successfully prevent a growing global burden related to osteoporosis.

Urban air quality

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Fenger, J.

1999-01-01

Since 1950 the world population has more than doubled, and the global number of cars has increased by a factor of 10. In the same period the fraction of people living in urban areas has increased by a factor of 4. In year 2000 this will amount to nearly half of the world population. About 20 urban regions will each have populations above 10 million people. Seen over longer periods, pollution in major cities tends to increase during the built up phase, they pass through a maximum and are then again reduced, as abatement strategies are developed. In the industrialised western world urban air pollution is in some respects in the last stage with effectively reduced levels of sulphur dioxide and soot. In recent decades however, the increasing traffic has switched the attention to nitrogen oxides, organic compounds and small particles. In some cities photochemical air pollution is an important urban problem, but in the northern part of Europe it is a large-scale phenomenon, with ozone levels in urban streets being normally lower than in rural areas. Cities in Eastern Europe have been (and in many cases still are) heavily polluted. After the recent political upheaval, followed by a temporary recession and a subsequent introduction of new technologies, the situation appears to improve. However, the rising number of private cars is an emerging problem. In most developing countries the rapid urbanisation has so far resulted in uncontrolled growth and deteriorating environment. Air pollution levels are here still rising on many fronts. Apart from being sources of local air pollution, urban activities are significant contributors to transboundary pollution and to the rising global concentrations of greenhouse gasses. Attempts to solve urban problems by introducing cleaner, more energy-efficient technologies will generally have a beneficial impact on these large-scale problems. Attempts based on city planning with a spreading of the activities, on the other hand, may generate

A blueprint for strategic urban research: the urban piazza.

Science.gov (United States)

Kourtit, Karima; Nijkamp, Peter; Franklin, Rachel S; Rodríguez-Pose, Andrés

2014-01-01

Urban research in many countries has failed to keep up with the pace of rapidly and constantly evolving urban change. The growth of cities, the increasing complexity of their functions and the complex intra- and inter-urban linkages in this 'urban century' demand new approaches to urban analysis, which, from a systemic perspective, supersede the existing fragmentation in urban studies. In this paper we propose the concept of the urban piazza as a framework in order to address some of the inefficiencies associated with current urban analysis. By combining wealth-creating potential with smart urban mobility, ecological resilience and social buzz in this integrated and systemic framework, the aim is to set the basis for a ' New Urban World ' research blueprint, which lays the foundation for a broader and more integrated research programme for strategic urban issues.

Sources of Militaria on the World Wide Web | Walker | Scientia ...

African Journals Online (AJOL)

Having an interest in military-type topics is one thing, finding information on the web to quench your thirst for knowledge is another. The World Wide Web (WWW) is a universal electronic library that contains millions of web pages. As well as being fun, it is an addictive tool on which to search for information. To prevent hours ...

World Wide Web Homepages: An Examination of Content and Audience.

Science.gov (United States)

Reynolds, Betty; And Others

This paper shows how the content of a World Wide Web page is selected and how an examination of the intended audience influences content. Examples from the New Mexico Tech (NMT) Library homepage show what sources are selected and what level of detail is appropriate for the intended audience. Six fundamental functions of libraries and information…

Integrating Mathematics, Science, and Language Arts Instruction Using the World Wide Web.

Science.gov (United States)

Clark, Kenneth; Hosticka, Alice; Kent, Judi; Browne, Ron

1998-01-01

Addresses issues of access to World Wide Web sites, mathematics and science content-resources available on the Web, and methods for integrating mathematics, science, and language arts instruction. (Author/ASK)

World's Biggest Astronomy Event on the World-Wide

Science.gov (United States)

1996-06-01

`Astronomy On-Line' will connect students all over Europe Astronomy On-Line is a major, all-European project that will take place in conjunction with the 4th European Week for Scientific and Technological Culture later this year. It is based on intensive use of the World-Wide-Web (WWW) and represents the first large-scale attempt in the world to bring together pupils and their teachers all over one continent to explore challenging scientific questions, using modern communication tools, both for obtaining and for communicating information. The programme will be carried out in a collaboration between the European Association for Astronomy Education (EAAE) [1] and the European Southern Observatory, and together with the European Commission (EC). The active phase of Astronomy On-Line will start on October 1 and reach a climax on November 18 - 22, 1996 . What is `Astronomy On-Line'? In this project, a large number of students and their teachers at schools all over Europe, together with professional and amateur astronomers and others interested in astronomy, will become associated in a unique experience that makes intensive use of the vast possibilities of the World-Wide-Web (WWW). Although the exact number of participants will not be known until the beginning of October, it is expected to run into thousands, possibly many more. The unusual size and scope of Astronomy On-Line will contribute to make it an important all-European media event. The central idea is that the participants, through the WWW, will `meet' in a `marketplace' where a number of different `shops' will be available, each of which will tempt them with a number of exciting and educational `events', carefully prepared to cater for different age groups, from 12 years upwards. The events will cover a wide spectrum of activities, some of which will be timed to ensure the proper progression of this very complex project through its main phases. The benefits In fact, Astronomy On-Line will be the first

Diffuse urban pollution increases metal tolerance of natural heterotrophic biofilms

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Fechner, Lise C.; Gourlay-Francé, Catherine; Bourgeault, Adeline; Tusseau-Vuillemin, Marie-Hélène

2012-01-01

This study is a first attempt to investigate the impact of urban contamination on metal tolerance of heterotrophic river biofilms using a short-term test based on β-glucosidase activity. Tolerance levels to Cu, Cd, Zn, Ni and Pb were evaluated for biofilms collected at three sites along an urban gradient in the Seine river (France). Metallic pollution increased along the river, but concentrations remained low compared to environmental quality standards. Biofilm metal tolerance increased downstream from the urban area. Multivariate analysis confirmed the correlation between tolerance and contamination and between multi-metallic and physico-chemical gradients. Therefore, tolerance levels have to be interpreted in relation to the whole chemical and physical characteristics and not solely metal exposure. We conclude that community tolerance is a sensitive biological response to urban pressure and that mixtures of contaminants at levels lower than quality standards might have a significant impact on periphytic communities. - Highlights: ► A new short-term test based on β-glucosidase activity to assess biofilm metal tolerance. ► Cd, Cu, Ni, Pb and Zn tolerance of natural biofilms collected along an urban gradient. ► Metal tolerance levels increase upstream to downstream the river. ► Community tolerance increases at environmental quality standard exposure concentrations. ► Biofilm tolerance is a sensitive biological response to diffuse urban pollution. - Metal concentrations below environmental quality standards increase tolerance levels of natural, hetetrophic biofilms downstream from an urban area.

Medical mentoring via the evolving world wide web.

Science.gov (United States)

Jaffer, Usman; Vaughan-Huxley, Eyston; Standfield, Nigel; John, Nigel W

2013-01-01

Mentoring, for physicians and surgeons in training, is advocated as an essential adjunct in work-based learning, providing support in career and non-career related issues. The World Wide Web (WWW) has evolved, as a technology, to become more interactive and person centric, tailoring itself to the individual needs of the user. This changing technology may open new avenues to foster mentoring in medicine. DESIGN, SYSTEMATIC REVIEW, MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES: A search of the MEDLINE database from 1950 to 2012 using the PubMed interface, combined with manual cross-referencing was performed using the following strategy: ("mentors"[MeSH Terms] OR "mentors"[All Fields] OR "mentor"[All Fields]) AND ("internet"[MeSH Terms] OR "internet"[All Fields]) AND ("medicine"[MeSH Terms] OR "medicine"[All Fields]) AND ("humans"[MeSH Terms] AND English[lang]). Abstracts were screened for relevance (UJ) to the topic; eligibility for inclusion was simply on screening for relevance to online mentoring and web-based technologies. Forty-five papers were found, of which 16 were relevant. All studies were observational in nature. To date, all medical mentoring applications utilizing the World Wide Web have enjoyed some success limited by Web 1.0 and 2.0 technologies. With the evolution of the WWW through 1.0, 2.0 and 3.0 generations, the potential for meaningful tele- and distance mentoring has greatly improved. Some engagement has been made with these technological advancements, however further work is required to fully realize the potential of these technologies. Copyright © 2012 Association of Program Directors in Surgery. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Marketing and Selling CD-ROM Products on the World-Wide Web.

Science.gov (United States)

Walker, Becki

1995-01-01

Describes three companies' approaches to marketing and selling CD-ROM products on the World Wide Web. Benefits include low overhead for Internet-based sales, allowance for creativity, and ability to let customers preview products online. Discusses advertising, information delivery, content, information services, and security. (AEF)

Urban Environmental Education for Global Transformation Initiatives - Integrating Information and Communication Systems for Urban Sustainability in 2050.

Science.gov (United States)

Chaudhari, K.

2017-12-01

The Urban population of developing countries is predicted to rise from one third in 1990 to over 50% by 2025. In 1950 the world's total urban population was 734 million, of whom 448 million were living in developed countries and remaining 286 were in developing region. The total population on earth is predicted to increase by more than one billion people within the next 15 years, reaching 8.5 billion in 2030, and to increase further to 9.7 billion in 2050 and 11.2 billion by 2100. Looking at the ever increasing urbanization.In 2016, an estimated 54.5 per cent of the world's populations inhabited in urban region. By 2030, urban areas are projected to shelter 60 per cent of people worldwide and one in every three people will live in cities with at least half a million inhabitants.On the basis of these figures and other global trends, it would appear that Africa and Asia will have the highest share of world's urban growth in next 25 years, resulting consideration rise of large number of metropolitan cities and towns. Therefore issues related to urban climate change will be important for socio economic development for urban transformation through environmental sustainability.The information and communication systems plays an important role in achieving the social sustainability through environmental sustainability for urban transformation. This presentation aims to start the Global initiatives on the problem identifications in environment education for global transformation, education for socio-economic and environmental sustainability due to urbanization in 2050 to investigate problems related to social-economic risks and management issues resulting from urbanization to aid mitigation planning in globalized world and to educate scientists and local populations to form a basis for sustainable solutions in environment learning.The presentation aims to assess the potential of information and communication technology for environment education,both within different

Challenges of urbanization and peri-urban development in Europe

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Nielsen, Thomas Alexander Sick; Nilsson, Kjell Svenne Bernhard

2010-01-01

Urbanisation has arguably been the most significant process of land use change in Europe since Second World War. Over 70% of Europe's population now lives in urban areas, which in turn, have grown in area by almost 80% over the last fifty years (EEA 2006). Urban areas cover approximately five...... percent of the territory of the European Union (EU25), and are growing more than twice as fast as the European population. A general consequence of the urbanisation trend and increasing wealth and mobility is urban sprawl, as well as the emergence of peri-urban areas....

Radar Images of the Earth and the World Wide Web

Science.gov (United States)

Chapman, B.; Freeman, A.

1995-01-01

A perspective of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory as a center of planetary exploration, and its involvement in studying the earth from space is given. Remote sensing, radar maps, land topography, snow cover properties, vegetation type, biomass content, moisture levels, and ocean data are items discussed related to earth orbiting satellite imaging radar. World Wide Web viewing of this content is discussed.

Thorium, uranium and plutonium in human tissues of world-wide general population

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Singh, N.P.

1990-01-01

The results on the concentrations of thorium, uranium and plutonium in human tissues of world-wide general populations are summarized. The majority of thorium and uranium are accumulated in the skeleton, whereas, plutonium is divided between two major organs: the liver and skeleton. However, there is a wide variation in the fractions of plutonium in the liver and the skeleton of the different populations. (author) 44 refs.; 15 figs

The Relationship between Habitat Loss and Fragmentation during Urbanization: An Empirical Evaluation from 16 World Cities.

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Zhifeng Liu

Full Text Available Urbanization results in habitat loss and habitat fragmentation concurrently, both influencing biodiversity and ecological processes. To evaluate these impacts, it is important to understand the relationships between habitat loss and habitat fragmentation per se (HLHF during urbanization. The objectives of this study were two-fold: 1 to quantify the different forms of the HLHF relationship during urbanization using multiple landscape metrics, and 2 to test the validity of the HLHF relations reported in the literature. Our analysis was based on a long-term urbanization dataset (1800-2000 of 16 large cities from around the world. Habitat area was represented as the percentage of non-built-up area in the landscape, while habitat fragmentation was measured using several landscape metrics. Our results show that the relationship between habitat loss and habitat fragmentation during urbanization is commonly monotonic-linear, exponential, or logarithmic, indicating that the degree of habitat fragmentation per se increases with habitat loss in general. We compared our results with 14 hypothesized HLHF relationships based on simulated landscapes found in the literature, and found that four of them were consistent with those of urbanization, whereas the other ten were not. Also, we identified six new HLHF relationships when fragmentation was measured by total core area, normalized total core area, patch density, edge density and landscape shape index, respectively. In addition, our study demonstrated that the "space-for-time" approach, frequently used in ecology and geography, generated specious HLHF relationships, suggesting that this approach is largely inappropriate for analyses of urban landscapes that are highly heterogeneous in space and unusually contingent in dynamics. Our results show both generalities and idiosyncrasies of the HLHF relationship, providing new insights for assessing ecological effects of urbanization.

Constructing spatialised knowledge on urban poverty : (multiple) dimensions, mapping spaces and claim-making in urban governance

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Baud, I.; Lemanski, C.; Marx, C.

2015-01-01

Recently, increasing attention is given to poverty issues in urban areas in the Global South. This follows recognition that population growth is shifting to urban areas, as more than half the world population is found in urban areas, which are expected to grow mainly in South Asia and sub-Saharan

How Commercial Banks Use the World Wide Web: A Content Analysis.

Science.gov (United States)

Leovic, Lydia K.

New telecommunications vehicles expand the possible ways that business is conducted. The hypermedia portion of the Internet, the World Wide Web, is such a telecommunications device. The Web is presently one of the most flexible and dynamic methods for electronic information dissemination. The level of technological sophistication necessary to…

Documenting historical data and accessing it on the World Wide Web

Science.gov (United States)

Malchus B. Baker; Daniel P. Huebner; Peter F. Ffolliott

2000-01-01

New computer technologies facilitate the storage, retrieval, and summarization of watershed-based data sets on the World Wide Web. These data sets are used by researchers when testing and validating predictive models, managers when planning and implementing watershed management practices, educators when learning about hydrologic processes, and decisionmakers when...

World-wide trend of long-lived radionuclides transmutation studies

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Kim, Young Hwan; Lee, Il Hee; Yoo, Jae Hyung

1997-01-01

The objective of this study is to review the concepts of partitioning and transmutation studies which are being conducted in several countries. This review was focused on the analysis of such areas as radiotoxicities of radwaste containing long-lived radionuclides, transmutation by reactors or accelerators, and separation of minor actinides. The world-wide trend of partitioning and transmutation studies was also investigated on the basis of each country's R and D activities in this area. (author). 5 refs., 4 tabs., 3 figs

World Wide Webs: Crossing the Digital Divide through Promotion of Public Access

Science.gov (United States)

Coetzee, Liezl

“As Bill Gates and Steve Case proclaim the global omnipresence of the Internet, the majority of non-Western nations and 97 per cent of the world's population remain unconnected to the net for lack of money, access, or knowledge. This exclusion of so vast a share of the global population from the Internet sharply contradicts the claims of those who posit the World Wide Web as a ‘universal' medium of egalitarian communication.” (Trend 2001:2)

Outreach to International Students and Scholars Using the World Wide Web.

Science.gov (United States)

Wei, Wei

1998-01-01

Describes the creation of a World Wide Web site for the Science Library International Outreach Program at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Discusses design elements, content, and promotion of the site. Copies of the home page and the page containing the outreach program's statement of purpose are included. (AEF)

Radiation protection and environmental radioactivity. A voyage to the World Wide Web for beginners; Strahlenschutz und Umweltradioaktivitaet im Internet. Eine Reise in das World Wide Web fuer Anfaenger

Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

Weimer, S [Landesanstalt fuer Umweltschutz Baden-Wuerttemberg, Referat ' ' Umweltradioaktivitaet, Strahlenschutz' ' (Germany)

1998-07-01

According to the enormous growth of the Internet service 'World Wide Web' there is also a big growth in the number of web sites in connection with radiation protection. An introduction is given of some practical basis of the WWW. The structure of WWW addresses and navigating through the web with hyperlinks is explained. Further some search engines are presented. The paper lists a number of WWW addresses of interesting sites with radiological protection informations. (orig.) [German] Mit dem rasanten Wachstum des Internet-Dienstes 'World Wide Web' ist auch das Angebot von Web-Seiten im Bereich Strahlenschutz stark gewachsen. Es wird eine Einfuehrung in die wichtigsten praktischen Grundlagen des WWW gegeben. Es wird der Aufbau der WWW-Adressen erklaert und das Navigieren mit Hyperlinks. Ausserdem werden einige Suchmaschinen vorgestellt. Der Beitrag stellt eine groessere Zahl an WWW-Adressen zu interessanten Seiten mit Strahlenschutzinformationen zur Verfuegung. (orig.)

Consolidation and coordination in urban freight transport

NARCIS (Netherlands)

van Heeswijk, W.J.A.

2017-01-01

Due to growing urbanization, fragmentation of freight flows, and increasingly strict delivery conditions, cities around the world have to deal with a vastly increasing number of freight transport flows. Carriers are unable to efficiently bundle these flows, resulting in inefficient urban transport.

Information about liver transplantation on the World Wide Web.

Science.gov (United States)

Hanif, F; Sivaprakasam, R; Butler, A; Huguet, E; Pettigrew, G J; Michael, E D A; Praseedom, R K; Jamieson, N V; Bradley, J A; Gibbs, P

2006-09-01

Orthotopic liver transplant (OLTx) has evolved to a successful surgical management for end-stage liver diseases. Awareness and information about OLTx is an important tool in assisting OLTx recipients and people supporting them, including non-transplant clinicians. The study aimed to investigate the nature and quality of liver transplant-related patient information on the World Wide Web. Four common search engines were used to explore the Internet by using the key words 'Liver transplant'. The URL (unique resource locator) of the top 50 returns was chosen as it was judged unlikely that the average user would search beyond the first 50 sites returned by a given search. Each Web site was assessed on the following categories: origin, language, accessibility and extent of the information. A weighted Information Score (IS) was created to assess the quality of clinical and educational value of each Web site and was scored independently by three transplant clinicians. The Internet search performed with the aid of the four search engines yielded a total of 2,255,244 Web sites. Of the 200 possible sites, only 58 Web sites were assessed because of repetition of the same Web sites and non-accessible links. The overall median weighted IS was 22 (IQR 1 - 42). Of the 58 Web sites analysed, 45 (77%) belonged to USA, six (10%) were European, and seven (12%) were from the rest of the world. The median weighted IS of publications originating from Europe and USA was 40 (IQR = 22 - 60) and 23 (IQR = 6 - 38), respectively. Although European Web sites produced a higher weighted IS [40 (IQR = 22 - 60)] as compared with the USA publications [23 (IQR = 6 - 38)], this was not statistically significant (p = 0.07). Web sites belonging to the academic institutions and the professional organizations scored significantly higher with a median weighted IS of 28 (IQR = 16 - 44) and 24(12 - 35), respectively, as compared with the commercial Web sites (median = 6 with IQR of 0 - 14, p = .001). There

Meeting the challenge of finding resources for ophthalmic nurses on the World Wide Web.

Science.gov (United States)

Duffel, P G

1998-12-01

The World Wide Web ("the Web") is a macrocosm of resources that can be overwhelming. Often the sheer volume of material available causes one to give up in despair before finding information of any use. The Web is such a popular resource that it cannot be ignored. Two of the biggest challenges to finding good information on the Web are knowing where to start and judging whether the information gathered is pertinent and credible. This article addresses these two challenges and introduces the reader to a variety of ophthalmology and vision science resources on the World Wide Web.

A review of images of nurses and smoking on the World Wide Web.

Science.gov (United States)

Sarna, Linda; Bialous, Stella Aguinaga

2012-01-01

With the advent of the World Wide Web, historic images previously having limited distributions are now widely available. As tobacco use has evolved, so have images of nurses related to smoking. Using a systematic search, the purpose of this article is to describe types of images of nurses and smoking available on the World Wide Web. Approximately 10,000 images of nurses and smoking published over the past century were identified through search engines and digital archives. Seven major themes were identified: nurses smoking, cigarette advertisements, helping patients smoke, "naughty" nurse, teaching women to smoke, smoking in and outside of health care facilities, and antitobacco images. The use of nursing images to market cigarettes was known but the extent of the use of these images has not been reported previously. Digital archives can be used to explore the past, provide a perspective for understanding the present, and suggest directions for the future in confronting negative images of nursing. Copyright © 2012 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Increasing of Urban Radiation due to Climate Change and Reduction Strategy using Vegetation

Science.gov (United States)

Park, C.; Lee, D.; Heo, H. K.; Ahn, S.

2017-12-01

Urban Heat Island (UHI) which means urban air temperature is higher than suburban area is one of the most important environmental issues in Urban. High density of buildings and high ratio of impervious surfaces increases the radiation fluxes in urban canopy. Furthermore, climate change is expected to make UHI even more seriously in the future. Increased irradiation and air temperature cause high amount of short wave and long wave radiation, respectively. This increases net radiation negatively affects heat condition of pedestrian. UHI threatens citizen's health by increasing violence and heat related diseases. For this reason, understanding how much urban radiation will increase in the future, and exploring radiation reduction strategies is important for reducing UHI. In this research, we aim to reveal how the radiation flux in the urban canyon will change as the climate change and determine how much of urban vegetation will be needed to cover this degradation. The study area is a commercial district in Seoul where highly populated area. Due to the high density of buildings and lack of urban vegetation, this area has a poor thermal condition in summer. In this research, we simulate the radiation flux on the ground using multi-layer urban canopy model. Unlike conventionally used urban canopy model to simulate radiation transfer using vertically single layer, the multi-layer model we used here, enables to consider the vertical heterogeneous of buildings and urban vegetation. As a result, net radiation of urban ground will be increase 2.1 W/m² in the 2050s and 2.7 W/m² in the 2100s. And to prevent the increase of radiation, it is revealed that the urban vegetation should by increased by 10%. This research will be valuable in establishing greening planning as a strategy to reduce UHI effect.

An Integrated Model Based on a Hierarchical Indices System for Monitoring and Evaluating Urban Sustainability

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Xulin Guo

2013-02-01

Full Text Available Over 50% of world’s population presently resides in cities, and this number is expected to rise to ~70% by 2050. Increasing urbanization problems including population growth, urban sprawl, land use change, unemployment, and environmental degradation, have markedly impacted urban residents’ Quality of Life (QOL. Therefore, urban sustainability and its measurement have gained increasing attention from administrators, urban planners, and scientific communities throughout the world with respect to improving urban development and human well-being. The widely accepted definition of urban sustainability emphasizes the balancing development of three primary domains (urban economy, society, and environment. This article attempts to improve the aforementioned definition of urban sustainability by incorporating a human well-being dimension. Major problems identified in existing urban sustainability indicator (USI models include a weak integration of potential indicators, poor measurement and quantification, and insufficient spatial-temporal analysis. To tackle these challenges an integrated USI model based on a hierarchical indices system was established for monitoring and evaluating urban sustainability. This model can be performed by quantifying indicators using both traditional statistical approaches and advanced geomatic techniques based on satellite imagery and census data, which aims to provide a theoretical basis for a comprehensive assessment of urban sustainability from a spatial-temporal perspective.

Integrating Temporal Media and Open Hypermedia on the World Wide Web

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Bouvin, Niels Olof; Schade, René

1999-01-01

The World Wide Web has since its beginning provided linking to and from text documents encoded in HTML. The Web has evolved and most Web browsers now support a rich set of media types either by default or by the use of specialised content handlers, known as plug-ins. The limitations of the Web...

Concept, opportunities and challenges of urban tourism in the Arab world: Case studies of Dubai, Cairo and Amman

OpenAIRE

Al-Saad, Saad Ahmed; Ababneh, Abdelkader

2017-01-01

This paper aims to provide a better understanding of the current situation of urban tourism with referring to the experiences of the Arab World. By using bibliographic documentation and descriptive-analytic method, this paper addresses the main opportunities, impediments, and challenges of urban tourism in three Arab cities (Dubai, Cairo and Amman). This paper indicates that the three cities have many opportunities stemming from their location and their rich tourism resources. Moreover, urban...

Distributing flight dynamics products via the World Wide Web

Science.gov (United States)

Woodard, Mark; Matusow, David

1996-01-01

The NASA Flight Dynamics Products Center (FDPC), which make available selected operations products via the World Wide Web, is reported on. The FDPC can be accessed from any host machine connected to the Internet. It is a multi-mission service which provides Internet users with unrestricted access to the following standard products: antenna contact predictions; ground tracks; orbit ephemerides; mean and osculating orbital elements; earth sensor sun and moon interference predictions; space flight tracking data network summaries; and Shuttle transport system predictions. Several scientific data bases are available through the service.

The World-Wide Web past present and future, and its application to medicine

CERN Document Server

Sendall, D M

1997-01-01

The World-Wide Web was first developed as a tool for collaboration in the high energy physics community. From there it spread rapidly to other fields, and grew to its present impressive size. As an easy way to access information, it has been a great success, and a huge number of medical applications have taken advantage of it. But there is another side to the Web, its potential as a tool for collaboration between people. Medical examples include telemedicine and teaching. New technical developments offer still greater potential in medical and other fields. This paper gives some background to the early development of the World-Wide Web, a brief overview of its present state with some examples relevant to medicine, and a look at the future.

Urban Containment Policies and the Protection of Natural Areas: The Case of Seoul's Greenbelt

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

David N. Bengston

2006-06-01

Full Text Available Countries around the world have responded to the problems associated with rapid urban growth and increasingly land-consumptive development patterns by creating a wide range of policy instruments designed to manage urban growth. Of the array of growth management techniques, urban containment policies are considered by some to be a promising approach. This paper focuses on greenbelts, the most restrictive form of urban containment policy. The long-standing greenbelt of Seoul, Republic of Korea is examined as a case study. Seoul's greenbelt has generated both significant social costs and benefits. Costs include higher land and housing prices in the urban area surrounded by the greenbelt, additional costs incurred by commuters who live beyond the greenbelt and work in Seoul, and increased congestion and related quality of life impacts. Benefits include the amenity value of living near the greenbelt, recreational resources, bequest and heritage values, fiscal savings due to increased efficiency in the provision of public services and infrastructure, and a wide range of life-supporting ecosystem services. After standing virtually unchanged for almost three decades, Korea's greenbelt policy is currently being revised and weakened, largely due to pressure from greenbelt landowners and developers. Although there is no definitive answer to the question of whether Seoul would be a more or less "sustainable city" today without the greenbelt, it is certain that in the absence of the greenbelt, Seoul would have lost much of its rich natural heritage and essential ecosystem services.

The Land of Confusion? High School Students and Their Use of the World Wide Web for Research.

Science.gov (United States)

Lorenzen, Michael

2002-01-01

Examines high school students' use of the World Wide Web to complete assignments. Findings showed the students used a good variety of resources, including libraries and the World Wide Web, to find information for assignments. However, students were weak at determining the quality of the information found on web sites. Students did poorly at…

Decades of urban growth and development on the Asian megadeltas

Science.gov (United States)

Small, Christopher; Sousa, Daniel; Yetman, Gregory; Elvidge, Christopher; MacManus, Kytt

2018-06-01

The current and ongoing expansion of urban areas worldwide represents the largest mass migration in human history. It is well known that the world's coastal zones are associated with large and growing concentrations of population, urban development and economic activity. Among coastal environments, deltas have long been recognized for both benefits and hazards. This is particularly true on the Asian megadeltas, where the majority of the world's deltaic populations reside. Current trends in urban migration, combined with demographic momentum suggest that the already large populations on the Asian megadeltas will continue to grow. In this study, we combine recently released gridded population density (circa 2010) with a newly developed night light change product (1992 to 2012) and a digital elevation model to quantify the spatial distribution of population and development on the nine Asian megadeltas. Bivariate distributions of population as functions of elevation and coastal proximity quantify potential exposure of deltaic populations to flood and coastal hazards. Comparison of these distributions for the Asian megadeltas show very different patterns of habitation with peak population elevations ranging from 2 to 11 m above sea level over a wide range of coastal proximities. Over all nine megadeltas, over 174 million people reside below a peak population elevation of 7 m. Changes in the spatial extent of anthropogenic night light from 1992 to 2012 show widely varying extents and changes of lighted urban development. All of the deltas except the Indus show the greatest increases in night light brightness occurring at elevations <10 m. At global and continental scales, growth of settlements of all sizes takes the form of evolving spatial networks of development. Spatial networks of lighted urban development in Asia show power law scaling properties consistent with other continents, but much higher rates of growth. The three largest networks of development in China all

Consécration pour les Inventeurs du World-Wide Web

CERN Multimedia

CERN Press Office. Geneva

1996-01-01

Nearly seven years after it was invented at CERN, the World-Wide Web has woven its way into every corner of the Internet. On Saturday, 17 February, the inventors of the Web, Tim Berners-Lee, now at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and Robert Cailliau of CERN's Electronics and Computing for Physics (ECP) Division, will be honoured with one of computing's highest distinctions: the Association for Computing (ACM) Software System Award 1995.

Role of Librarian in Internet and World Wide Web Environment

OpenAIRE

K. Nageswara Rao; KH Babu

2001-01-01

The transition of traditional library collections to digital or virtual collections presented the librarian with new opportunities. The Internet, Web en-vironment and associated sophisticated tools have given the librarian a new dynamic role to play and serve the new information based society in bet-ter ways than hitherto. Because of the powerful features of Web i.e. distributed, heterogeneous, collaborative, multimedia, multi-protocol, hyperme-dia-oriented architecture, World Wide Web has re...

Environmental Reporting for Global Higher Education Institutions using the World Wide Web.

Science.gov (United States)

Walton, J.; Alabaster, T.; Richardson, S.; Harrison, R.

1997-01-01

Proposes the value of voluntary environmental reporting by higher education institutions as an aid to implementing environmental policies. Suggests that the World Wide Web can provide a fast, up-to-date, flexible, participatory, multidimensional medium for information exchange and management. Contains 29 references. (PVD)

Quality analysis of patient information about knee arthroscopy on the World Wide Web.

Science.gov (United States)

Sambandam, Senthil Nathan; Ramasamy, Vijayaraj; Priyanka, Priyanka; Ilango, Balakrishnan

2007-05-01

This study was designed to ascertain the quality of patient information available on the World Wide Web on the topic of knee arthroscopy. For the purpose of quality analysis, we used a pool of 232 search results obtained from 7 different search engines. We used a modified assessment questionnaire to assess the quality of these Web sites. This questionnaire was developed based on similar studies evaluating Web site quality and includes items on illustrations, accessibility, availability, accountability, and content of the Web site. We also compared results obtained with different search engines and tried to establish the best possible search strategy to attain the most relevant, authentic, and adequate information with minimum time consumption. For this purpose, we first compared 100 search results from the single most commonly used search engine (AltaVista) with the pooled sample containing 20 search results from each of the 7 different search engines. The search engines used were metasearch (Copernic and Mamma), general search (Google, AltaVista, and Yahoo), and health topic-related search engines (MedHunt and Healthfinder). The phrase "knee arthroscopy" was used as the search terminology. Excluding the repetitions, there were 117 Web sites available for quality analysis. These sites were analyzed for accessibility, relevance, authenticity, adequacy, and accountability by use of a specially designed questionnaire. Our analysis showed that most of the sites providing patient information on knee arthroscopy contained outdated information, were inadequate, and were not accountable. Only 16 sites were found to be providing reasonably good patient information and hence can be recommended to patients. Understandably, most of these sites were from nonprofit organizations and educational institutions. Furthermore, our study revealed that using multiple search engines increases patients' chances of obtaining more relevant information rather than using a single search

The world wide web: exploring a new advertising environment.

Science.gov (United States)

Johnson, C R; Neath, I

1999-01-01

The World Wide Web currently boasts millions of users in the United States alone and is likely to continue to expand both as a marketplace and as an advertising environment. Three experiments explored advertising in the Web environment, in particular memory for ads as they appear in everyday use across the Web. Experiments 1 and 2 examined the effect of advertising repetition on the retention of familiar and less familiar brand names, respectively. Experiment 1 demonstrated that repetition of a banner ad within multiple web pages can improve recall of familiar brand names, and Experiment 2 demonstrated that repetition can improve recognition of less familiar brand names. Experiment 3 directly compared the retention of familiar and less familiar brand names that were promoted by static and dynamic ads and demonstrated that the use of dynamic advertising can increase brand name recall, though only for familiar brand names. This study also demonstrated that, in the Web environment, much as in other advertising environments, familiar brand names possess a mnemonic advantage not possessed by less familiar brand names. Finally, data regarding Web usage gathered from all experiments confirm reports that Web usage among males tends to exceed that among females.

Urban Conservation Policies and Plans for a World Heritage Site Case: Antique Pergamon City and its Multi-Layered Cultural Landscape

Science.gov (United States)

Tunçer, Mehmet

2017-10-01

Izmir’s Pergamon (Bergama) Antique City and Its Multi-Layered Cultural Landscape entered the UNESCO World Heritage List with the participation of 21 countries in the 38th World Heritage Committee Meeting held in Doha, Qatar’s capital in between 15 - 25 June 2014. Bergama became the 999th WORLD HERITAGE. Bergama, which has been in operation since 2010, has entered the list as a Multi-layered Cultural Landscape Area. The main purpose of this paper will explain and summarize of urban and archaeological conservation efforts for Pergamon since 1992 to 2014. In the paper also aimed to give the conservation policies of public administrations which mainly central /Ministry of Culture and Tourism, Ministry of Environment/ and local /Bergama Municipality, Gen. Directorate of Vakiflar. Turkey is one of the 10 original member states to establish UNESCO. 9 cities in Turkey are included in the UNESCO List of World Heritage Sites. Further, 23 sites have been nominated and are included in the tentative list. The activities aimed to include the district of Bergama in the UNESCO World Heritage List are ongoing in the years 2009-2014. All the efforts have been made carry this unique antique city to the UNESCO Heritage List at 2014. As an Urban Conservation Planner, I had a change of preparing the FIRST Conservation Aimed Plans and urban designs for Urban and Archaeological Sites of Pergamon together with my team, in the years between 1992-94. We prepared conservation aimed plans for all of the areas of Acropolis, Middle City and Ottoman period urban conservation areas. Urban and archaeological sites of Pergamon the ancient city today, which is over two thousand years old, where scientists, archaeologists, architects, art historians, urban planners, sculptors and similar arts and culture, men talk about admiration, write about and write praises, face to face some deterioration and destruction. As a conservation planner working on Pergamon since 1992, I’ will concentrate the

Affordable Digital Planetariums with WorldWide Telescope

Science.gov (United States)

Rosenfield, P.; Connolly, A.; Fay, J.; Sayres, C.; Tofflemire, B.

2011-09-01

Digital planetariums can provide a broader range of educational experiences than the more classical planetariums that use star-balls. This is because of their ability to project images, content from current research, and the 3-D distribution of the stars and galaxies. While there are hundreds of planetariums in the country, the reason that few of these are fully digital is the cost. In collaboration with Microsoft Research (MSR), we have developed a way to digitize existing planetariums for approximately $40,000 using freely available software. We describe here how off the shelf equipment, together with a WorldWide Telescope client, can provide a rich and truly interactive experience. This will enable students and the public to pan though multi-wavelength full-sky scientific data sets, explore 3-D visualizations of our Solar System (including trajectories of millions of minor planets), near-by stars, and the SDSS galaxy catalog.

Bumble bees (Bombus spp along a gradient of increasing urbanization.

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Karin Ahrné

Full Text Available BACKGROUND: Bumble bees and other wild bees are important pollinators of wild flowers and several cultivated crop plants, and have declined in diversity and abundance during the last decades. The main cause of the decline is believed to be habitat destruction and fragmentation associated with urbanization and agricultural intensification. Urbanization is a process that involves dramatic and persistent changes of the landscape, increasing the amount of built-up areas while decreasing the amount of green areas. However, urban green areas can also provide suitable alternative habitats for wild bees. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS: We studied bumble bees in allotment gardens, i.e. intensively managed flower rich green areas, along a gradient of urbanization from the inner city of Stockholm towards more rural (periurban areas. Keeping habitat quality similar along the urbanization gradient allowed us to separate the effect of landscape change (e.g. proportion impervious surface from variation in habitat quality. Bumble bee diversity (after rarefaction to 25 individuals decreased with increasing urbanization, from around eight species on sites in more rural areas to between five and six species in urban allotment gardens. Bumble bee abundance and species composition were most affected by qualities related to the management of the allotment areas, such as local flower abundance. The variability in bumble bee visits between allotment gardens was higher in an urban than in a periurban context, particularly among small and long-tongued bumble bee species. CONCLUSIONS/SIGNIFICANCE: Our results suggest that allotment gardens and other urban green areas can serve as important alternatives to natural habitats for many bumble bee species, but that the surrounding urban landscape influences how many species that will be present. The higher variability in abundance of certain species in the most urban areas may indicate a weaker reliability of the ecosystem

Accessing NASA Technology with the World Wide Web

Science.gov (United States)

Nelson, Michael L.; Bianco, David J.

1995-01-01

NASA Langley Research Center (LaRC) began using the World Wide Web (WWW) in the summer of 1993, becoming the first NASA installation to provide a Center-wide home page. This coincided with a reorganization of LaRC to provide a more concentrated focus on technology transfer to both aerospace and non-aerospace industry. Use of WWW and NCSA Mosaic not only provides automated information dissemination, but also allows for the implementation, evolution and integration of many technology transfer and technology awareness applications. This paper describes several of these innovative applications, including the on-line presentation of the entire Technology OPportunities Showcase (TOPS), an industrial partnering showcase that exists on the Web long after the actual 3-day event ended. The NASA Technical Report Server (NTRS) provides uniform access to many logically similar, yet physically distributed NASA report servers. WWW is also the foundation of the Langley Software Server (LSS), an experimental software distribution system which will distribute LaRC-developed software. In addition to the more formal technology distribution projects, WWW has been successful in connecting people with technologies and people with other people.

Multi-dimensional effects of color on the world wide web

Science.gov (United States)

Morton, Jill

2002-06-01

Color is the most powerful building material of visual imagery on the World Wide Web. It must function successfully as it has done historically in traditional two-dimensional media, as well as address new challenges presented by this electronic medium. The psychological, physiological, technical and aesthetic effects of color have been redefined by the unique requirements of the electronic transmission of text and images on the Web. Color simultaneously addresses each of these dimensions in this electronic medium.

The Conundrum of Impacts of Climate Change on Urbanization and the Urban Heat Island Effect

Science.gov (United States)

Quattrochi, Dale A.

2011-01-01

The twenty-first century is the first urban century according to the United Nations Development Program. The focus on cities reflects awareness of the growing percentage of the world's population that lives in urban areas. In 2000, approximately 3 billion people representing about 40% of the global population resided in urban areas. The United Nations estimates that by 2025, 60% of the world s population will live in urban areas. As a consequence, the number of megacities (those cities with populations of 10 million inhabitants or more) will increase by 100 by 2025. Thus, there is a critical need to understand the spatial growth of urban areas and what the impacts are on the environment. Moreover, there is a critical need to assess how under global climate change, cities will affect the local, regional, and even global climate. As urban areas increase in size, it is anticipated there will be a concomitant growth of the Urban Heat Island effect (UHI), and the attributes that are related to its spatial and temporal dynamics. Therefore, how climate change, including the dynamics of the UHI, will affect the urban environment, must be explored to help mitigate potential impacts on the environment (e.g., air quality, heat stress, vectorborne disease) and on human health and well being, to develop adaptation schemes to cope with these impacts.

Information consumerism on the World Wide Web: implications for dermatologists and patients.

Science.gov (United States)

Travers, Robin L

2002-09-01

The World Wide Web (WWW) is continuing to grow exponentially both in terms of numbers of users and numbers of web pages. There is a trend toward the increasing use of the WWW for medical educational purposes, both among physicians and patients alike. The multimedia capabilities of this evolving medium are particularly relevant to visual medical specialties such as dermatology. The origins of information consumerism on the WWW are examined, and the public health issues surrounding dermatologic information and misinformation, and how consumers navigate through the WWW are reviewed. The economic realities of medical information as a "capital good," and the impact this has on dermatologic information sources on the WWW are also discussed.Finally, strategies for guiding consumers and ourselves toward credible medical information sources on the WWW are outlined.

Observational evidence of a long-term increase in precipitation due to urbanization effects and its implications for sustainable urban living.

Science.gov (United States)

Wai, K M; Wang, X M; Lin, T H; Wong, M S; Zeng, S K; He, N; Ng, E; Lau, K; Wang, D H

2017-12-01

Although projected precipitation increases in East Asia due to future climate change have aroused concern, less attention has been paid by the scientific community and public to the potential long-term increase in precipitation due to rapid urbanization. A ten-year precipitation dataset was analysed for both a rapidly urbanized megacity and nearby suburban/rural stations in southern China. Rapid urbanization in the megacity was evident from satellite observations. A statistically significant, long-term, increasing trend of precipitation existed only at the megacity station (45.6mm per decade) and not at the other stations. The increase was attributed to thermal and dynamical modifications of the tropospheric boundary layer related to urbanization, which was confirmed by the results of our WRF-SLUCM simulations. The results also suggested that a long-term regional increase in precipitation, caused by greenhouse gas-induced climate change, for instance, was not evident within the study period. The urbanization-induced increase was found to be higher than the precipitation increase (18.3mm per decade) expected from future climate change. The direct climate impacts due to rapid urbanization is highlighted with strong implications for urban sustainable development and the planning of effective adaptation strategies for issues such as coastal defenses, mosquito-borne disease spread and heat stress mortality. Copyright © 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Glue ear: how good is the information on the World Wide Web?

Science.gov (United States)

Ritchie, L; Tornari, C; Patel, P M; Lakhani, R

2016-02-01

This paper objectively evaluates current information available to the general public related to glue ear on the World Wide Web. The term 'glue ear' was typed into the 3 most frequently used internet search engines - Google, Bing and Yahoo - and the first 20 links were analysed. The first 400 words of each page were used to calculate the Flesch-Kincaid readability score. Each website was subsequently graded using the Discern instrument, which gauges quality and content of literature. The websites Webmd.boots.com, Bupa.co.uk and Patient.co.uk received the highest overall scores. These reflected top scores in either readability or Discern instrument assessment, but not both. Readability and Discern scores increased with the presence of a marketing or advertising incentive. The Patient.co.uk website had the highest Discern score and third highest readability score. There is huge variation in the quality of information available to patients on the internet. Some websites may be accessible to a wide range of reading ages but have poor quality content, and vice versa. Clinicians should be aware of indicators of quality, and use validated instruments to assess and recommend literature.

People, places and infrastructure: Countering urban violence and ...

International Development Research Centre (IDRC) Digital Library (Canada)

People, Places, and Infrastructure: Countering Urban Violence and Promoting Justice in Mumbai, Rio, and Durban. In today's rapidly urbanizing world, cities offer economic opportunity and social mobility, yet they are also places of violence for increasingly large numbers of residents. As urbanization spreads, new sites are ...

Comparison of student outcomes and preferences in a traditional vs. World Wide Web-based baccalaureate nursing research course.

Science.gov (United States)

Leasure, A R; Davis, L; Thievon, S L

2000-04-01

The purpose of this project was to compare student outcomes in an undergraduate research course taught using both World Wide Web-based distance learning technology and traditional pedagogy. Reasons given for enrolling in the traditional classroom section included the perception of increased opportunity for interaction, decreased opportunity to procrastinate, immediate feedback, and more meaningful learning activities. Reasons for selecting the Web group section included cost, convenience, and flexibility. Overall, there was no significant difference in examination scores between the two groups on the three multiple-choice examinations or for the course grades (t = -.96, P = .343). Students who reported that they were self-directed and had the ability to maintain their own pace and avoid procrastination were most suited to Web-based courses. The Web-based classes can help provide opportunities for methods of communication that are not traditionally nurtured in traditional classroom settings. Secondary benefits of the World Wide Web-based course were to increase student confidence with the computer, and introduce them to skills and opportunities they would not have had in the classroom. Additionally, over time and with practice, student's writing skills improved.

THE NEW “UNIVERSAL TRUTH” OF THE WORLD WIDE WEB

OpenAIRE

Alexandru Tăbușcă

2011-01-01

We all see that the world wide web is permanently evolving and developing. New websites are created continuously and push the limits of the old HTML specs in all respects. HTML4 is the real standard for almost 10 years and developers are starting to look for new and improved technologies to help them provide greater functionality. In order to give the authors flexibility and interoperability and to enable much more interactive and innovative websites and applications, HTML5 introduces and enh...

The Impact of Albedo Increase to Mitigate the Urban Heat Island in Terni (Italy Using the WRF Model

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Elena Morini

2016-10-01

Full Text Available The impacts of the urban heat island (UHI phenomenon on energy consumption, air quality, and human health have been widely studied and described. Mitigation strategies have been developed to fight the UHI and its detrimental consequences. A potential countermeasure is the increase of urban albedo by using cool materials. Cool materials are highly reflective materials that can maintain lower surface temperatures and thus can present an effective solution to mitigate the UHI. Terni’s proven record of high temperatures along with related environmental and comfort issues in its urban areas have reflected the local consequences of global warming. On the other hand, it promoted integrated actions by the government and research institutes to investigate solutions to mitigate the UHI effects. In this study, the main goal is to investigate the effectiveness of albedo increase as a strategy to tackle the UHI, by using the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF mesoscale model to simulate the urban climate of Terni (Italy. Three different scenarios through a summer heat wave in the summer of 2015 are analyzed. The Base Scenario, which simulates the actual conditions of the urban area, is the control case. In the Albedo Scenario (ALB Scenario, the albedo of the roof, walls and road of the whole urban area is increased. In the Albedo-Industrial Scenario (ALB-IND Scenario, the albedo of the roof, walls and road of the area occupied by the main industrial site of Terni, located in close proximity to the city center, is increased. The simulation results show that the UHI is decreased up to 2 °C both at daytime and at nighttime in the ALB and in ALB-IND Scenarios. Peak temperatures in the urban area can be decreased by 1 °C at daytime, and by about 2 °C at nighttime. Albedo increase in the area of interest might thus represent an opportunity to decrease the UHI effect and its consequences.

Parenting in 2 Worlds: Effects of a Culturally Adapted Intervention for Urban American Indians on Parenting Skills and Family Functioning

Science.gov (United States)

Kulis, Stephen S.; Ayers, Stephanie L.; Harthun, Mary L.; Jager, Justin

2016-01-01

Parenting in 2 Worlds (P2W) is a culturally grounded parenting intervention that addresses the distinctive social and cultural worlds of urban American Indian (AI) families. P2W was culturally adapted through community-based participatory research in three urban AI communities with diverse tribal backgrounds. This paper reports the immediate outcomes of P2W in a randomized controlled trial, utilizing data from 575 parents of AI children (ages 10–17). Parents were assigned to P2W or to the comparison group, an informational family health curriculum, Healthy Families in 2 Worlds (HF2W). Both the P2W and HF2W curricula consisted of 10 workshops delivered weekly by AI community facilitators. Pretests were administered at the first workshop and a post-test at the last workshop. Tests of the efficacy of P2W versus HF2W on parenting skills and family functioning were analyzed with pairwise t-tests, within intervention type, and by baseline adjusted path models using FIML estimation in Mplus. Intervention effect sizes were estimated with Cohen’s d. Participants in P2W reported significant improvements in parental agency, parenting practices, supervision and family cohesion, and decreases in discipline problems and parent-child conflict. Compared to HF2W, P2W participants reported significantly larger increases in parental self-agency and positive parenting practices, and fewer child discipline problems. Most of these desired program effects for P2W approached medium size. Culturally adapted parenting interventions like P2W can effectively strengthen parenting practices and family functioning among urban AI families and help address their widespread need for targeted, culturally grounded programs. PMID:27129476

The Social, Political and Environmental Dimensions of Urban ...

International Development Research Centre (IDRC) Digital Library (Canada)

Urban agriculture is an increasingly popular practice in cities worldwide, and a sustainable future for it is critical, especially for the urban poor of the developing world. This book presents the first findings of original field research projects funded by IDRC's AGROPOLIS International Graduate Research Awards on Urban ...

In defence of utopian urbanism

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Pinder, David

2002-01-01

What is the role of utopian visions of the city today? What is their use at a time when, for many people, the very concept of utopia has come to an end? Taking a wide perspective on contemporary debates, this paper addresses the general retreat from utopian urbanism in recent years. It connects...... it with the so-called crisis of modernist urbanism in the capitalist West as well as forms of ‘utopic degeneration’, and assesses some of its implications. Arguing against the abandonment of utopian perspectives, it advocates a rethinking of utopianism through considering its potential function in developing...... critical approaches to urban questions. The authoritarianism of much utopian urbanism certainly needs acknowledging and criticising, but this need not entail a retreat from imagining alternatives and dreaming of better worlds. Instead, it is necessary to reconceptualise utopia, and to open up the field...

Le world wide web: l'hypermedià sur internet | Houmel | Revue d ...

African Journals Online (AJOL)

The telecommunication's networks technology linked to the electronic document has changed abroad the information specialists' methods of work. The Internet network did a lot in thèse big changes and especially after the World Wide Web intégration wich is a high hypermedia distributed information System. In Algeria lots ...

Transmission of antibiotic-resistant Escherichia coli between cattle, humans and the environment in peri-urban livestock keeping communities in Morogoro, Tanzania

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Lupindu, Athumani M; Dalsgaard, Anders; Msoffe, Peter L. M.

2015-01-01

Urban and peri-urban livestock farming is expanding world-widely because of increased urbanization and demands for food of animal origin. Such farming practices pose a public health risk as livestock are reservoirs of several zoonotic pathogens. In an attempt to determine the fecal transmission...... infrastructures (Odd Ratio=11.2, 95% CI=1.1-119.3) were associated with E. coli showing identical PFGE types within and between clusters. There is a need to improve animal husbandry and manure management practices to reduce risks of transmission of enteropathogens between livestock and humans in urban and peri-urban...... between livestock and people, 100 household clusters keeping cattle in close proximity of humans were selected in urban and peri-urban areas of Morogoro in Tanzania. One hundred eighteen ampicillin and tetracycline resistant Escherichia coli (40 from human stool, 50 from cattle feces, 21 from soil...

World wide developments in shortwall and wide web mining techniques

Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

Pollard, T

1975-11-01

The paper describes the progress to date with continuous pillar extraction, and how the typical longwall powered support has been modified to be both strong enough and stable enough to provide roof support for very wide webs. It also describes the operating systems which have been specially designed. The next stages of development are discussed, particularly the provision of continuous conveyor haulage in place of the present-day shuttle car. The author suggests that marrying American coal-getting technology and British roof support technology might increase productivity.

Developing as new search engine and browser for libraries to search and organize the World Wide Web library resources

OpenAIRE

Sreenivasulu, V.

2000-01-01

Internet Granthalaya urges world wide advocates and targets at the task of creating a new search engine and dedicated browseer. Internet Granthalaya may be the ultimate search engine exclusively dedicated for every library use to search and organize the world wide web libary resources

International Markedsføring på World Wide Web

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Rask, Morten; Buch, Niels Jakob

1999-01-01

Denne artikel tager udgangspunkt i en gruppe af danske virksomheders anvendelse af World Wide Web til international markedsføring i en periode fra 1996 til 1998. Der identificeres tre interaktionstyper for virksomhedernes profil på Web, nemlig Brochuren, Håndbogen og Handelspladsen. Der reflekteres...... over de krav de enkelte interaktionstyper i forhold til automatisering, formalisering, integration og evaluering kunne kræve. Konklusionen bliver, at de tre interaktionstyper afspejler de udfordringer og muligheder, der er i anvendelsen af Web til markedsføring primært i et internationalt perspektiv......, men kan også bruges som input til nationale Web markedsføringsaktiviteter....

The PEP-II/BaBar Project-Wide Database using World Wide Web and Oracle*Case

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Chan, A.; Crane, G.; MacGregor, I.; Meyer, S.

1995-12-01

The PEP-II/BaBar Project Database is a tool for monitoring the technical and documentation aspects of the accelerator and detector construction. It holds the PEP-II/BaBar design specifications, fabrication and installation data in one integrated system. Key pieces of the database include the machine parameter list, components fabrication and calibration data, survey and alignment data, property control, CAD drawings, publications and documentation. This central Oracle database on a UNIX server is built using Oracle*Case tools. Users at the collaborating laboratories mainly access the data using World Wide Web (WWW). The Project Database is being extended to link to legacy databases required for the operations phase

Urban Air Pollution Climates Throughout the World

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Hertel, Ole; Goodsite, Michael Evan

2009-01-01

The extent of the urban area, the local emission density, and the temporal pattern in the releases govern the local contribution to air pollution levels in urban environments. However, meteorological conditions also heavily affect the actual pollution levels as they govern the dispersion conditio...... population and provide the right basis for future urban air pollution management....

Carbon sequestration and storage by Gainesville's urban forest

Science.gov (United States)

Francisco Escobedo; Jennifer A. Seitz; Wayne Zipperer

2009-01-01

Climate change is a world-wide issue, and it may seem as if only actions by national governments can work effectively against it. In fact individuals and small communities, too, can make wise choices and impacts. Communities can mitigate climate change through reducing fossil fuel consumption and good management of its urban forest....

Reading on the World Wide Web: Dealing with conflicting information from multiple sources

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Van Strien, Johan; Brand-Gruwel, Saskia; Boshuizen, Els

2011-01-01

Van Strien, J. L. H., Brand-Gruwel, S., & Boshuizen, H. P. A. (2011, August). Reading on the World Wide Web: Dealing with conflicting information from multiple sources. Poster session presented at the biannual conference of the European Association for Research on Learning and Instruction, Exeter,

[Third World cities: points of accumulation, centers of distribution].

Science.gov (United States)

Armstrong, W R; Mcgee, T G

1985-01-01

Attention was called over 3 decades ago to the very rapid growth of Third World cities and the significance of the differences between their patterns of urbanization and those of industrialized countries. Their demographic growth occurred much faster and depended much more heavily on high fertility, their economies were geared more to export of raw materials than to manufacturing and were unable to create massive numbers of jobs to absorb the growing labor force except in the unproductive tertiary sector, and it appeared unlikely that they would be able to produce entrepreneurial classes of their own. Several economic developments during the 1970s affected the world economy and the patterns of urbanization of the Third World: the decline of the principal capitalist economies and the multiple increases in the price of oil, the floating exchange rate, the considerable increase in consumer goods, and the increasing costs of labor in industrialized countries, among others, created new conditions. World economic interdependence, international control of investment and exchange, and volume and mobility of capital increased at a time of rapid economic growth in some Third World countries, especially those whose governments took an aggressive role in promoting growth and investment. Some Third World cities now seem to be developing according to a more western model, but the same cannot be said of all Third World countries, and international economic evolution appears to have led to increasing polarization between countries as well as within them. The 1 domain where a certain convergence has occurred is consumption, beginning with the privileged classes and filtering to the lower income groups. Consumption of collective and individual consumer goods, which is concentrated in the largest cities, increases dependence on imports, technology, knowledge, and usually debt. The modern productive sector and its distribution activities become implanted in the cities to such a degree

Ontology-aided feature correlation for multi-modal urban sensing

Science.gov (United States)

Misra, Archan; Lantra, Zaman; Jayarajah, Kasthuri

2016-05-01

The paper explores the use of correlation across features extracted from different sensing channels to help in urban situational understanding. We use real-world datasets to show how such correlation can improve the accuracy of detection of city-wide events by combining metadata analysis with image analysis of Instagram content. We demonstrate this through a case study on the Singapore Haze. We show that simple ontological relationships and reasoning can significantly help in automating such correlation-based understanding of transient urban events.

Groundwater contamination in relation with the increasing urbanization rate in Africa. Case of Cotonou and Porto Novo (Benin).

Science.gov (United States)

Odeloui, Diane; Celle-Jeanton, Hélène; Huneau, Frédéric; Boukari, Moussa; Alassane, Abdelkarim; Garel, Emilie; Lavastre, Véronique; Bertrand, Guillaume

2016-04-01

More than one billion people in the world still have no access to sufficient resources in drinking water (United Nation, 2014). In particular, large cities in Africa have to face several problems: 1) population growth associated with the strongest urbanization rate increase (5% per year) of the world leading to a dramatic increase in good-quality water needs, 2) low levels of solid waste management and sanitation services, 3) insufficient or disconnected water supply services, 4) low knowledge of water resources availabilities. The situation in Benin is a relevant illustration of the problems that Africa has to face to. As many other coastal urban areas in Africa (Showers, 2002; Re et al., 2011), Cotonou and Porto Novo cities have seen a rapid increase of their population as these towns constitute a corridor of transit for the imports and the exports in the nearby countries. Hence, they are very attractive for job hunters, and constitute the administrative centers for the whole country. This rapid population growth amplifies the problem of water supply and may generate serious impacts on groundwater resources: depletion due to overexploitation, salinization due to seawater intrusion and pollution linked to human activities. In order to insure a safe water supply in the context of increasing urbanization and population in the coastal area of Cotonou and Porto Novo, the identification of the main sources of pollution is essential for the implementation of long-term water management procedures. Based on two field campaigns carried out in January-2012 (dry season) and August-2012 (rainy season), hydrochemical analysis have been realized on groundwater sampled from boreholes drilled in the CTA (Continental Terminal Aquifer) and wells dug in the QCA (Quaternary Coastal Aquifer) in order to investigate the origin of salinization and the present time extension of the nitrate contamination. Historical data have also been collected from previous studies in order to

Urban Intensification and Expansion in Sub-Saharan Africa: Impacts on Urban Agriculture and Food Security

Science.gov (United States)

Uzokwe, V. N. E. N.; Muchelo, R. O.; Odeh, I. A.

2015-12-01

In Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), urban intensification and expansion are increasing at alarming rates due to rapid population growth and rural-to-urban migration. This has led to the premise that the proportion of SSA urban residents most vulnerable to food insecurity is the highest in the world. Using a focused survey and multi-temporal (decadal) land use/cover classification of Landsat images, we explored the effect of urban intensification and expansion on urban agriculture and food security, focusing on a megacity and a regional center in Uganda: Kampala and Mbarara, respectively. We found that food insecurity arose due to a number of reasons, among which are: i) expansion and intensification of of urban settlements into previously productive agricultural lands in urban and peri-urban areas; ii) loss of predominantly young (rural agricultural) adult labor force to urban centers, leading to decline in rural food production; iii) lack of proper urban planning incorporating green and agricultural development leading to low productive market garden systems. We discussed these outcomes in light of existing studies which estimated that urban agriculture alone supports over 800 million people globally and accounts for 15-20% of world food supply. In spite of this relatively low contribution by urban/peri-urban agriculture, it probably accounts for higher proportion of food supply to urban poor in SSA and thus are most vulnerable to the loss of urban and peri-urban agricultural land. Further recommendations require policy makers and urban planners to team up to design a suitable framework for sustainable urban planning and development.

Futures of global urban expansion: uncertainties and implications for biodiversity conservation

Science.gov (United States)

Güneralp, B.; Seto, K. C.

2013-03-01

Urbanization will place significant pressures on biodiversity across the world. However, there are large uncertainties in the amount and location of future urbanization, particularly urban land expansion. Here, we present a global analysis of urban extent circa 2000 and probabilistic forecasts of urban expansion for 2030 near protected areas and in biodiversity hotspots. We estimate that the amount of urban land within 50 km of all protected area boundaries will increase from 450 000 km2 circa 2000 to 1440 000 ± 65 000 km2 in 2030. Our analysis shows that protected areas around the world will experience significant increases in urban land within 50 km of their boundaries. China will experience the largest increase in urban land near protected areas with 304 000 ± 33 000 km2 of new urban land to be developed within 50 km of protected area boundaries. The largest urban expansion in biodiversity hotspots, over 100 000 ± 25 000 km2, is forecasted to occur in South America. Uncertainties in the forecasts of the amount and location of urban land expansion reflect uncertainties in their underlying drivers including urban population and economic growth. The forecasts point to the need to reconcile urban development and biodiversity conservation strategies.

Futures of global urban expansion: uncertainties and implications for biodiversity conservation

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Güneralp, B; Seto, K C

2013-01-01

Urbanization will place significant pressures on biodiversity across the world. However, there are large uncertainties in the amount and location of future urbanization, particularly urban land expansion. Here, we present a global analysis of urban extent circa 2000 and probabilistic forecasts of urban expansion for 2030 near protected areas and in biodiversity hotspots. We estimate that the amount of urban land within 50 km of all protected area boundaries will increase from 450 000 km 2 circa 2000 to 1440 000 ± 65 000 km 2 in 2030. Our analysis shows that protected areas around the world will experience significant increases in urban land within 50 km of their boundaries. China will experience the largest increase in urban land near protected areas with 304 000 ± 33 000 km 2 of new urban land to be developed within 50 km of protected area boundaries. The largest urban expansion in biodiversity hotspots, over 100 000 ± 25 000 km 2 , is forecasted to occur in South America. Uncertainties in the forecasts of the amount and location of urban land expansion reflect uncertainties in their underlying drivers including urban population and economic growth. The forecasts point to the need to reconcile urban development and biodiversity conservation strategies. (letter)

Do We Need to Impose More Regulation Upon the World Wide Web? -A Metasystem Analysis

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

John P. van Gigch

2000-01-01

Full Text Available Every day a new problem attributable to the World Wide Web's lack of formal structure and/or organization is made public. What arguably could be represented as one of its main strengths is rapidly turning out to be one of its most flagrant weaknesses. The intent of this article is to show the need to establish a more formal organization than presently exists over the World Wide Web. (This article will use the terms the Internet and Cyberspace interchangeably. It is proposed that this formal organization take the form of a metacontrol system--to be explained-- and rely, at least in part, for this control to self-regulate. The so-called metasystem system would be responsible for preventing some of the unanticipated situations that take place in cyberspace and that, due to the web's lack of maturity, have not been encountered heretofore. Some activities, such as the denial-of-service (DoS attacks, may well be illicit. Others, like the question of establishing a world-wide democratic board to administer the Internet's address system, are so new that there are no technical, legal or political precedents to ensure its design will succeed. What is needed is a formal, over-arching control system, i.e. a "metasystem," to arbitrate over controversies, decide on the legality of new policies and, in general, act as a metalevel controller over the activities of the virtual community called Cyberspace. The World Wide Web Consortium has emerged as a possible candidate for this role.This paper uses control theory to define both the problem and the proposed solution. Cyberspace lacks a metacontroller that can be used to resolve the many problems that arise when a new organizational configuration, such as the Internet, is created and when questions surface about the extent to which new activities interfere with individual or corporate freedoms.

Delivering an Alternative Medicine Resource to the User's Desktop via World Wide Web.

Science.gov (United States)

Li, Jie; Wu, Gang; Marks, Ellen; Fan, Weiyu

1998-01-01

Discusses the design and implementation of a World Wide Web-based alternative medicine virtual resource. This homepage integrates regional, national, and international resources and delivers library services to the user's desktop. Goals, structure, and organizational schemes of the system are detailed, and design issues for building such a…

Urban development in China

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Brakman, Steven; Garretsen, J.H.; van Marrewijk, J.G.M.

2016-01-01

Urbanization is important for economic development. As the largest country in the world in terms of population, China has experienced a remarkable history of urbanization; one 1000 years ago it housed the largest cities in world, it went through a counter-urbanization revolution during the Mao

Histology on the World Wide Web: A Digest of Resources for Students and Teachers.

Science.gov (United States)

Cotter, John R.

1997-01-01

Provides a list of 37 World Wide Web sites that are devoted to instruction in histology and include electronic manuals, syllabi, atlases, image galleries, and quizzes. Reviews the topics, content, and highlights of these Web sites. (DDR)

Network Formation and the Structure of the Commercial World Wide Web

OpenAIRE

Zsolt Katona; Miklos Sarvary

2008-01-01

We model the commercial World Wide Web as a directed graph that emerges as the equilibrium of a game in which utility maximizing websites purchase (advertising) in-links from each other while also setting the price of these links. In equilibrium, higher content sites tend to purchase more advertising links (mirroring the Dorfman-Steiner rule) while selling less advertising links themselves. As such, there seems to be specialization across sites in revenue models: high content sites tend to ea...

Application of World Wide Web (W3) Technologies in Payload Operations

Science.gov (United States)

Sun, Charles; Windrem, May; Picinich, Lou

1996-01-01

World Wide Web (W3) technologies are considered in relation to their application to space missions. It is considered that such technologies, including the hypertext transfer protocol and the Java object-oriented language, offer a powerful and relatively inexpensive framework for distributed application software development. The suitability of these technologies for payload monitoring systems development is discussed, and the experience gained from the development of an insect habitat monitoring system based on W3 technologies is reported.

WorldWide Telescope: A Newly Open Source Astronomy Visualization System

Science.gov (United States)

Fay, Jonathan; Roberts, Douglas A.

2016-01-01

After eight years of development by Microsoft Research, WorldWide Telescope (WWT) was made an open source project at the end of June 2015. WWT was motivated by the desire to put new surveys of objects, such as the Sloan Digital Sky Survey in the context of the night sky. The development of WWT under Microsoft started with the creation of a Windows desktop client that is widely used in various education, outreach and research projects. Using this, users can explore the data built into WWT as well as data that is loaded in. Beyond exploration, WWT can be used to create tours that present various datasets a narrative format.In the past two years, the team developed a collection of web controls, including an HTML5 web client, which contains much of the functionality of the Windows desktop client. The project under Microsoft has deep connections with several user communities such as education through the WWT Ambassadors program, http://wwtambassadors.org/ and with planetariums and museums such as the Adler Planetarium. WWT can also support research, including using WWT to visualize the Bones of the Milky Way and rich connections between WWT and the Astrophysical Data Systems (ADS, http://labs.adsabs.harvard.edu/adsabs/). One important new research connection is the use of WWT to create dynamic and potentially interactive supplements to journal articles, which have been created in 2015.Now WWT is an open source community lead project. The source code is available in GitHub (https://github.com/WorldWideTelescope). There is significant developer documentation on the website (http://worldwidetelescope.org/Developers/) and an extensive developer workshops (http://wwtworkshops.org/?tribe_events=wwt-developer-workshop) has taken place in the fall of 2015.Now that WWT is open source anyone who has the interest in the project can be a contributor. As important as helping out with coding, the project needs people interested in documentation, testing, training and other roles.

Introducing chinese treatment experience of Budd-Chiari syndrome to world wide

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Li Linsun

2008-01-01

During the latest 20 years, the crucial progress has been made in the field of treatment for Budd-Chiari syndrome (BCS)in China with therapeutic methods transferring from surgical to interventional and achieving successful rate of 96%. Our unique contribution to the BCS interventional therapy should have made ourselves proud for being as a superior world position on account of large number of cases, abundant therapeutic contents and consummate skills. What a pity is that our achievement was not appreciated by international colleagues because of only a few papers published in SCI journals. So that, Chinese scholars ought to have doing more necessarily through diligently learning English, doing long term follow-up and performing more basic researches and actively joining international academic exchanges, let our good experiences of treatment for BCS be introduced to the world-wide. (authors)

Gender Equity in Advertising on the World-Wide Web: Can it be Found?

Science.gov (United States)

Kramer, Kevin M.; Knupfer, Nancy Nelson

Recent attention to gender equity in computer environments, as well as in print-based and televised advertising for technological products, suggests that gender bias in the computer environment continues. This study examined gender messages within World Wide Web advertisements, specifically the type and number of visual images used in Web banner…

The poor quality of information about laparoscopy on the World Wide Web as indexed by popular search engines.

Science.gov (United States)

Allen, J W; Finch, R J; Coleman, M G; Nathanson, L K; O'Rourke, N A; Fielding, G A

2002-01-01

This study was undertaken to determine the quality of information on the Internet regarding laparoscopy. Four popular World Wide Web search engines were used with the key word "laparoscopy." Advertisements, patient- or physician-directed information, and controversial material were noted. A total of 14,030 Web pages were found, but only 104 were unique Web sites. The majority of the sites were duplicate pages, subpages within a main Web page, or dead links. Twenty-eight of the 104 pages had a medical product for sale, 26 were patient-directed, 23 were written by a physician or group of physicians, and six represented corporations. The remaining 21 were "miscellaneous." The 46 pages containing educational material were critically reviewed. At least one of the senior authors found that 32 of the pages contained controversial or misleading statements. All of the three senior authors (LKN, NAO, GAF) independently agreed that 17 of the 46 pages contained controversial information. The World Wide Web is not a reliable source for patient or physician information about laparoscopy. Authenticating medical information on the World Wide Web is a difficult task, and no government or surgical society has taken the lead in regulating what is presented as fact on the World Wide Web.

Tapping the Resources of the World Wide Web for Inquiry in Middle Schools.

Science.gov (United States)

Windschitl, Mark; Irby, Janet

1999-01-01

Argues for the cautiously expanded use of the World Wide Web for inquiry across the middle school curriculum, noting how the Internet can be used in schools. Describes the Internet and appraises its distractions and academic utility, identifying features that support student inquiry in science, mathematics, social studies, and language arts. (JPB)

Lithuanian on-line periodicals on the World Wide Web

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Lina Sarlauskiene

2001-01-01

Full Text Available Deals with Lithuanian full-text electronic periodicals distributed through the World Wide Web. An electronic periodical is usually defined as a regular publication on some particular topic distributed in digital form, chiefly through the Web, but also by electronic mail or digital disk. The author has surveyed 106 publications. Thirty-four are distributed only on the Web, and 72 have printed versions. The number of analysed publications is not very big, but four years of electronic publishing and the variety of periodicals enables us to establish the causes of this phenomenon, the main features of development, and some perspectives. Electronic periodicals were analysed according to their type, purpose, contents, publisher, regularity, language, starting date and place of publication, and other features.

AVIRIS data and neural networks applied to an urban ecosystem

Science.gov (United States)

Ridd, Merrill K.; Ritter, Niles D.; Bryant, Nevin A.; Green, Robert O.

1992-01-01

Urbanization is expanding on every continent. Although urban/industrial areas occupy a small percentage of the total landscape of the earth, their influence extends far beyond their borders, affecting terrestrial, aquatic, and atmospheric systems globally. Yet little has been done to characterize urban ecosystems of their linkages to other systems horizontally or vertically. With remote sensing we now have the tools to characterize, monitor, and model urban landscapes world-wide. However, the remote sensing performed on cities so far has concentrated on land-use patterns as distinct from land-cover or composition. The popular Anderson system is entirely land-use oriented in urban areas. This paper begins with the premise that characterizing the biophysical composition of urban environments is fundamental to understanding urban/industrial ecosystems, and, in turn, supports the modeling of other systems interfacing with urban systems. Further, it is contended that remote sensing is a tool poised to provide the biophysical composition data to characterize urban landscapes.

Simplification of arboreal marsupial assemblages in response to increasing urbanization.

Science.gov (United States)

Isaac, Bronwyn; White, John; Ierodiaconou, Daniel; Cooke, Raylene

2014-01-01

Arboreal marsupials play an essential role in ecosystem function including regulating insect and plant populations, facilitating pollen and seed dispersal and acting as a prey source for higher-order carnivores in Australian environments. Primarily, research has focused on their biology, ecology and response to disturbance in forested and urban environments. We used presence-only species distribution modelling to understand the relationship between occurrences of arboreal marsupials and eco-geographical variables, and to infer habitat suitability across an urban gradient. We used post-proportional analysis to determine whether increasing urbanization affected potential habitat for arboreal marsupials. The key eco-geographical variables that influenced disturbance intolerant species and those with moderate tolerance to disturbance were natural features such as tree cover and proximity to rivers and to riparian vegetation, whereas variables for disturbance tolerant species were anthropogenic-based (e.g., road density) but also included some natural characteristics such as proximity to riparian vegetation, elevation and tree cover. Arboreal marsupial diversity was subject to substantial change along the gradient, with potential habitat for disturbance-tolerant marsupials distributed across the complete gradient and potential habitat for less tolerant species being restricted to the natural portion of the gradient. This resulted in highly-urbanized environments being inhabited by a few generalist arboreal marsupial species. Increasing urbanization therefore leads to functional simplification of arboreal marsupial assemblages, thus impacting on the ecosystem services they provide.

WORLD-WIDE PERSPECTIVES ON IMPROVISATIONAL MUSIC THERAPY FROM THE TIME-A PROJECT

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Gottfried, Tali; Thompson, Grace; Geretsegger, Monika

Background Improvisational music therapy methods have been viewed as a valuable way of working with children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) since the pioneering efforts of Alvin and Nordoff and Robbins (Alvin, 1978; Nordoff & Robbins, 1977). The TIME-A project is a unique international...... collaboration targeted at investigating the effectiveness of improvisational music therapy (IMT) (Geretsegger, Holck, & Gold, 2012; Wigram, 2004) for children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Within this project, an international “consensus model” for IMT has been developed by drawing on the worldwide...... perspectives of the international collaborators. World Wide Perspectives on Improvisational Music Therapy with Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder Clinicians from 4 continents around the world presented examples of clinical work highlighting an aspect of working improvisationally in their local context...

Setting the scene : About planning and a world in change

NARCIS (Netherlands)

de Roo, Gert; Boelens, Luuk; de Roo, Gert; Boelens, Luuk

2016-01-01

Today’s world is predominantly urban. Most urban regions are located in delta regions. And delta regions face severe pressures because of their fragile environments, their delicate relationship with existing ecological habitats and coastal zones, which need protection, and the increasing constraints

Spiders and Worms and Crawlers, Oh My: Searching on the World Wide Web.

Science.gov (United States)

Eagan, Ann; Bender, Laura

Searching on the world wide web can be confusing. A myriad of search engines exist, often with little or no documentation, and many of these search engines work differently from the standard search engines people are accustomed to using. Intended for librarians, this paper defines search engines, directories, spiders, and robots, and covers basics…

Urbanization Increases Pathogen Pressure on Feral and Managed Honey Bees.

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Elsa Youngsteadt

Full Text Available Given the role of infectious disease in global pollinator decline, there is a need to understand factors that shape pathogen susceptibility and transmission in bees. Here we ask how urbanization affects the immune response and pathogen load of feral and managed colonies of honey bees (Apis mellifera Linnaeus, the predominant economically important pollinator worldwide. Using quantitative real-time PCR, we measured expression of 4 immune genes and relative abundance of 10 honey bee pathogens. We also measured worker survival in a laboratory bioassay. We found that pathogen pressure on honey bees increased with urbanization and management, and the probability of worker survival declined 3-fold along our urbanization gradient. The effect of management on pathogens appears to be mediated by immunity, with feral bees expressing immune genes at nearly twice the levels of managed bees following an immune challenge. The effect of urbanization, however, was not linked with immunity; instead, urbanization may favor viability and transmission of some disease agents. Feral colonies, with lower disease burdens and stronger immune responses, may illuminate ways to improve honey bee management. The previously unexamined effects of urbanization on honey-bee disease are concerning, suggesting that urban areas may favor problematic diseases of pollinators.

Urbanization Increases Pathogen Pressure on Feral and Managed Honey Bees.

Science.gov (United States)

Youngsteadt, Elsa; Appler, R Holden; López-Uribe, Margarita M; Tarpy, David R; Frank, Steven D

2015-01-01

Given the role of infectious disease in global pollinator decline, there is a need to understand factors that shape pathogen susceptibility and transmission in bees. Here we ask how urbanization affects the immune response and pathogen load of feral and managed colonies of honey bees (Apis mellifera Linnaeus), the predominant economically important pollinator worldwide. Using quantitative real-time PCR, we measured expression of 4 immune genes and relative abundance of 10 honey bee pathogens. We also measured worker survival in a laboratory bioassay. We found that pathogen pressure on honey bees increased with urbanization and management, and the probability of worker survival declined 3-fold along our urbanization gradient. The effect of management on pathogens appears to be mediated by immunity, with feral bees expressing immune genes at nearly twice the levels of managed bees following an immune challenge. The effect of urbanization, however, was not linked with immunity; instead, urbanization may favor viability and transmission of some disease agents. Feral colonies, with lower disease burdens and stronger immune responses, may illuminate ways to improve honey bee management. The previously unexamined effects of urbanization on honey-bee disease are concerning, suggesting that urban areas may favor problematic diseases of pollinators.

The World Wide Web: A Web Even a Fly Would Love

Science.gov (United States)

Bryson, E.

Ever since my introduction to the World Wide Web (WWW), it's been love at first byte. Searching on the WWW is similar to being able to go to a public library and allow yourself to be transported to any other book or library around the world by looking at a reference or index and clicking your heels together like Dorothy did in "The Wizard of Oz", only the clicking is done with a computer mouse. During this presentation, we will explore the WWW protocols which allow clients and servers to communicate on the Internet. We will demonstrate the ease with which users can navigate the virtual tidal wave of information available with a mere click of a button. In addition, the workshop will discuss the revolutionary aspects of this network information system and how it's impacting our libraries as a primary mechanism for rapid dissemination of knowledge.

Ecosystem Services and Potential Utilization of of Urban Typha angustifolia Wetlands of across Metropolitan Bangkok, Thailand

Science.gov (United States)

Sritrairat, S.

2014-12-01

Over half the world's 7.2 billion population are living in urban habitats. While these cities only occupy 2% of the world's surface, the ecological footprint by these cities combined is far greater than that of the other 98% of the world. Bangkok, Thailand has experienced this rapid urbanization that has resulted in various environmental problems, including pollution, land subsidence, and flooding. Major flooding in 2011 has raised awareness about the importance of restoring ecosystem services in urban space to cope up with the forecasted extreme climatic conditions. Finding localized flooding, carbon and pollution mitigation methods will be important to cities. Upland reforestration has been proposed as a way to decrease these anthropogenic and climate change impacts. However, there is also a large area of wetlands in Bangkok with possibly high ecosystem services that have not been quantified. This study measure above ground and below ground carbon accumulation in wide-spread Typha angustifolia wetlands as an untapped source of ecosystem services that are worth projected. These wetlands are typically viewed as wasteland and are not being protected. We examined carbon and heavy metals (Pb, Zn, Cu) pools in 7 wetlands across Bangkok with various environmental settings--from industrialized zone, to residential area, farms, and protected urban green space. The results indicate recent peat accumulation layer by these wetlands at high rate. Heavy concentration are found near contaminant source such as industries and farms. Combined with their ability to buffer storms and being habitats for wildlife, these wetlands have important values in increasing ecosystem services in urban space and should be considered for protection.

What is the urban in the contemporary world?

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Roberto Luís Monte-Mór

2005-06-01

Full Text Available Central concepts of contemporary life such as politics, civilization, and citizenship derive from the city's form and social organization. The city expresses the socio-spatial division of labor, and Henri Lefèbvre proposes to view its transformation within a continuum from the political city to the urban, whereby it completes its domination over the countryside. The city's transformation into the urban takes place when industry brings production (and the proletariat into that space of power. The city, locus of surplus, power, and the fiesta, a privileged scenario for social reproduction, was subordinated to the industrial logic and underwent a dual process: its centrality imploded, and its outskirts exploded on surrounding areas through the urban fabric, bearing with it the seeds of the polis and civitas. The urban praxis, formerly restricted to the city, re-politicized social space as a whole. In Brazil, the urban has its origins in the military governments' centralizing and integrating policies, following Vargas's expansionism and Kubitschek's developmental interiorization (or occupation of the hinterlands. Today, urban-industrial processes impose themselves over virtually all social space, in contemporary extended urbanization.

E-Learning and Role of World Wide Web in E-Learning

OpenAIRE

Jahankhani, Hossein

2012-01-01

This paper reviews some of the aspects of the E-learning through the World Wide Web. E-revolution as new phenomenon influenced the society by its means and strategies. E-learning is one of the sub-products of E-revolution, towards making more convenient and effective learning. In time Internet become a source of information, people start to learn through the Internet instead of books. It gives the flexibility to remote access at any time. The working people and the students are inspired by th...

The psychological world of adolescence: A comparative evaluation between rural and urban girls

OpenAIRE

Dhoundiyal Manju; Venkatesh Renuka

2009-01-01

A cross-sectional study was conducted to get an insight into the psychological world of adolescence and to study the influence of locality and school-going activity on it. The study group comprised of 240 girls in the age group 12–18 years equally representing urban and rural areas. Using two psychological tests, namely Strengths and Difficulty Questionnaire and Health-Related Quality of Life Inventory, the results revealed that two-third of them were in the problematic and borderline categor...

Performative Urban Architecture

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Thomsen, Bo Stjerne; Jensen, Ole B.

The paper explores how performative urban architecture can enhance community-making and public domain using socio-technical systems and digital technologies to constitute an urban reality. Digital medias developed for the web are now increasingly occupying the urban realm as a tool for navigating...... the physical world e.g. as exemplified by the Google Walk Score and the mobile extension of the Google Maps to the iPhone. At the same time the development in pervasive technologies and situated computing extends the build environment with digital feedback systems that are increasingly embedded and deployed...... using sensor technologies opening up for new access considerations in architecture as well as the ability for a local environment to act as real-time sources of information and facilities. Starting from the NoRA pavilion for the 10th International Architecture Biennale in Venice the paper discusses...

A World Wide Web-based antimicrobial stewardship program improves efficiency, communication, and user satisfaction and reduces cost in a tertiary care pediatric medical center.

Science.gov (United States)

Agwu, Allison L; Lee, Carlton K K; Jain, Sanjay K; Murray, Kara L; Topolski, Jason; Miller, Robert E; Townsend, Timothy; Lehmann, Christoph U

2008-09-15

Antimicrobial stewardship programs aim to reduce inappropriate hospital antimicrobial use. At the Johns Hopkins Children's Medical and Surgical Center (Baltimore, MD), we implemented a World Wide Web-based antimicrobial restriction program to address problems with the existing restriction program. A user survey identified opportunities for improvement of an existing antimicrobial restriction program and resulted in subsequent design, implementation, and evaluation of a World Wide Web-based antimicrobial restriction program at a 175-bed, tertiary care pediatric teaching hospital. The program provided automated clinical decision support, facilitated approval, and enhanced real-time communication among prescribers, pharmacists, and pediatric infectious diseases fellows. Approval status, duration, and rationale; missing request notifications; and expiring approvals were stored in a database that is accessible via a secure Intranet site. Before and after implementation of the program, user satisfaction, reports of missed and/or delayed doses, antimicrobial dispensing times, and cost were evaluated. After implementation of the program, there was a $370,069 reduction in projected annual cost associated with restricted antimicrobial use and an 11.6% reduction in the number of dispensed doses. User satisfaction increased from 22% to 68% and from 13% to 69% among prescribers and pharmacists, respectively. There were 21% and 32% reductions in the number of prescriber reports of missed and delayed doses, respectively, and there was a 37% reduction in the number of pharmacist reports of delayed approvals; measured dispensing times were unchanged (P = .24). In addition, 40% fewer restricted antimicrobial-related phone calls were noted by the pharmacy. The World Wide Web-based antimicrobial approval program led to improved communication, more-efficient antimicrobial administration, increased user satisfaction, and significant cost savings. Integrated tools, such as this World

The Metacity: A Conceptual Framework for Integrating Ecology and Urban Design

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

S. T. A. Pickett

2011-10-01

Full Text Available We introduce the term metacity as a conceptual framework that can be shared by ecologists and designers and applied across the wide variety of urban habitats found around the world. While the term metacity was introduced by UN-HABITAT to designate hyper cities of over twenty million people, for us it is not limited to large urban agglomerations, but rather refers to the proliferation of new forms of urbanization, each with distinct ecological and social attributes. These various urban configurations when combined with new digital sensing, communication and social networking technologies constitute a virtual meta-infrastructure, present in all cities today. This new metacity has the potential to integrate new activist forms of ecological and urban design research and practice in making the transition from sanitary to sustainable city models globally. The city of Baltimore, Maryland will be used both as a site to illustrate these recent urban trends, and also as an example of the integration of ecology and urban design pursued by the two authors over the past seven years [1,2]. Metacity theory is drawn from both an architectural analysis of contemporary forms of urbanism, new forms of digital monitoring and communication technologies, as well as metapopulation and metacommunity theories in ecology. We seek to provide tools and lessons from our experiences for realizing an integrated metacity approach to achieving social sustainability and ecological resilience on an increasingly urbanized planet.

Increasing the availability of urban passenger transport on objective ...

African Journals Online (AJOL)

Increasing the availability of urban passenger transport on objective control data ... mathematical modeling, probability theory and mathematical statistics, expert ... intended for development of methods and means of operative management of ...

Uses and Gratifications of the World Wide Web: From Couch Potato to Web Potato.

Science.gov (United States)

Kaye, Barbara K.

1998-01-01

Investigates uses and gratifications of the World Wide Web and its impact on traditional mass media, especially television. Identifies six Web use motivations: entertainment, social interaction, passing of time, escape, information, and Web site preference. Examines relationships between each use motivation and Web affinity, perceived realism, and…

Simplification of arboreal marsupial assemblages in response to increasing urbanization.

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Bronwyn Isaac

Full Text Available Arboreal marsupials play an essential role in ecosystem function including regulating insect and plant populations, facilitating pollen and seed dispersal and acting as a prey source for higher-order carnivores in Australian environments. Primarily, research has focused on their biology, ecology and response to disturbance in forested and urban environments. We used presence-only species distribution modelling to understand the relationship between occurrences of arboreal marsupials and eco-geographical variables, and to infer habitat suitability across an urban gradient. We used post-proportional analysis to determine whether increasing urbanization affected potential habitat for arboreal marsupials. The key eco-geographical variables that influenced disturbance intolerant species and those with moderate tolerance to disturbance were natural features such as tree cover and proximity to rivers and to riparian vegetation, whereas variables for disturbance tolerant species were anthropogenic-based (e.g., road density but also included some natural characteristics such as proximity to riparian vegetation, elevation and tree cover. Arboreal marsupial diversity was subject to substantial change along the gradient, with potential habitat for disturbance-tolerant marsupials distributed across the complete gradient and potential habitat for less tolerant species being restricted to the natural portion of the gradient. This resulted in highly-urbanized environments being inhabited by a few generalist arboreal marsupial species. Increasing urbanization therefore leads to functional simplification of arboreal marsupial assemblages, thus impacting on the ecosystem services they provide.

Quality of information available on the World Wide Web for patients undergoing thyroidectomy: review.

Science.gov (United States)

Muthukumarasamy, S; Osmani, Z; Sharpe, A; England, R J A

2012-02-01

This study aimed to assess the quality of information available on the World Wide Web for patients undergoing thyroidectomy. The first 50 web-links generated by internet searches using the five most popular search engines and the key word 'thyroidectomy' were evaluated using the Lida website validation instrument (assessing accessibility, usability and reliability) and the Flesch Reading Ease Score. We evaluated 103 of a possible 250 websites. Mean scores (ranges) were: Lida accessibility, 48/63 (27-59); Lida usability, 36/54 (21-50); Lida reliability, 21/51 (4-38); and Flesch Reading Ease, 43.9 (2.6-77.6). The quality of internet health information regarding thyroidectomy is variable. High ranking and popularity are not good indicators of website quality. Overall, none of the websites assessed achieved high Lida scores. In order to prevent the dissemination of inaccurate or commercially motivated information, we recommend independent labelling of medical information available on the World Wide Web.

The new urban world: Challenges and policy

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Kourtit, K.; Nijkamp, P.; Reid, N.

2014-01-01

As the process of urbanization continues unabated new and emerging socio-economic trends will present both new challenges and opportunities for not only the residents of urban areas but also for those who govern them, plan for them, and research them. In this introductory article we provide a

Global Patterns of Material Flows and their Socio-Economic and Environmental Implications: A MFA Study on All Countries World-Wide from 1980 to 2009

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Stefan Giljum

2014-03-01

Full Text Available This paper assesses world-wide patterns of material extraction, trade, consumption and productivity based on a new data set for economy-wide material flows, covering used materials for all countries world-wide between 1980 and 2009. We show that global material extraction has grown by more than 90% over the past 30 years and is reaching almost 70 billion tonnes today. Also, trade volumes in physical terms have increased by a factor of 2.5 over the past 30 years, and in 2009, 9.3 billion tonnes of raw materials and products were traded around the globe. China has turned into the biggest consumer of materials world-wide and together with the US, India, Brazil and Russia, consumes more than 50% of all globally extracted materials. We also show that the per-capita consumption levels are very uneven, with a factor of more than 60 between the country with the lowest and highest consumption in 2009. On average, each human being consumed 10 tonnes of materials in 2009, 2 tonnes more than in 1980. We discuss whether decoupling of economies’ growth from resource use has occurred and analyse interrelations of material use with human development. Finally, we elaborate on key environmental problems related to various material groups.

Social vulnerability and environmental change along urban-rural interfaces

Science.gov (United States)

John Schelhas; Sarah Hitchner; Cassandra Johnson

2012-01-01

As the world becomes increasingly urbanized and interconnected, the distinction between urban and rural areas is diminishing. Creation of new urban–rural interface areas causes immediate changes in local natural and social environments, and theseareas are also susceptible to both short-term and long-term environmental changes. Different groups of people...

Potential for use of environmental factors in urban planning

Science.gov (United States)

Teixeira da Silva, Ricardo; van der Ploeg, Martine; van Delden, Hedwig; Fleskens, Luuk

2016-04-01

Projections for population growth estimate, on top of the current 7.4 billion world population, an increase of 2 billion people for the next 40 years. It is also projected that 66 per cent of the world population in 2050 will live in urban areas. To accommodate the urban population growth cities are changing continuously land cover to urban areas. Such changes are a threat for natural resources and food production systems stability and capability to provide food and other functions. However, little has been done concerning a rational soil management for food production in urban and peri-urban areas. This study focuses on the assessment of soil lost due to urban expansion and discusses the potential loss regarding the quality of the soil for food production and environmental functions. It is relevant to increase the knowledge on the role of soils in peri-urban areas and in the interaction of physical, environmental and social factors. The methodology consists of assessing the soil quality in and around urban and peri-urban areas. It focuses particularly on the physical properties and the environmental factors, for two periods of time and account the potential losses due to urban expansion. This project is on-going, therefore current advances will be presented and will look for a discussion on the contribution of soil quality for decision-making and land management in urban and peri-urban areas.

[World population and development: an important change in perspective].

Science.gov (United States)

Vallin, J

1984-10-24

The International Population Conference in Mexico City was much less controversial than the World Population Conference in Bucharest 10 years previously, in part because the message of Bucharest was widely accepted and in part because of changes that occurred in the demographic and economic situations in the succeeding decade. The UN medium population projection for 1985 has been proved quite accurate; it is not as alarming as the high projection but still represents a doubling of world population in less than 40 years. The control of fertility upon which the medium projection was predicated is well underway. The movement from high to low rates of fertility and mortality began in the 18th century in the industrial countries and lasted about 1 1/2 centuries during which the population surplus was dispersed throughout the world, especially in North and South America. The 2nd phase of movement from high to low rates currently underway in the developing countries has produced a far greater population increase. The proportion of the population in the developed areas of Europe, North America, the USSR, Japan, Australia, and New Zealand will decline from about 1/3 of the 2.5 billion world population of 1950 to 1/4 of the 3.7 billion of 1985, to 1/5 of the 4.8 billion of 2000, and probably 1/7 of the 10 billion when world population stabilizes at the end of the next century. The growth rates of developing countries are not homogeneous; the populations of China and India have roughly doubled in the past 35 years while that of Latin America has multiplied by 2 1/2. The population of Africa more than doubled in 35 years and will almost triple by 2025. The number of countries with over 50 million inhabitants, 9 in 1950, will increase from 19 in 1985 to 32 in 2025. The process of urbanization is almost complete in the industrialized countries, with about 75% of the population urban in 1985, but urban populations will continue to grow rapidly in the developing countries as rural

A comparative study of urban crime between Malaysia and Nigeria

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Zubairu Abubakar Ghani

2017-06-01

Full Text Available Urbanization has created numerous social problems, among which is crime that became a common phenomenon to all urban areas in both developed and developing nations. Recent unimaginable levels of the world urbanization coincides with rise in urban crimes in many parts of the world, as the rate of unemployment had been on the increase and coupled with increased poverty among the urban poor. Nature of crime is not uniform but varies from one geographical region to another. In some areas, property crime is more common while in others, crime on person (violent is prevalent. Crime is not being plagued by a singular factor anywhere it occurred, there are variant factors that influence criminal activities. However, key factors that persuade criminal behaviours of potential offenders includes: unemployment, poverty, bad governance and weaknesses in law enforcement or crime-control agencies. These four key factors were discussed in this paper with hope of bringing out nature of urban crimes that bedevilled properties and people safety for taking management and prevention measures.

Some structural aspects of urbanization in Ethiopia.

Science.gov (United States)

Rafiq, M; Hailemariam, A

1987-07-01

This article studies the emerging patterns of urbanization in Ethiopia. Over the period from 1967-1984, a number of structural changes have occurred which are likely to play a dominant role in the future urban growth in Ethiopia. In spite of its long history of settled population, Ethiopia did not witness sustained growth of urban centers. Ethiopia is 1 of the least urbanized areas in the Third World. A 3rd aspect of urbanization in Ethiopia is the wide range of regional differentials in the level of urbanization. Most of the urban population is concentrated in 2 administrative regions--Shoa and Eritrea. A more balanced urban growth may, inter alia, involve a better spread in terms of higher education, industrialization, provision of health and social services, and the development of communication and commercial infrastructure. Another striking feature of urbanization in Ethiopia is that growth has not been disproportionately concentrated in the largest urban centers. The largest urban centers have not assumed an inordinately higher level of primacy. The basic form of the curve depicting the relationship between the size of a locality and its rank has remained unchanged over the period. The post-revolution land reforms and the new socioeconomic structure emerging from reorganization of the society appear to have a rural-urban migration inhibiting effect. Some of the country's regional differentials may be associated with environmental factors.

Urban Transport and Communication

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Irandu, E.M.

1999-01-01

The population according to the 1989 census was 21,448,774 inhabitants. This figure shows that on average the total population has been increasing by more than 40% every decade since 1948. As a result the widening gap between fertility and mortality, the population is growing at an accelerated rate. The current official population growth rate figure of 3.4% per annum puts the country among the world's most rapidly growing nations. It is projected that by the year 2010, the population will be about 37.4 million. At present the urban centres with a population size of 2,000 people and above constitute about 18.1% of the total population (Kenya, 1994). Rapid economic growth has led to the development of a number of urban centres as centres of commerce, industry and tourism. Consequently, this has led to rural urban drift. This drift to urban areas causes a number of problems which if unresolved will limit the ability of the urban centres to support their population The rapid increase in urban population causes a shortage of facilities to meet the increasing demand in services such as public transport, water supply, sewage and housing (Ramatullah, 1997: 161-168). Urban Transport acts as catalyst to both urban and national development, by facilitating the movements associated with urban and national Development. They provide a means by which goods and services are made available to industry and consumers, creating opportunity for social and economic interaction and employment. Without urban transport, access to health, education and employment would not be possible. Indeed urban transport is what gives life to urban development

A Hierarchical Object-oriented Urban Land Cover Classification Using WorldView-2 Imagery and Airborne LiDAR data

Science.gov (United States)

Wu, M. F.; Sun, Z. C.; Yang, B.; Yu, S. S.

2016-11-01

In order to reduce the “salt and pepper” in pixel-based urban land cover classification and expand the application of fusion of multi-source data in the field of urban remote sensing, WorldView-2 imagery and airborne Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) data were used to improve the classification of urban land cover. An approach of object- oriented hierarchical classification was proposed in our study. The processing of proposed method consisted of two hierarchies. (1) In the first hierarchy, LiDAR Normalized Digital Surface Model (nDSM) image was segmented to objects. The NDVI, Costal Blue and nDSM thresholds were set for extracting building objects. (2) In the second hierarchy, after removing building objects, WorldView-2 fused imagery was obtained by Haze-ratio-based (HR) fusion, and was segmented. A SVM classifier was applied to generate road/parking lot, vegetation and bare soil objects. (3) Trees and grasslands were split based on an nDSM threshold (2.4 meter). The results showed that compared with pixel-based and non-hierarchical object-oriented approach, proposed method provided a better performance of urban land cover classification, the overall accuracy (OA) and overall kappa (OK) improved up to 92.75% and 0.90. Furthermore, proposed method reduced “salt and pepper” in pixel-based classification, improved the extraction accuracy of buildings based on LiDAR nDSM image segmentation, and reduced the confusion between trees and grasslands through setting nDSM threshold.

Urbanization and the more-individuals hypothesis.

Science.gov (United States)

Chiari, Claudia; Dinetti, Marco; Licciardello, Cinzia; Licitra, Gaetano; Pautasso, Marco

2010-03-01

1. Urbanization is a landscape process affecting biodiversity world-wide. Despite many urban-rural studies of bird assemblages, it is still unclear whether more species-rich communities have more individuals, regardless of the level of urbanization. The more-individuals hypothesis assumes that species-rich communities have larger populations, thus reducing the chance of local extinctions. 2. Using newly collated avian distribution data for 1 km(2) grid cells across Florence, Italy, we show a significantly positive relationship between species richness and assemblage abundance for the whole urban area. This richness-abundance relationship persists for the 1 km(2) grid cells with less than 50% of urbanized territory, as well as for the remaining grid cells, with no significant difference in the slope of the relationship. These results support the more-individuals hypothesis as an explanation of patterns in species richness, also in human modified and fragmented habitats. 3. However, the intercept of the species richness-abundance relationship is significantly lower for highly urbanized grid cells. Our study confirms that urban communities have lower species richness but counters the common notion that assemblages in densely urbanized ecosystems have more individuals. In Florence, highly inhabited areas show fewer species and lower assemblage abundance. 4. Urbanized ecosystems are an ongoing large-scale natural experiment which can be used to test ecological theories empirically.

Global distribution and evolvement of urbanization and PM2.5 (1998-2015)

Science.gov (United States)

Yang, Dongyang; Ye, Chao; Wang, Xiaomin; Lu, Debin; Xu, Jianhua; Yang, Haiqing

2018-06-01

PM2.5 concentrations increased and have been one of the major social issues along with rapid urbanization in many regions of the world in recent decades. The development of urbanization differed among regions, PM2.5 pollution also presented discrepant distribution across the world. Thus, this paper aimed to grasp the profile of global distribution of urbanization and PM2.5 and their evolutionary relationships. Based on global data for the proportion of the urban population and PM2.5 concentrations in 1998-2015, this paper investigated the spatial distribution, temporal variation, and evolutionary relationships of global urbanization and PM2.5. The results showed PM2.5 presented an increasing trend along with urbanization during the study period, but there was a variety of evolutionary relationships in different countries and regions. Most countries in East Asia, Southeast Asia, South Asia, and some African countries developed with the rapid increase in both urbanization and PM2.5. Under the impact of other socioeconomic factors, such as industry and economic growth, the development of urbanization increased PM2.5 concentrations in most Asian countries and some African countries, but decreased PM2.5 concentrations in most European and American countries. The findings of this study revealed the spatial distributions of global urbanization and PM2.5 pollution and provided an interpretation on the evolution of urbanization-PM2.5 relationships, which can contribute to urbanization policies making aimed at successful PM2.5 pollution control and abatement.

Atlanta households’ willingness to increase urban forests to mitigate cimate change

Science.gov (United States)

Y. Tran; J. P.  Siry; J. M.  Bowker; N. C.  Poudyal

2017-01-01

Investments in urban forests have been increasing in many US cities. Urban forests have been shownto provide countless ecosystem benefits with many addressing climate change issues, such as seques-tering carbon, reducing air pollution, and decreasing the heat island effect. Individual groups within theAmerican public may not respond to the issue of climate change in...

Immunization, urbanization and slums - a systematic review of factors and interventions.

Science.gov (United States)

Crocker-Buque, Tim; Mindra, Godwin; Duncan, Richard; Mounier-Jack, Sandra

2017-06-08

In 2014, over half (54%) of the world's population lived in urban areas and this proportion will increase to 66% by 2050. This urbanizing trend has been accompanied by an increasing number of people living in urban poor communities and slums. Lower immunization coverage is found in poorer urban dwellers in many contexts. This study aims to identify factors associated with immunization coverage in poor urban areas and slums, and to identify interventions to improve coverage. We conducted a systematic review, searching Medline, Embase, Global Health, CINAHL, Web of Science and The Cochrane Database with broad search terms for studies published between 2000 and 2016. Of 4872 unique articles, 327 abstracts were screened, leading to 63 included studies: 44 considering factors and 20 evaluating interventions (one in both categories) in 16 low or middle-income countries. A wide range of socio-economic characteristics were associated with coverage in different contexts. Recent rural-urban migration had a universally negative effect. Parents commonly reported lack of awareness of immunization importance and difficulty accessing services as reasons for under-immunization of their children. Physical distance to clinics and aspects of service quality also impacted uptake. We found evidence of effectiveness for interventions involving multiple components, especially if they have been designed with community involvement. Outreach programmes were effective where physical distance was identified as a barrier. Some evidence was found for the effective use of SMS (text) messaging services, community-based education programmes and financial incentives, which warrant further evaluation. No interventions were identified that provided services to migrants from rural areas. Different factors affect immunization coverage in different urban poor and slum contexts. Immunization services should be designed in collaboration with slum-dwelling communities, considering the local context

Web-based international knowledge exchange tool on urban resilience and climate proofing cities : climatescan

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Boogaard, Floris; Tipping, Jonathan; Muthanna, T.; Duffy, A.; Bendall, Barry; Kluck, Jeroen

There is a wide diversity of projects undertaken to address urban resillience and climate proofing in the world. International knowledge exchange tools are evaluated with result: stakeholders demand tools that are interactive, open source and provide more detailed information (location, free photo

How Students Evaluate Information and Sources when Searching the World Wide Web for Information

Science.gov (United States)

Walraven, Amber; Brand-Gruwel, Saskia; Boshuizen, Henny P. A.

2009-01-01

The World Wide Web (WWW) has become the biggest information source for students while solving information problems for school projects. Since anyone can post anything on the WWW, information is often unreliable or incomplete, and it is important to evaluate sources and information before using them. Earlier research has shown that students have…

Urban Heat Islands of the World's Major Cities Revealed at Multiple Scales Using Both Station Observations and Complementary Remotely Sensed Data Products

Science.gov (United States)

Nguyen, L. H.; Krehbiel, C.; Henebry, G. M.

2016-12-01

Urban heat islands (UHIs) have long been studied using both ground-based observations of air temperature and remotely sensed data. In the rapidly urbanizing world, cross-comparison between various datasets will allow us to characterize and model UHI effects more generally. Here we analyze UHIs of the world's major cities using station observations from the Global Historical Climate Network (GHCN), surface air temperatures derived from Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometers (AMSRs), and land surface temperatures (LST) estimated from Moderate-resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS). We compute the two measurements of thermal time (accumulated diurnal degree-days or ADDD and nocturnal degree-days or ANDD) and the normalized difference accumulated thermal time index (NDATTI) to characterize urban and rural thermal differences and day-night dynamics over multiple growing seasons. Our preliminary results for 27 major cities and 83 urban-rural groupings in the USA and Canada indicate that daytime urban thermal accumulations from the passive microwave data (AMSRs) were generally lower than in adjacent rural areas, with only 18% of urban-rural groupings showing higher thermal accumulations in cities. In contrast, station observations and MODIS LST showed consistently higher ADDD in cities (82% and 93% for GHCN and MODIS data respectively). UHIs are more pronounced at night, with 55% (AMSR), 93% (GHCN) and 100% (MODIS) of urban-rural groupings showing higher ANDD in cities. Humidity appears to be a common factor driving the day-night thermal dynamics throughout all three datasets (Figure 1). Normalized day-night differences in thermal time metrics were consistently lower (>90% of urban-rural groupings) in urban than rural areas for both air temperature datasets (GHCN and AMSRs). With MODIS LST, only 70% of urban-rural groupings show lower NDATTI in cities. We will present results for the rest of the globe.

Atmospheric Chemistry in a Changing World

Science.gov (United States)

Brune, William H.

The world is changing,and the atmosphere's composition is changing with it. Human activity is responsible for much of this. Global population growth and migration to urban centers, extensive biomass burning, the spread of fertilizer-intensive agribusiness, globalization of business and industry, rising standards of living in the developing world, and increased energy use fuels atmospheric change. If current practices continue, atmospheric increases are likely for the greenhouse gases carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide; and for the chemically active gases nitric oxide, sulfur dioxide,and ammonia. Increases in global tropospheric ozone and aerosols are a distinct possibility.

The third hans cloos lecture. Urban landslides: Socioeconomic impacts and overview of mitigative strategies

Science.gov (United States)

Schuster, R.L.; Highland, L.M.

2007-01-01

As a result of population pressures, hillsides in the world's urban areas are being developed at an accelerating rate. This development increases the risk for urban landslides triggered by rainfall or earthquake activity. To counter this risk, four approaches have been employed by landslide managers and urban planners: (1) restricting development in landslide-prone areas; (2) implementing and enforcing excavation, grading, and construction codes; (3) protecting existing developments by physical mitigation measures and (4) developing and installing monitoring and warning systems. Where they have been utilized, these approaches generally have been effective in reducing the risk due to landslide hazards. In addition to these practices, landslide insurance holds promise as a mitigative measure by reducing the financial impact of landslides on individual property owners. Until recently, however, such insurance has not been widely available and, where it is available, it is so expensive that it has been little used. ?? Springer-Verlag 2006.

Is Demography Destiny? Urban Population Change and Economic Vitality of Future Cities

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Jacques Poot

Full Text Available ABSTRACT: The growth of cities has attracted considerable scholarly attention during the last decade as it is becoming clear that powerful agglomeration forces are reinforcing the role of cities as the engines of economic growth. Close to 4 billion people live in cities, about 55 per cent of the world's population. While population growth rates are declining and the world's population is likely to level off from the middle of the 21st century, probably ending up around 10 billion, further urbanization is expected to continue. Another 3 billion people will become urban citizens this century. At the same time no corner of the world will be sheltered from sweeping demographic changes due to population ageing and increasing migration. Such changes will be amplified in cities. In this paper we combine UN population projections and migration data with our own assumptions to derive projections of age composition and birthplace composition of urban populations by continent. We also briefly address the consequences of these demographic trends for future urban economic vitality. Particular attention is paid to the impacts of demographic changes on urban creativity and innovation. We conclude that, with the right policies in place, such demographic changes enhance rather than impede the future prosperity of the urban world. KEYWORDS: World population projections, urbanization, ageing, migration, ethnic diversity

"To subsidise my income" : urban farming in an East-African town

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Foeken, D.W.J.

2006-01-01

Urban agriculture in sub-Saharan Africa has gained momentum in recent years in terms of research and policy, as well as in practical terms. The paradox of accelerated urbanization and the increase in urban agriculture in developing countries is widely recognized. More than ever before, urban

From theater to the world wide web--a new online era for surgical education.

LENUS (Irish Health Repository)

O'Leary, D Peter

2012-07-01

Traditionally, surgical education has been confined to operating and lecture theaters. Access to the World Wide Web and services, such as YouTube and iTunes has expanded enormously. Each week throughout Ireland, nonconsultant hospital doctors work hard to create presentations for surgical teaching. Once presented, these valuable presentations are often never used again.

Implementation of a World Wide Web server for the oil and gas industry

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Blaylock, R.E.; Martin, F.D.; Emery, R.

1996-01-01

The Gas and Oil Technology Exchange and Communication Highway (GO-TECH) provides an electronic information system for the petroleum community for exchanging ideas, data, and technology. The PC-based system fosters communication and discussion by linking the oil and gas producers with resource centers, government agencies, consulting firms, service companies, national laboratories, academic research groups, and universities throughout the world. The oil and gas producers can access the GO-TECH World Wide Web (WWW) home page through modem links, as well as through the Internet. Future GO-TECH applications will include the establishment of virtual corporations consisting of consortia of small companies, consultants, and service companies linked by electronic information systems. These virtual corporations will have the resources and expertise previously found only in major corporations

Possible world-wide middle miocene iridium anomaly and its relationship to periodicity of impacts and extinctions

Science.gov (United States)

Asaro, F.; Alvarez, W.; Michel, H. V.; Alvarez, L. W.; Anders, Mark H.; Montanari, A.; Kennett, James P.

1988-01-01

In a study of one million years of Middle Miocene sediment deposition in ODP Hole 689B in the Weddell Sea near Antarctica, a single iridium (Ir) anomaly of 44 (+ or - 10) x 10 to the 12th gram Ir per gram rock (ppt) was observed in core 6H, section 3, 50 to 60 cm, after background contributions associated with manganese precipitates and clay are subtracted. The ODP Hole 689B is 10,000 km away from another site, DSDP Hole 588B in the Tasman Sea north of New Zealand, where a single Ir anomaly of 144 + or - 7 ppt over a background of 11 ppt was found in an earlier study of 3 million years of deposition. From chemical measurements the latter deposition was thought to be impact-related. Ir measurements were made, following neutron activation, with the Iridium Coincidence Spectrometer. The age vs depth calibration curves given in the DSDP and ODP preliminary reports indicate the ages of the Iranomalies are identical, 11.7 million years, but the absolute and relative uncertainties in the curves are not known. Based on the newest age data the age estimate is 10 million years. As the Ir was deposited at the two sites at about the same time and they are one quarter of the way around the world from each other it seems likely that the deposition was world-wide. The impact of a large asteroid or comet could produce the wide distribution, and this data is supportive of the impact relationship deduced for Deep Sea Drilling Project (DSDP) 588B from the chemical evidence. If the surface densities of Ir at the two sites are representative of the world-wide average, the diameter of a Cl type asteroid containing the necessary Ir would be 3 + or - 1 km, which is large enough to cause world-wide darkness and hence extinctions although the latter point is disputed.

Increased body size along urbanization gradients at both community and intraspecific level in macro-moths.

Science.gov (United States)

Merckx, Thomas; Kaiser, Aurélien; Van Dyck, Hans

2018-05-23

Urbanization involves a cocktail of human-induced rapid environmental changes and is forecasted to gain further importance. Urban-heat-island effects result in increased metabolic costs expected to drive shifts towards smaller body sizes. However, urban environments are also characterized by strong habitat fragmentation, often selecting for dispersal phenotypes. Here, we investigate to what extent, and at which spatial scale(s), urbanization drives body size shifts in macro-moths-an insect group characterized by positive size-dispersal links-at both the community and intraspecific level. Using light and bait trapping as part of a replicated, spatially nested sampling design, we show that despite the observed urban warming of their woodland habitat, macro-moth communities display considerable increases in community-weighted mean body size because of stronger filtering against small species along urbanization gradients. Urbanization drives intraspecific shifts towards increased body size too, at least for a third of species analysed. These results indicate that urbanization drives shifts towards larger, and hence, more mobile species and individuals in order to mitigate low connectivity of ecological resources in urban settings. Macro-moths are a key group within terrestrial ecosystems, and since body size is central to species interactions, such urbanization-driven phenotypic change may impact urban ecosystem functioning, especially in terms of nocturnal pollination and food web dynamics. Although we show that urbanization's size-biased filtering happens simultaneously and coherently at both the inter- and intraspecific level, we demonstrate that the impact at the community level is most pronounced at the 800 m radius scale, whereas species-specific size increases happen at local and landscape scales (50-3,200 m radius), depending on the species. Hence, measures-such as creating and improving urban green infrastructure-to mitigate the effects of urbanization on

Urban Stream Burial Increases Watershed-Scale Nitrate Export.

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Jake J Beaulieu

Full Text Available Nitrogen (N uptake in streams is an important ecosystem service that reduces nutrient loading to downstream ecosystems. Here we synthesize studies that investigated the effects of urban stream burial on N-uptake in two metropolitan areas and use simulation modeling to scale our measurements to the broader watershed scale. We report that nitrate travels on average 18 times farther downstream in buried than in open streams before being removed from the water column, indicating that burial substantially reduces N uptake in streams. Simulation modeling suggests that as burial expands throughout a river network, N uptake rates increase in the remaining open reaches which somewhat offsets reduced N uptake in buried reaches. This is particularly true at low levels of stream burial. At higher levels of stream burial, however, open reaches become rare and cumulative N uptake across all open reaches in the watershed rapidly declines. As a result, watershed-scale N export increases slowly at low levels of stream burial, after which increases in export become more pronounced. Stream burial in the lower, more urbanized portions of the watershed had a greater effect on N export than an equivalent amount of stream burial in the upper watershed. We suggest that stream daylighting (i.e., uncovering buried streams can increase watershed-scale N retention.

Securing the anonymity of content providers in the World Wide Web

Science.gov (United States)

Demuth, Thomas; Rieke, Andreas

1999-04-01

Nowadays the World Wide Web (WWW) is an established service used by people all over the world. Most of them do not recognize the fact that they reveal plenty of information about themselves or their affiliation and computer equipment to the providers of web pages they connect to. As a result, a lot of services offer users to access web pages unrecognized or without risk of being backtracked, respectively. This kind of anonymity is called user or client anonymity. But on the other hand, an equivalent protection for content providers does not exist, although this feature is desirable for many situations in which the identity of a publisher or content provider shall be hidden. We call this property server anonymity. We will introduce the first system with the primary target to offer anonymity for providers of information in the WWW. Beside this property, it provides also client anonymity. Based on David Chaum's idea of mixes and in relation to the context of the WWW, we explain the term 'server anonymity' motivating the system JANUS which offers both client and server anonymity.

School-wide implementation of the elements of effective classroom instruction: Lessons from a high-performing, high-poverty urban school

Science.gov (United States)

Dyson, Hilarie

2008-10-01

The purpose of the study was to identify structures and systems implemented in a high-performing high-poverty urban school to promote high academic achievement among students of color. The researcher used a sociocultural theoretical framework to examine the influence of culture on the structures and systems that increased performance by African American and Hispanic students. Four research questions guided the study: (1) What are the trends and patterns of student performance among students of color? (2) What are the organizational structures and systems that are perceived to contribute to high student performance in high-poverty urban schools with high concentrations of students of color? (3) How are the organizational structures and systems implemented to support school-wide effective classroom instruction that promotes student learning? (4) How is the construct of race reflected in the school's structures and systems? Qualitative data were collected through interviews, observations, and artifact collection. A single case study method was employed and collected data were triangulated to capture and explore the rich details of the study. The study focused on a high-performing high-poverty urban elementary school located in southern California. The school population consisted of 99% students of color and 93% were economically disadvantaged. The school was selected for making significant and consistent growth in Academic Performance Index and Adequate Yearly Progress over a 3-year period. The school-wide structures and systems studied were (a) leadership, (b) school climate and culture, (c) standards-based instruction, (d) data-driven decision making, and (e) professional development. Four common themes emerged from the findings: (a) instructional leadership that focused on teaching and learning; (b) high expectations for all students; (c) school-wide focus on student achievement using standards, data, and culturally responsive teaching; and (d) positive

World wide web implementation of the Langley technical report server

Science.gov (United States)

Nelson, Michael L.; Gottlich, Gretchen L.; Bianco, David J.

1994-01-01

On January 14, 1993, NASA Langley Research Center (LaRC) made approximately 130 formal, 'unclassified, unlimited' technical reports available via the anonymous FTP Langley Technical Report Server (LTRS). LaRC was the first organization to provide a significant number of aerospace technical reports for open electronic dissemination. LTRS has been successful in its first 18 months of operation, with over 11,000 reports distributed and has helped lay the foundation for electronic document distribution for NASA. The availability of World Wide Web (WWW) technology has revolutionized the Internet-based information community. This paper describes the transition of LTRS from a centralized FTP site to a distributed data model using the WWW, and suggests how the general model for LTRS can be applied to other similar systems.

Area-wide management of Aedes albopictus. Part 2: gauging the efficacy of traditional integrated pest control measures against urban container mosquitoes.

Science.gov (United States)

Fonseca, Dina M; Unlu, Isik; Crepeau, Taryn; Farajollahi, Ary; Healy, Sean P; Bartlett-Healy, Kristen; Strickman, Daniel; Gaugler, Randy; Hamilton, George; Kline, Daniel; Clark, Gary G

2013-12-01

Aedes (Stegomyia) albopictus (Skuse) is an important disease vector and biting nuisance. During the 2009 active season, six ∼1000-parcel sites were studied, three in urban and three in suburban areas of New Jersey, United States, to examine the efficacy of standard integrated urban mosquito control strategies applied area wide. Active source reduction, larviciding, adulticiding and public education (source reduction through education) were implemented in one site in each county, an education-only approach was developed in a second site and a third site was used as an untreated experimental control. Populations were surveyed weekly with BG-Sentinel traps and ovitraps. A substantial reduction in Ae. albopictus populations was achieved in urban sites, but only modest reductions in suburban sites. Education alone achieved significant reductions in urban adult Ae. albopictus. Egg catches echoed adult catches only in suburban sites. There are significant socioeconomic and climatic differences between urban and suburban sites that impact upon Ae. albopictus populations and the efficacy of the control methods tested. An integrated pest management approach can affect abundances, but labor-intensive, costly source reduction was not enough to maintain Ae. albopictus counts below a nuisance threshold. Nighttime adult population suppression using truck-mounted adulticides can be effective. Area-wide cost-effective strategies are necessary. Published 2013. This article is a U.S. Government work and is in the public domain in the USA.

Navigational Structure on the World Wide Web: Usability Concerns, User Preferences, and "Browsing Behavior."

Science.gov (United States)

Frick, Theodore; Monson, John A.; Xaver, Richard F.; Kilic, Gulsen; Conley, Aaron T.; Wamey, Beatrice

There are several approaches a World Wide Web site designer considers in developing a menu structure. One consideration is the content of the menus (what choices are available to the user). Another consideration is the physical layout of the menu structure. The physical layout of a menu may be described as being one of at least three different…

A World Wide Web Human Dimensions Framework and Database for Wildlife and Forest Planning

Science.gov (United States)

Michael A. Tarrant; Alan D. Bright; H. Ken Cordell

1999-01-01

The paper describes a human dimensions framework(HDF) for application in wildlife and forest planning. The HDF is delivered via the world wide web and retrieves data on-line from the Social, Economic, Environmental, Leisure, and Attitudes (SEELA) database. The proposed HDF is guided by ten fundamental HD principles, and is applied to wildlife and forest planning using...

Role of Librarian in Internet and World Wide Web Environment

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

K. Nageswara Rao

2001-01-01

Full Text Available The transition of traditional library collections to digital or virtual collections presented the librarian with new opportunities. The Internet, Web en-vironment and associated sophisticated tools have given the librarian a new dynamic role to play and serve the new information based society in bet-ter ways than hitherto. Because of the powerful features of Web i.e. distributed, heterogeneous, collaborative, multimedia, multi-protocol, hyperme-dia-oriented architecture, World Wide Web has revolutionized the way people access information, and has opened up new possibilities in areas such as digital libraries, virtual libraries, scientific information retrieval and dissemination. Not only the world is becoming interconnected, but also the use of Internet and Web has changed the fundamental roles, paradigms, and organizational culture of libraries and librarians as well. The article describes the limitless scope of Internet and Web, the existence of the librarian in the changing environment, parallelism between information sci-ence and information technology, librarians and intelligent agents, working of intelligent agents, strengths, weaknesses, threats and opportunities in-volved in the relationship between librarians and the Web. The role of librarian in Internet and Web environment especially as intermediary, facilita-tor, end-user trainer, Web site builder, researcher, interface designer, knowledge manager and sifter of information resources is also described.

An Image Retrieval and Processing Expert System for the World Wide Web

Science.gov (United States)

Rodriguez, Ricardo; Rondon, Angelica; Bruno, Maria I.; Vasquez, Ramon

1998-01-01

This paper presents a system that is being developed in the Laboratory of Applied Remote Sensing and Image Processing at the University of P.R. at Mayaguez. It describes the components that constitute its architecture. The main elements are: a Data Warehouse, an Image Processing Engine, and an Expert System. Together, they provide a complete solution to researchers from different fields that make use of images in their investigations. Also, since it is available to the World Wide Web, it provides remote access and processing of images.

Streets and stages: urban renewal and the arts after World War II.

Science.gov (United States)

Foulkes, Julia L

2010-01-01

Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts in Manhattan and the revitalization of the Brooklyn Academy of Music in Brooklyn offer insights into the intersection of arts and urbanization after World War II. This intra-city comparison shows the aggrandizing pull of the international arena in the shaping of Lincoln Center and the arts it featured in contrast to the local focus and debate that transformed how BAM fit into its Brooklyn neighborhood. The performing arts, bound as they are to a moment fused in space and time, reveal the making of place within grandiose formal buildings as well as outside on the streets that surround them—and it is, perhaps, that tensile connection between stages and streets that informs the relevancy of both the institution and the arts it features. At a time when the suburbs pulled more and more people, the arts provided a counterforce in cities, as magnet and stimulus. The arts were used as compensation for the demolition and re-building of a neighborhood in urban renewal, but they also exposed the more complex social dynamics that underpinned the transformation of the mid-20th century American city from a segregated to a multi-faceted place.

The World Wide Web as a Medium of Instruction: What Works and What Doesn't

Science.gov (United States)

McCarthy, Marianne; Grabowski, Barbara; Hernandez, Angel; Koszalka, Tiffany; Duke, Lee

1997-01-01

A conference was held on March 18-20, 1997 to investigate the lessons learned by the Aeronautics Cooperative Agreement Projects with regard to the most effective strategies for developing instruction for the World Wide Web. The conference was a collaboration among the NASA Aeronautics and Space Transportation Technology Centers (Ames, Dryden, Langley, and Lewis), NASA Headquarters, the University of Idaho and The Pennsylvania State University. The conference consisted of presentations by the Aeronautics Cooperative Agreement Teams, the University of Idaho, and working sessions in which the participants addressed teacher training and support, technology, evaluation and pedagogy. The conference was also undertaken as part of the Dryden Learning Technologies Project which is a collaboration between the Dryden Education Office and The Pennsylvania State University. The DFRC Learning Technology Project goals relevant to the conference are as follows: conducting an analysis of current teacher needs, classroom infrastructure and exemplary instructional World Wide Web sites, and developing models for Web-enhanced learning environments that optimize teaching practices and student learning.

Urban residents' perceptions of birds in the neighborhood: Biodiversity, cultural ecosystem services, and disservices

Science.gov (United States)

J. Amy Belaire; Lynne M. Westphal; Christopher J. Whelan; Emily S. Minor

2015-01-01

As our world becomes increasingly urbanized, cities are often where we come into contact with the natural world—not just in parks and urban nature preserves, but in more familiar places like residential yards. We conducted bird surveys and social surveys in Chicago-area residential landscapes near forest preserves (primarily in middle- and high-income areas)...

Environmental Health in Relation to Urban Planning and Human Physical Activity

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Oliver, L.H.L.; Siti Nur Afiqah Mohamed Musthafa; Dasimah Omar

2015-01-01

The world is changing everyday in a fast pace that makes majority of the urbanized areas becoming more congested and polluted by the development. The planning of the urban world has brought about a great impact towards the environment and health. With the large number of human population, urban areas will have various kinds of activities that contributed to the higher rate of pollutants compared to areas with less development. In a car oriented urban development pattern, majority of the population will choose automobiles as their transportation modes rather than walking or cycling. Due to that, the air emission in urban areas will increase rapidly, and reduce the physical activity. Air pollutants contribute to various health problems, especially respiratory infection. Besides, lacking of physical activities also increase the health risk. However, there is limited study on the relationship between urban land use setting and health in developing country. Thus, a study had been carried out to establish the relationship between urban setting and human health. It involved air quality data collection, observation on land use setting, and questionnaire survey on human health and the lifestyle. Findings from the relationship analysis had been discussed with suitable recommendation and conclusion. (author)

Urbanization Process and Variation of Energy Budget of Land Surfaces

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Ciro Gardi

2007-06-01

Full Text Available Urban areas are increasing at a rate much higher than human population growth in many part of the world; actually more than 73 towns in the world are larger than 1000 km2. The European Environmental Agency indicates an urban area average growth rate, over the last 20 years, of 20%. The urbanization process, and the consequent soil sealing, determines not only the losses of the ecological functions of the soil, but also a variation of the energy budget of land surfaces, that affect the microclimatic conditions (heat islands. The alteration of the energy budget are determined by the variations of albedo and roughness of surfaces, but especially by the net losses of evapotranspirating areas. In the present research we have assessed the variation of Parma territory energy budget, induced by the change in land use over the last 122 years. The urban area increase between 1881 and 2003 was 535%.

Electropollution in our urban environment

OpenAIRE

Alina Cobzaru

2015-01-01

The paper is a descriptive study based on the scientific results coming out from all over the world in the last years (2007-2013), concerning an increasing level of electropollution in our urban envi-ronment as a dangerous health threat mostly in the big and crowded urban places. Electropollution is today subject of serious health damages. The paper mention results of several significant studies including the BioInitiative Report 2012 prepared by 29 authors from ten countries, and covers a se...

Evidence-based intervention in physical activity: lessons from around the world.

Science.gov (United States)

Heath, Gregory W; Parra, Diana C; Sarmiento, Olga L; Andersen, Lars Bo; Owen, Neville; Goenka, Shifalika; Montes, Felipe; Brownson, Ross C

2012-07-21

Promotion of physical activity is a priority for health agencies. We searched for reviews of physical activity interventions, published between 2000 and 2011, and identified effective, promising, or emerging interventions from around the world. The informational approaches of community-wide and mass media campaigns, and short physical activity messages targeting key community sites are recommended. Behavioural and social approaches are effective, introducing social support for physical activity within communities and worksites, and school-based strategies that encompass physical education, classroom activities, after-school sports, and active transport. Recommended environmental and policy approaches include creation and improvement of access to places for physical activity with informational outreach activities, community-scale and street-scale urban design and land use, active transport policy and practices, and community-wide policies and planning. Thus, many approaches lead to acceptable increases in physical activity among people of various ages, and from different social groups, countries, and communities.

Plundering the poor: the role of the World Bank in the Third World.

Science.gov (United States)

Feder, E

1983-01-01

The World Bank, the most important so-called development assistance agency, annually dispenses billions of dollars to Third World governments, ostensibly to "develop" their economics through a variety of loan projects. But even a superficial analysis reveals that the Bank is the perfect mechanism to help (i.e., subsidize) the large transnational corporations from the industrial countries to expand their industrial, commercial, and financial activities in the Third World, at the expense of the latter and particularly at the expense of the rural and urban proletariat. This article discusses Cheryl Payer's recent book, The World Bank: A Critical Analysis, in which she analyzes the Bank's role in the Third World and sets forth the major reasons why poverty, hunger, and malnutrition, as well as unemployment, and all the adverse social phenomena associated with them, are on the increase.

Recent world-wide advances in irradiation of food and its identification

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Uchiyama, Sadao; Saito, Yukio

1991-01-01

Irradiation (ionizing radiation) of various foods is growing in popularity internationally. For example, it is used as a substitute for the use of post-harvest pesticides. This trend has served to intensify research on the identification of irradiated foods. The first Research Co-ordinated Meeting on Analytical Detection Method for Irradiated Foods was held in Poland under the sponsorship of FAO/IAEA in 1990 in order to solve problems related to the international trade of irradiated foods and to ensure their correct labelling in the market. In this review, the world-wide advances in the irradiation of food and its identification are introduced and discussed. (author)

World-wide sexual compatibility in Medfly, Ceratitis capitata (Wied.), and its implications for SIT

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Cayol, J.P.

2000-01-01

The concept of the sterile insect technique, described by Knipling (1953), to control and/or eradicate insect pest populations has been applied to many Lepidoptera and Diptera species. Among Diptera species, the Mediterranean fruit fly, Ceratitis capitata (Wied.) (Diptera: Tephritidae), is often referred to as the most important agricultural pest in the world (Liquido et al. 1990) and it is also a major target of SIT action programmes world-wide. The use of SIT requires that mass rearing facilities be developed to produce sterile insects for use in national programmes, with mass reared strains being established by colonising wild insects collected from the SIT target area. More recently, with the increasing demand for sterile Medflies and the limited number of production facilities, some rearing facilities began to export Medflies to other national/regional programmes. Eight facilities have now reached production levels which allow them to export sterile insects (Fisher and Caceres 199) on a regional or inter-regional basis. When this procedure is used, the flies released have to compete with wild flies of a different geographic origin. The increasing use of Medfly genetic sexing strains (GSS) has also resulted in the same strain being used in different countries. To date, five rearing facilities in the world produce GSS (Fisher and Caceres 1999). Since GSS are assembled from specific components, it is impossible to 'colonise' them from each country where sterile GSS flies are needed. The GSS are often backcrossed with insects from the target population to increase the genetic variability (Franz et al. 1996), although in some cases this presents problems (Franz, personal communication). In practice, a single wild population is used as a basis for the synthesis of the GSS. Consequently, the same GSS based on the same wild genetic material may be used in various countries/continents and the question was raised concerning the sexual compatibility of these strains with

Assessing increasing susceptibility to wildfire at the wildland-urban fringe in the western United States

Science.gov (United States)

Kinoshita, A. M.; Hogue, T. S.

2013-05-01

Much of the western U.S. is increasingly susceptible to wildfire activity due to drier conditions, elevated fuel loads, and expanding urbanization. As population increases, development pushes the urban boundary further into wildlands, creating more potential for human interaction at the wildland-urban interface (WUI), primarily from human ignitions and fire suppression policies. The immediate impacts of wildfires include vulnerability to debris flows, flooding, and impaired water quality. Fires also alter longer-term hydrological and ecosystem behavior. The current study utilizes geospatial datasets to investigate historical wildfire size and frequency relative to the WUI for a range of cities across western North America. California, the most populous state in the U.S., has an extensive fire history. The decennial population and acres burned for four major counties (Los Angeles, San Bernardino, San Diego, and Shasta) in California show that increasing wildfire size and frequency follow urbanization trends, with high correlation between the last decade of burned area, urban-fringe proximity, and increasing population. Ultimately, results will provide information on urban fringe communities that are most vulnerable to the risks associated with wildfire and post-fire impacts. In light of evolving land use policies (i.e. forest management and treatment, development at the urban-fringe) and climate change, it is critical to advance our knowledge of the implications that these conditions pose to urban centers, communicate risks to the public, and ultimately provide guidance for wildfire management.

Statistical Analysis with Webstat, a Java applet for the World Wide Web

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Webster West

1997-09-01

Full Text Available The Java programming language has added a new tool for delivering computing applications over the World Wide Web (WWW. WebStat is a new computing environment for basic statistical analysis which is delivered in the form of a Java applet. Anyone with WWW access and a Java capable browser can access this new analysis environment. Along with an overall introduction of the environment, the main features of this package are illustrated, and the prospect of using basic WebStat components for more advanced applications is discussed.

World wide web and virtual reality in developing and using environmental models

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Guariso, G.

2001-01-01

The application of World wide web as an active component of environmental decision support system is still largely unexplored. Environmental problems are distributed in nature, both from the physical and from the social point of view; the Web is thus an ideal tool to share concepts and decisions among multiple interested parties. Also Virtual Reality (VR) that has not find, up to know, a large application in the development and teaching of environmental models. The paper shows some recent applications that highlight the potential of these tools [it

The Culture-Transmission Motive in Immigrants: A World-Wide Internet Survey.

Science.gov (United States)

Mchitarjan, Irina; Reisenzein, Rainer

2015-01-01

A world-wide internet survey was conducted to test central assumptions of a recent theory of cultural transmission in minorities proposed by the authors. 844 1st to 2nd generation immigrants from a wide variety of countries recruited on a microjob platform completed a questionnaire designed to test eight hypotheses derived from the theory. Support was obtained for all hypotheses. In particular, evidence was obtained for the continued presence, in the immigrants, of the culture-transmission motive postulated by the theory: the desire to maintain the culture of origin and transmit it to the next generation. Support was also obtained for the hypothesized anchoring of the culture-transmission motive in more basic motives fulfilled by cultural groups, the relative intra- and intergenerational stability of the culture-transmission motive, and its motivating effects for action tendencies and desires that support cultural transmission under the difficult conditions of migration. Furthermore, the findings suggest that the assumption that people have a culture-transmission motive belongs to the folk psychology of sociocultural groups, and that immigrants regard the fulfillment of this desire as a moral right.

High Spatial Resolution WorldView-2 Imagery for Mapping NDVI and Its Relationship to Temporal Urban Landscape Evapotranspiration Factors

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Hamideh Nouri

2014-01-01

Full Text Available Evapotranspiration estimation has benefitted from recent advances in remote sensing and GIS techniques particularly in agricultural applications rather than urban environments. This paper explores the relationship between urban vegetation evapotranspiration (ET and vegetation indices derived from newly-developed high spatial resolution WorldView-2 imagery. The study site was Veale Gardens in Adelaide, Australia. Image processing was applied on five images captured from February 2012 to February 2013 using ERDAS Imagine. From 64 possible two band combinations of WorldView-2, the most reliable one (with the maximum median differences was selected. Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI values were derived for each category of landscape cover, namely trees, shrubs, turf grasses, impervious pavements, and water bodies. Urban landscape evapotranspiration rates for Veale Gardens were estimated through field monitoring using observational-based landscape coefficients. The relationships between remotely sensed NDVIs for the entire Veale Gardens and for individual NDVIs of different vegetation covers were compared with field measured urban landscape evapotranspiration rates. The water stress conditions experienced in January 2013 decreased the correlation between ET and NDVI with the highest relationship of ET-Landscape NDVI (Landscape Normalized Difference Vegetation Index for shrubs (r2 = 0.66 and trees (r2 = 0.63. However, when the January data was excluded, there was a significant correlation between ET and NDVI. The highest correlation for ET-Landscape NDVI was found for the entire Veale Gardens regardless of vegetation type (r2 = 0.95, p > 0.05 and the lowest one was for turf (r2 = 0.88, p > 0.05. In support of the feasibility of ET estimation by WV2 over a longer period, an algorithm recently developed that estimates evapotranspiration rates based on the Enhanced Vegetation Index (EVI from MODIS was employed. The results revealed a

High spatial resolution WorldView-2 imagery for mapping NDVI and its relationship to temporal urban landscape evapotranspiration factors

Science.gov (United States)

Nouri, Hamideh; Beecham, Simon; Anderson, Sharolyn; Nagler, Pamela

2014-01-01

Evapotranspiration estimation has benefitted from recent advances in remote sensing and GIS techniques particularly in agricultural applications rather than urban environments. This paper explores the relationship between urban vegetation evapotranspiration (ET) and vegetation indices derived from newly-developed high spatial resolution WorldView-2 imagery. The study site was Veale Gardens in Adelaide, Australia. Image processing was applied on five images captured from February 2012 to February 2013 using ERDAS Imagine. From 64 possible two band combinations of WorldView-2, the most reliable one (with the maximum median differences) was selected. Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) values were derived for each category of landscape cover, namely trees, shrubs, turf grasses, impervious pavements, and water bodies. Urban landscape evapotranspiration rates for Veale Gardens were estimated through field monitoring using observational-based landscape coefficients. The relationships between remotely sensed NDVIs for the entire Veale Gardens and for individual NDVIs of different vegetation covers were compared with field measured urban landscape evapotranspiration rates. The water stress conditions experienced in January 2013 decreased the correlation between ET and NDVI with the highest relationship of ET-Landscape NDVI (Landscape Normalized Difference Vegetation Index) for shrubs (r2 = 0.66) and trees (r2 = 0.63). However, when the January data was excluded, there was a significant correlation between ET and NDVI. The highest correlation for ET-Landscape NDVI was found for the entire Veale Gardens regardless of vegetation type (r2 = 0.95, p > 0.05) and the lowest one was for turf (r2 = 0.88, p > 0.05). In support of the feasibility of ET estimation by WV2 over a longer period, an algorithm recently developed that estimates evapotranspiration rates based on the Enhanced Vegetation Index (EVI) from MODIS was employed. The results revealed a significant positive

Geological problems in radioactive waste isolation - A world wide review

Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

Witherspoon, P.A. [Lawrence Berkeley Lab., CA (United States)

1991-06-01

The problem of isolating radioactive wastes from the biosphere presents specialists in the earth sciences with some of the most complicated problems they have ever encountered. This is especially true for high-level waste (HLW), which must be isolated in the underground and away from the biosphere for thousands of years. The most widely accepted method of doing this is to seal the radioactive materials in metal canisters that are enclosed by a protective sheath and placed underground in a repository that has been carefully constructed in an appropriate rock formation. Much new technology is being developed to solve the problems that have been raised, and there is a continuing need to publish the results of new developments for the benefit of all concerned. Table 1 presents a summary of the various formations under investigation according to the reports submitted for this world wide review. It can be seen that in those countries that are searching for repository sites, granitic and metamorphic rocks are the prevalent rock type under investigation. Six countries have developed underground research facilities that are currently in use. All of these investigations are in saturated systems below the water table, except the United States project, which is in the unsaturated zone of a fractured tuff.

Urban Green Space and Its Impact on Human Health

Science.gov (United States)

Michelle Kondo; Jaime Fluehr; Thomas McKeon; Charles. Branas

2018-01-01

Background: Over half of the world's population now lives in urban areas, and this proportion is expected to increase. While there have been numerous reviews of empirical studies on the link between nature and human health, very few have focused on the urban context, and most have examined almost exclusively cross-sectional research. This...

Negotiating Urban Citizenship: The Urban Poor, Brokers and The State in Mexico City and Khartoum

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Denissen, I.N.M.

2014-01-01

This study is about citizenship and informality in megacities. The percentage of the world population living in cities is expected to further increase in the coming decades. Urbanisation is characterised by informality in large parts of the globe. Despite urban dwellers formally having the right to

Urban environmental geochemistry of trace metals

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Wong, Coby S.C.; Li Xiangdong; Thornton, Iain

2006-01-01

As the world's urban population continues to grow, it becomes increasingly imperative to understand the dynamic interactions between human activities and the urban environment. The development of urban environmental geochemistry has yielded a significant volume of scientific information about geochemical phenomena found uniquely in the urban environment, such as the distribution, dispersion, and geochemical characteristics of some toxic and potentially toxic trace metals. The aim of this paper is to provide an overview of the development of urban environmental geochemistry as a field of scientific study and highlight major transitions during the course of its development from its establishment to the major scientific interests in the field today. An extensive literature review is also conducted of trace metal contamination of the urban terrestrial environment, in particular of urban soils, in which the uniqueness of the urban environment and its influences on trace metal contamination are elaborated. Potential areas of future development in urban environmental geochemistry are identified and discussed. - Urban environmental geochemistry as a scientific discipline provides valuable information on trace metal contamination of the urban environment and its associated health effects

[Problems resulting from the absorption of small towns into urban areas in major Third World cities].

Science.gov (United States)

Mckee, D L

1985-01-01

The tendency toward hypertrophy of large metropolitan areas in the Third World has been a subject of concern to economists and other social scientists for some time. Inability to absorb vast waves of migrants into the organized labor force or to provide adequate infrastructure and services are serious problems in many growing cities of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. A different phenomenon created by perpetual urban expansion has been relatively neglected: the problems caused when preexisting urban areas are absorbed into the metropolis. The tendency of squatter settlements to constrict normal urban growth and expansion and to impede rational provision of services has been recognized, but the absorption of small cities does not necessarily produce identical problems. Small cities absorbed into a metropolis lose their identity in the successive waves of suburban proliferation. Los Angeles in the US may be considered the prototype of the phenomenon in which multiple preexisting urban zones are absorbed into the same metropolis without formation of any visible center of gravity. In some cases, small cities may be completely engulfed by the encroaching metropolis, if transit routes or availability of land makes them interesting to developers. The livelihood of residents may be threatened if they are no longer able to cultivate gardens or raise small animals. Local services may deteriorate. The youngest and most able residents are likely to abandon such places for the greater opportunities of the city, leaving the aged and less qualified to fend for themselves. Jobs may disappear and traditional commercial relations may be destroyed without being replaced. The future wellbeing of residents depends on their ability to maneuver in the new metropolitan environment, but many will be unable to adjust for lack of training, the weight of immovable property, or diverse personal considerations. Planning could help to reduce the problems that occasional survival of some small

Recent invasion of world-wide wheat growing areas by two aggressive strains of Puccinia striiformis

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Walter, Stephanie; Ali, Sajid; Justesen, Annemarie Fejer

2012-01-01

The ever more frequent and severe large-scale epidemics of wheat yellow/stripe rust disease (caused by Puccinia striiformis) pose a severe threat to the world’s wheat production (Hovmøller et al. 2010). The onset of a new series of world-wide wheat yellow rust epidemics in 2000 has been linked...

The transformation in the urban ecosystems

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Camargo Ponce de Leon, German

2002-01-01

In the last century cities has grown until representing about 80% of world population. Urban environment has grown more in population than in extension. Today more people than ever lives and construct urban environments, the question is not about people and human events that have concentrated in the frontiers of a few settlements, but about urban relationships from and beyond the cities. Urban determination of all fluxes and interchanges has spread over the earth, covered and controlled today by a vast urban-regional networks. In which way cities grows from the social nature and the ecological human behavior, as a need for evolution, is a relevant question in the analysis about the increasing way in which earth and the human habitat are transformed. Is this question that is addressed in some detail in this paper

Diverse urban plantings managed with sufficient resource availability can increase plant productivity and arthropod diversity

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Jonathon eMuller

2014-10-01

Full Text Available Buildings structures and surfaces are explicitly being used to grow plants, and these ‘urban plantings’ are typically designed for aesthetic value. Urban plantings also have the potential to contribute significant ‘ecological values’ by increasing urban habitat for animals such as arthropods and by increasing plant productivity. In this study, we evaluated how the provision of these additional ecological values is affected by plant species richness; the availability of essential resources for plants, such as water, light, space; and soil characteristics. We sampled 33 plantings located on the exterior of three buildings in the urban centre of Brisbane, Australia (subtropical climatic region over two, six week sampling periods characterised by different temperature and rainfall conditions. Plant cover was estimated as a surrogate for productivity as destructive sampling of biomass was not possible. We measured weekly light levels (photosynthetically active radiation, plant CO2 assimilation, soil CO2 efflux, and arthropod diversity.Differences in plant cover were best explained by a three-way interaction of plant species richness, management water regime and sampling period. As the richness of plant species increased in a planter, productivity and total arthropod richness also increased significantly - likely due to greater habitat heterogeneity and quality. Overall we found urban plantings can provide additional ecological values if essential resources are maintained within a planter such as water, light and soil temperature. Diverse urban plantings that are managed with these principles in mind can contribute to the attraction of diverse arthropod communities, and lead to increased plant productivity within a dense urban context.

Use of World Wide Web-based directories for tracing subjects in epidemiologic studies.

Science.gov (United States)

Koo, M M; Rohan, T E

2000-11-01

The recent availability of World Wide Web-based directories has opened up a new approach for tracing subjects in epidemiologic studies. The completeness of two World Wide Web-based directories (Canada411 and InfoSpace Canada) for subject tracing was evaluated by using a randomized crossover design for 346 adults randomly selected from respondents in an ongoing cohort study. About half (56.4%) of the subjects were successfully located by using either Canada411 or InfoSpace. Of the 43.6% of the subjects who could not be located using either directory, the majority (73.5%) were female. Overall, there was no clear advantage of one directory over the other. Although Canada411 could find significantly more subjects than InfoSpace, the number of potential matches returned by Canada411 was also higher, which meant that a longer list of potential matches had to be examined before a true match could be found. One strategy to minimize the number of potential matches per true match is to first search by InfoSpace with the last name and first name, then by Canada411 with the last name and first name, and finally by InfoSpace with the last name and first initial. Internet-based searches represent a potentially useful approach to tracing subjects in epidemiologic studies.

URBAN RAIN GAUGE SITING SELECTION BASED ON GIS-MULTICRITERIA ANALYSIS

OpenAIRE

Y. Fu; C. Jing; M. Du

2016-01-01

With the increasingly rapid growth of urbanization and climate change, urban rainfall monitoring as well as urban waterlogging has widely been paid attention. In the light of conventional siting selection methods do not take into consideration of geographic surroundings and spatial-temporal scale for the urban rain gauge site selection, this paper primarily aims at finding the appropriate siting selection rules and methods for rain gauge in urban area. Additionally, for optimization gauge loc...

WWW.Cell Biology Education: Using the World Wide Web to Develop a New Teaching Topic

Science.gov (United States)

Blystone, Robert V.; MacAlpine, Barbara

2005-01-01

"Cell Biology Education" calls attention each quarter to several Web sites of educational interest to the biology community. The Internet provides access to an enormous array of potential teaching materials. In this article, the authors describe one approach for using the World Wide Web to develop a new college biology laboratory exercise. As a…

Enhancing Student Performance in First-Semester General Chemistry Using Active Feedback through the World Wide Web

Science.gov (United States)

Chambers, Kent A.; Blake, Bob

2007-01-01

The World Wide Web recently launched a new interactive feedback system for the instructors, so that can better understanding about their students and their problems. The feedback, in combination with tailored lectures is expected to enhance student performance in the first semester of general chemistry.

Using the World-Wide Web to Facilitate Communications of Non-Destructive Evaluation

Science.gov (United States)

McBurney, Sean

1995-01-01

The high reliability required for Aeronautical components is a major reason for extensive Nondestructive Testing and Evaluation. Here at Langley Research Center (LaRC), there are highly trained and certified personal to conduct such testing to prevent hazards from occurring in the workplace and on the research projects for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). The purpose of my studies was to develop a communication source to educate others of the services and equipment offered here. This was accomplished by creating documents that are accessible to all in the industry via the World Wide Web.

Mega-event strategy as a tool of urban transformation : Sydney's experience

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Chen, Y.; Spaans, M.

2009-01-01

Mega-event strategies and their impact on host cities have drawn increasing interest, as organising large-scale urban events has become part of a deliberate urban policy strategy to promote local economic growth and put the host city on the world agenda. Thus far, the research addressing what

Estimating current and future global urban domestic material consumption

Science.gov (United States)

Baynes, Timothy Malcolm; Kaviti Musango, Josephine

2018-06-01

Urban material resource requirements are significant at the global level and these are expected to expand with future urban population growth. However, there are no global scale studies on the future material consumption of urban areas. This paper provides estimates of global urban domestic material consumption (DMC) in 2050 using three approaches based on: current gross statistics; a regression model; and a transition theoretic logistic model. All methods use UN urban population projections and assume a simple ‘business-as-usual’ scenario wherein historical aggregate trends in income and material flow continue into the future. A collation of data for 152 cities provided a year 2000 world average DMC/capita estimate, 12 tons/person/year (±22%), which we combined with UN population projections to produce a first-order estimation of urban DMC at 2050 of ~73 billion tons/year (±22%). Urban DMC/capita was found to be significantly correlated (R 2 > 0.9) to urban GDP/capita and area per person through a power law relation used to obtain a second estimate of 106 billion tons (±33%) in 2050. The inelastic exponent of the power law indicates a global tendency for relative decoupling of direct urban material consumption with increasing income. These estimates are global and influenced by the current proportion of developed-world cities in the global population of cities (and in our sample data). A third method employed a logistic model of transitions in urban DMC/capita with regional resolution. This method estimated global urban DMC to rise from approximately 40 billion tons/year in 2010 to ~90 billion tons/year in 2050 (modelled range: 66–111 billion tons/year). DMC/capita across different regions was estimated to converge from a range of 5–27 tons/person/year in the year 2000 to around 8–17 tons/person/year in 2050. The urban population does not increase proportionally during this period and thus the global average DMC/capita increases from ~12 to ~14 tons

Distributed intelligent urban environment monitoring system

Science.gov (United States)

Du, Jinsong; Wang, Wei; Gao, Jie; Cong, Rigang

2018-02-01

The current environmental pollution and destruction have developed into a world-wide major social problem that threatens human survival and development. Environmental monitoring is the prerequisite and basis of environmental governance, but overall, the current environmental monitoring system is facing a series of problems. Based on the electrochemical sensor, this paper designs a small, low-cost, easy to layout urban environmental quality monitoring terminal, and multi-terminal constitutes a distributed network. The system has been small-scale demonstration applications and has confirmed that the system is suitable for large-scale promotion

The Culture-Transmission Motive in Immigrants: A World-Wide Internet Survey

Science.gov (United States)

Mchitarjan, Irina; Reisenzein, Rainer

2015-01-01

A world-wide internet survey was conducted to test central assumptions of a recent theory of cultural transmission in minorities proposed by the authors. 844 1st to 2nd generation immigrants from a wide variety of countries recruited on a microjob platform completed a questionnaire designed to test eight hypotheses derived from the theory. Support was obtained for all hypotheses. In particular, evidence was obtained for the continued presence, in the immigrants, of the culture-transmission motive postulated by the theory: the desire to maintain the culture of origin and transmit it to the next generation. Support was also obtained for the hypothesized anchoring of the culture-transmission motive in more basic motives fulfilled by cultural groups, the relative intra- and intergenerational stability of the culture-transmission motive, and its motivating effects for action tendencies and desires that support cultural transmission under the difficult conditions of migration. Furthermore, the findings suggest that the assumption that people have a culture-transmission motive belongs to the folk psychology of sociocultural groups, and that immigrants regard the fulfillment of this desire as a moral right. PMID:26529599

Urban Cholera and Water Sustainability Challenges under Climatic and Anthropogenic Change

Science.gov (United States)

Akanda, A. S.; Jutla, A.; Huq, A.; Faruque, A. G.; Colwell, R. R.

2013-12-01

The last three decades of surveillance data shows a drastic increase of cholera prevalence in the largest cholera-endemic city of the world - Dhaka, Bangladesh. Emerging megacities in the developing world, especially those located in coastal regions of the tropics remain vulnerable to similar. However, there has not been any systematic study on linking the long-term disease trends with changes in related climatic, environmental, or societal variables. Here, we analyze the 30-year dynamics of urban cholera prevalence in Dhaka with changes in climatic or societal factors: regional hydrology, flooding, water usage, changes in distribution systems, population growth and density in urban settlements, as well as shifting climate patterns. An interesting change is observed in the seasonal trends of cholera incidence; while an endemic upward trend is seen in the dry season, the post-monsoon trend seem to be more epidemic in nature. Evidence points to growing urbanization and rising population in unplanned settlements that have negligible to poor water and sanitation systems compounded by increasing frequency of record flood events. Growing water scarcity in the dry season and lack of sustainable water and sanitation infrastructure for urban settlements have increased endemicity of spring outbreaks, while record flood events and prolonged post-monsoon inundation have contributed to increased epidemic outbreaks in fall. We analyze our findings with the World Health Organization recommended guidelines and investigate water sustainability challenges in the context of climatic and anthropogenic changes in the region.

Simulated Climate Impacts of Mexico City's Historical Urban Expansion

Science.gov (United States)

Benson-Lira, Valeria

Urbanization, a direct consequence of land use and land cover change, is responsible for significant modification of local to regional scale climates. It is projected that the greatest urban growth of this century will occur in urban areas in the developing world. In addition, there is a significant research gap in emerging nations concerning this topic. Thus, this research focuses on the assessment of climate impacts related to urbanization on the largest metropolitan area in Latin America: Mexico City. Numerical simulations using a state-of-the-science regional climate model are utilized to address a trio of scientifically relevant questions with wide global applicability. The importance of an accurate representation of land use and land cover is first demonstrated through comparison of numerical simulations against observations. Second, the simulated effect of anthropogenic heating is quantified. Lastly, numerical simulations are performed using pre-historic scenarios of land use and land cover to examine and quantify the impact of Mexico City's urban expansion and changes in surface water features on its regional climate.

The biogeochemical fingerprint of urbanization: increasing carbon quality in Maine headwater streams

Science.gov (United States)

Parr, T.; Cronan, C.; Ohno, T.; Simon, K. S.

2012-12-01

Conversion of land cover to urban use is an accelerating global phenomenon. Physical landscape change manifests as the replacement of forests, grasslands, and wetlands with buildings, novel vegetation, and infrastructure. This physical change also brings with it a change in the human management of the landscape for aesthetic and practical purposes (i.e. road salt applications). Although urbanization's effects on inorganic nutrients have been well studied, far less is known about the interactive influences of urbanization and urban landscape management practices on dissolved organic matter (DOM), a key energy source essential to ecosystem function. We examined the seasonal abundance and composition of DOM, nutrients, and common cations in 116 small streams along a gradient of urbanization (0-60% total watershed imperviousness, TWI), in Maine, USA. Dissolved organic carbon concentration ranged from 0.5 to 20 ppm with no clear relationship to watershed urbanization. In contrast, DOM composition, quantified with specific ultra violet absorbance at 254 nm (SUVA_{254}), fluorescence indices, and parallel factor analysis (PARAFAC), changed considerably with increasing urbanization. SUVA_{254} indicated a shift from higher molecular weight humic compounds (SUVA_{254}>4) toward lower molecular weight compounds (SUVA_{254}road salt application may mobilize base cations into streams draining urbanized watersheds. There was a strong negative relationship between humic-like DOM components and Ca^{2+} (R^2=0.3-0.5, psalts over a natural range (0 - 6 mM) showed that ^{2+} cations (esp. Ca^{2+}) preferentially flocculated the humic fraction of DOM (R^2=0.6-0.9, premoving terrestrial C from the aquatic DOM pool in urban landscapes.

Landscaping climate change: a mapping technique for understanding science and technology debates on the world wide web

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Rogers, R.; Marres, N.

2000-01-01

New World Wide Web (web) mapping techniques may inform and ultimately facilitate meaningful participation in current science and technology debates. The technique described here "landscapes" a debate by displaying key "webby" relationships between organizations. "Debate-scaping" plots two

Designing urban spaces and buildings to improve sustainability and quality of life in a warmer world

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Smith, Claire; Levermore, Geoff

2008-01-01

It is in cities that the negative impacts of a warming climate will be felt most strongly. The summer time comfort and well-being of the urban population will become increasingly compromised under future scenarios for climate change and urbanisation. In contrast to rural areas, where night-time relief from high daytime temperatures occurs as heat is lost to the sky, the city environment stores and traps heat and offers little respite from high temperatures. This urban heat island effect is responsible for temperature differences of up to 7 deg. C between cities and the country in the UK. We already have experience of the potential hazards of these higher temperatures. The majority of heat-related fatalities during the summer of 2003 were in urban areas. This means that the cooling of the urban environment is a high priority for urban planners and designers. Proven ways of doing this include altering the urban microclimate by modifying its heat absorption and emission, for example through urban greening, the use of high-reflectivity materials, and by increasing openness to allow cooling winds. Buildings themselves can also deliver improved comfort and higher levels of sustainability by taking advantage of exemplary facade, glazing and ventilation designs. In addition, changed behaviour by building occupants can help keep urban areas cool. The technology to reduce the future vulnerability of city dwellers to thermal discomfort is already largely in existence. But there is a need for complementary policy and planning commitments to manage its implementation, especially in existing buildings and urban areas

A multifaceted hospital-wide intervention increases hand hygiene ...

African Journals Online (AJOL)

A multifaceted hospital-wide intervention increases hand hygiene compliance. B Patel, H Engelbrecht, H McDonald, V Morris, W Smythe. Abstract. Background. Hand hygiene is an important and basic practice that should be used by all healthcare staff to protect both themselves and their patients against infection.

Distributed nuclear medicine applications using World Wide Web and Java technology

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Knoll, P.; Hoell, K.; Koriska, K.; Mirzaei, S.; Koehn, H.

2000-01-01

At present, medical applications applying World Wide Web (WWW) technology are mainly used to view static images and to retrieve some information. The Java platform is a relative new way of computing, especially designed for network computing and distributed applications which enables interactive connection between user and information via the WWW. The Java 2 Software Development Kit (SDK) including Java2D API, Java Remote Method Invocation (RMI) technology, Object Serialization and the Java Advanced Imaging (JAI) extension was used to achieve a robust, platform independent and network centric solution. Medical image processing software based on this technology is presented and adequate performance capability of Java is demonstrated by an iterative reconstruction algorithm for single photon emission computerized tomography (SPECT). (orig.)

Growth and structure of the World Wide Web: Towards realistic modeling

Science.gov (United States)

Tadić, Bosiljka

2002-08-01

We simulate evolution of the World Wide Web from the dynamic rules incorporating growth, bias attachment, and rewiring. We show that the emergent double-hierarchical structure with distinct distributions of out- and in-links is comparable with the observed empirical data when the control parameter (average graph flexibility β) is kept in the range β=3-4. We then explore the Web graph by simulating (a) Web crawling to determine size and depth of connected components, and (b) a random walker that discovers the structure of connected subgraphs with dominant attractor and promoter nodes. A random walker that adapts its move strategy to mimic local node linking preferences is shown to have a short access time to "important" nodes on the Web graph.

Identifying the causes of water crises: A configurational frequency analysis of 22 basins world wide

Science.gov (United States)

Srinivasan, V.; Gorelick, S.; Lambin, E.; Rozelle, S.; Thompson, B.

2010-12-01

Freshwater "scarcity" has been identified as being a major problem world-wide, but it is surprisingly hard to assess if water is truly scarce at a global or even regional scale. Most empirical water research remains location specific. Characterizing water problems, transferring lessons across regions, to develop a synthesized global view of water issues remains a challenge. In this study we attempt a systematic understanding of water problems across regions. We compared case studies of basins across different regions of the world using configurational frequency analysis. Because water crises are multi-symptom and multi-causal, a major challenge was to categorize water problems so as to make comparisons across cases meaningful. In this study, we focused strictly on water unsustainability, viz. the inability to sustain current levels of the anthropogenic (drinking water, food, power, livelihood) and natural (aquatic species, wetlands) into the future. For each case, the causes of three outcome variables, groundwater declines, surface water declines and aquatic ecosystem declines, were classified and coded. We conducted a meta-analysis in which clusters of peer-reviewed papers by interdisciplinary teams were considered to ensure that the results were not biased towards factors privileged by any one discipline. Based on our final sample of 22 case study river basins, some clear patterns emerged. The meta-analysis suggests that water resources managers have long overemphasized the factors governing supply of water resources and while insufficient attention has been paid to the factors driving demand. Overall, uncontrolled increase in demand was twice as frequent as declines in availability due to climate change or decreased recharge. Moreover, groundwater and surface water declines showed distinct causal pathways. Uncontrolled increases in demand due to lack of credible enforcement were a key factor driving groundwater declines; while increased upstream abstractions

Border Patrol: Professional Jurisdictions in Sustainable Urban Environments

OpenAIRE

Rebecca Henn

2013-01-01

According to the United Nations, our world is becoming more populated, more urban, more connected, more globalized, and more complex. With this physical and social complexity comes a need for increased coordination in negotiating our urban futures. Environmental design and planning professionals have worked for decades according to traditional institutionalized role structures. Sustainability—in considering a wider variety of stakeholders—promises not only to include more members in the typic...

User Interface on the World Wide Web: How to Implement a Multi-Level Program Online

Science.gov (United States)

Cranford, Jonathan W.

1995-01-01

The objective of this Langley Aerospace Research Summer Scholars (LARSS) research project was to write a user interface that utilizes current World Wide Web (WWW) technologies for an existing computer program written in C, entitled LaRCRisk. The project entailed researching data presentation and script execution on the WWW and than writing input/output procedures for the database management portion of LaRCRisk.

An Ontology of Quality Initiatives and a Model for Decentralized, Collaborative Quality Management on the (Semantic) World Wide Web

Science.gov (United States)

2001-01-01

This editorial provides a model of how quality initiatives concerned with health information on the World Wide Web may in the future interact with each other. This vision fits into the evolving "Semantic Web" architecture - ie, the prospective that the World Wide Web may evolve from a mess of unstructured, human-readable information sources into a global knowledge base with an additional layer providing richer and more meaningful relationships between resources. One first prerequisite for forming such a "Semantic Web" or "web of trust" among the players active in quality management of health information is that these initiatives make statements about themselves and about each other in a machine-processable language. I present a concrete model on how this collaboration could look, and provide some recommendations on what the role of the World Health Organization (WHO) and other policy makers in this framework could be. PMID:11772549

Sustainable urban spaces: Ecological parks

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Burçak Erdoğan Onur

2016-01-01

Full Text Available Rapidly depleted resources with technological and economic developments which increased in recent years has led to deterioration of the natural balance in the world. Urban ecosystems is considerably changed, especially with population growth and intensive construction in the city. This situation, as such in all other areas, urban ecosystems are also increasing their sustainability concerns. More compatible solution with the natural process in landscape design and management have to be brought. This article describes the conceptual structure of ecological park that has become a tool for sustainable urban target in community that matured of environmental awareness. Also planning, design and management principles are explained by supporting with application examples. The obtained results within the framework, it is aimed to create a source for similar applications that will lead to spread in our country. In addition, it is put forward suggestions for dissemination of such practices.

Evidence of Urban Precipitation Anomalies from Satellite and Ground-Based Measurements

Science.gov (United States)

Shepherd, J. Marshall; Manyin, M.; Negri, Andrew

2004-01-01

Urbanization is one of the extreme cases of land use change. Most of world's population has moved to urban areas. Although currently only 1.2% of the land is considered urban, the spatial coverage and density of cities are expected to rapidly increase in the near future. It is estimated that by the year 2025, 60% of the world's population will live in cities. Human activity in urban environments also alters weather and climate processes. However, our understanding of urbanization on the total Earth-weather-climate system is incomplete. Recent literature continues to provide evidence that anomalies in precipitation exist over and downwind of major cities. Current and future research efforts are actively seeking to verify these literature findings and understand potential cause-effect relationships. The novelty of this study is that it utilizes rainfall data from multiple satellite data sources (e.g. TRMM precipitation radar, TRMM-geosynchronous-rain gauge merged product, and SSM/I) and ground-based measurements to identify spatial anomalies and temporal trends in precipitation for cities around the world. Early results will be presented and placed within the context of weather prediction, climate assessment, and societal applications.

The future is urban.

Science.gov (United States)

1992-05-01

Urban centers are growing due to natural increase and the movement of people from rural areas. Urban areas are the traditional centers of trade, science, and culture, but growth over a threshold results in crime, congestion, and pollution. Sustainability is threatened in modern towns that are dependent on other sources for food, fuel, or water. Housing, water, food supplies, and sanitation, communication, and transportation services are threatened in rapidly growing cities. In 1990 45/100 people lived in towns or cities. Hyper-cities have grown in number to 20, of which 14 are in developing countries. 83% of world population increase is expected to occur in cities. In 48 countries with faster population growth cities had growth rates averaging about 6.1% per year, and the urban share of total population averaged 2.8%. In 49 countries with slower population growth, urban growth rates averaged only 3.6% per year, and the urban share of total population averaged about 1.8%. Squatter settlements are endemic to urban areas that are congested and without basic services, limited housing particularly for the poor, and few job opportunities. The number of street children in urban areas has risen. This child population is subjected to low wages, overwork, auto accidents, poor health, and lack of social services. Malnutrition is a more serious issue in urban areas. In the Philippines malnutrition is 3% nationally and 9% in Metro Manila. Rural land reform in the Philippines is no longer a viable solution. In Metro Manila squatters are expected to increase in number to 4 million people by the year 2000, which would be almost 50% of total population. The squatter areas are areas of neglect, decay, and poverty. Cities are viewed as development's "blind alleys."

Pre-Service Teachers Critically Evaluate Scientific Information on the World-Wide Web: What Makes Information Believable?

Science.gov (United States)

Iding, Marie; Klemm, E. Barbara

2005-01-01

The present study addresses the need for teachers to critically evaluate the credibility, validity, and cognitive load associated with scientific information on Web sites, in order to effectively teach students to evaluate scientific information on the World Wide Web. A line of prior research investigating high school and university students'…

Urban observatories opportunities for environmental monitoring: solid wastes.

Science.gov (United States)

Rojas-Caldelas, R I; Corona Zambrano, E A

2008-01-01

Towns concentrate around 50% of world-wide population and the trend is oriented to underscore an urban profile of population. In addition, towns have become important for their economic contribution to the Gross Internal Product. The negative side of towns is the environmental and social impacts as a result of productive and domestic activities, besides the lack of available data. In order to overcome these shortcomings, the United Nations has established a project of urban monitoring throughout the Global Network of Urban Observatories; Mexico joined the project in 2005. The Local Urban Observatory of Mexicali has the task to produce information about cities that is useful to design public policies. Some of this information deals with a set of environmental indicators in the United Nations Habitat Agenda, which includes solid wastes. Therefore, this paper deals with two main topics; firstly, from the Habitat Agenda, a comparative urban analysis of waste production and coverage of domestic waste collection services; secondly, from the Local Agenda, the identification and ranking of environmental problems according to public perception coming from people involved in the municipal planning and decision making process. Results will be used to develop local indicators and public environmental policies.

Recent urbanization in China is correlated with a Westernized microbiome encoding increased virulence and antibiotic resistance genes.

Science.gov (United States)

Winglee, Kathryn; Howard, Annie Green; Sha, Wei; Gharaibeh, Raad Z; Liu, Jiawu; Jin, Donghui; Fodor, Anthony A; Gordon-Larsen, Penny

2017-09-15

Urbanization is associated with an increased risk for a number of diseases, including obesity, diabetes, and cancer, which all also show associations with the microbiome. While microbial community composition has been shown to vary across continents and in traditional versus Westernized societies, few studies have examined urban-rural differences in neighboring communities within a single country undergoing rapid urbanization. In this study, we compared the gut microbiome, plasma metabolome, dietary habits, and health biomarkers of rural and urban people from a single Chinese province. We identified significant differences in the microbiota and microbiota-related plasma metabolites in rural versus recently urban subjects from the Hunan province of China. Microbes with higher relative abundance in Chinese urban samples have been associated with disease in other studies and were substantially more prevalent in the Human Microbiome Project cohort of American subjects. Furthermore, using whole metagenome sequencing, we found that urbanization was associated with a loss of microbial diversity and changes in the relative abundances of Viruses, Archaea, and Bacteria. Gene diversity, however, increased with urbanization, along with the proportion of reads associated with antibiotic resistance and virulence, which were strongly correlated with the presence of Escherichia and Shigella. Our data suggest that urbanization has produced convergent evolution of the gut microbial composition in American and urban Chinese populations, resulting in similar compositional patterns of abundant microbes through similar lifestyles on different continents, including a loss of potentially beneficial bacteria and an increase in potentially harmful genes via increased relative abundance of Escherichia and Shigella.

Urban strategies and post-event legacy : The case of summer Olympic cities

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Chen, Y.

2012-01-01

Mega-event strategies and their impact on host cities have drawn increasing interest, as organising large-scale urban events has become part of a deliberate urban policy strategy to promote local economic growth, improve the city image and put the host city on the world agenda. Most cities stressed

Computing Pathways for Urban Decarbonization.

Science.gov (United States)

Cremades, R.; Sommer, P.

2016-12-01

Urban areas emit roughly three quarters of global carbon emissions. Cities are crucial elements for a decarbonized society. Urban expansion and related transportation needs lead to increased energy use, and to carbon-intensive lock-ins that create barriers for climate change mitigation globally. The authors present the Integrated Urban Complexity (IUC) model, based on self-organizing Cellular Automata (CA), and use it to produce a new kind of spatially explicit Transformation Pathways for Urban Decarbonization (TPUD). IUC is based on statistical evidence relating the energy needed for transportation with the spatial distribution of population, specifically IUC incorporates variables from complexity science related to urban form, like the slope of the rank-size rule or spatial entropy, which brings IUC a step beyond existing models. The CA starts its evolution with real-world urban land use and population distribution data from the Global Human Settlement Layer. Thus, the IUC model runs over existing urban settlements, transforming the spatial distribution of population so the energy consumption for transportation is minimized. The statistical evidence that governs the evolution of the CA departs from the database of the International Association of Public Transport. A selected case is presented using Stuttgart (Germany) as an example. The results show how IUC varies urban density in those places where it improves the performance of crucial parameters related to urban form, producing a TPUD that shows where the spatial distribution of population should be modified with a degree of detail of 250 meters of cell size. The TPUD shows how the urban complex system evolves over time to minimize energy consumption for transportation. The resulting dynamics or urban decarbonization show decreased energy per capita, although total energy increases for increasing population. The results provide innovative insights: by checking current urban planning against a TPUD, urban

EKOLOGI DAERAH URBAN (PERKOTAAN DAN GANGGUAN KESEHATAN JIWA

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Yunita Satya Pratiwi

2016-01-01

Full Text Available City is a form of ecological systems are complex, dynamic, and dominated by humans. In this case, the city is considered as an ecosystem that is an artificial environment, the result of a process of interaction between man and man and between man and his environment. The growth of urban population in the world, especially in Indonesia is relatively high, will continue with a high acceleration. In the period 2005-2030 the number of the world's urban population is expected to increase 56%, Asia up 71%, and up 74% in Indonesia. In 2005 the Indonesian population living in urban areas reached more than 107.9 million people, where 20% of whom were in Greater Jabodetabek (UNDP and ADB, 2006. Rate of population growth is not accompanied by the growth of the region, will result in overcrowding. This causes an imbalance of urban ecosystems. In addition to the emergence of poverty, unemployment, crime, uneven development, urbanization, suspected to be the cause of many community members are prone to stress and anxiety that lead to mental disorders. It is supported by a number of research results that show the prevalence trend of population show symptoms of mental health disorders in relatively more in urban than in rural areas.

Engineer pioneer plants respond to and affect geomorphic constraints similarly along water–terrestrial interfaces world-wide

OpenAIRE

Corenblit, D.; Baas, A.; Balke, T.; Bouma, T.J.; Fromard, F.; Garófano-Gómez, V.; González, E.; Gurnell, A.M.; Hortobágyi, B.; Julien, F.; Kim, D.; Lambs, L.; Stallins, J.A.; Steiger, J.; Tabacchi, E.

2015-01-01

Aim Within fluvial and coastal ecosystems world-wide, flows of water, wind and sediment generate a shifting landscape mosaic composed of bare substrate and pioneer and mature vegetation successional stages. Pioneer plant species that colonize these ecosystems at the land–water interface have developed specific traits in response to environmental constraints (response...

Spatial planning based on urban energy harvesting toward productive urban regions

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Leduc, Wouter R. W. A.; Van Kann, Ferry M. G.

The industrial revolution and the exploitation of fossil fuels fostered profound changes on transportation systems and infrastructure enabling unprecedented urban growth. Urban regions, which now host the majority of the world's population, resemble a linear metabolism: importing most of their raw

Spatial planning based on urban energy harvesting toward productive urban regions

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Leduc, W.R.W.A.; Kann, van F.M.G.

2013-01-01

The industrial revolution and the exploitation of fossil fuels fostered profound changes on transportation systems and infrastructure enabling unprecedented urban growth. Urban regions, which now host the majority of the world's population, resemble a linear metabolism: importing most of their raw

Radiation protection and environmental radioactivity. A voyage to the World Wide Web for beginners

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Weimer, S.

1998-01-01

According to the enormous growth of the Internet service 'World Wide Web' there is also a big growth in the number of web sites in connection with radiation protection. An introduction is given of some practical basis of the WWW. The structure of WWW addresses and navigating through the web with hyperlinks is explained. Further some search engines are presented. The paper lists a number of WWW addresses of interesting sites with radiological protection informations. (orig.) [de

WEBSLIDE: A "Virtual" Slide Projector Based on World Wide Web

Science.gov (United States)

Barra, Maria; Ferrandino, Salvatore; Scarano, Vittorio

1999-03-01

We present here the design key concepts of WEBSLIDE, a software project whose objective is to provide a simple, cheap and efficient solution for showing slides during lessons in computer labs. In fact, WEBSLIDE allows the video monitors of several client machines (the "STUDENTS") to be synchronously updated by the actions of a particular client machine, called the "INSTRUCTOR." The system is based on the World Wide Web and the software components of WEBSLIDE mainly consists in a WWW server, browsers and small Cgi-Bill scripts. What makes WEBSLIDE particularly appealing for small educational institutions is that WEBSLIDE is built with "off the shelf" products: it does not involve using a specifically designed program but any Netscape browser, one of the most popular browsers available on the market, is sufficient. Another possible use is to use our system to implement "guided automatic tours" through several pages or Intranets internal news bulletins: the company Web server can broadcast to all employees relevant information on their browser.

Urban inequities; urban rights: a conceptual analysis and review of impacts on children, and policies to address them.

Science.gov (United States)

Stephens, Carolyn

2012-06-01

This paper explores current conceptual understanding of urban social, environmental, and health inequality and inequity, and looks at the impact of these processes on urban children and young people in the 21st century. This conceptual analysis was commissioned for a discussion paper for UNICEF's flagship publication: State of the World's Children 2012: Children in an Urban World. The aim of the paper is to examine evidence on the meaning of urban inequality and inequity for urban children and young people. It further looks at the controversial policies of targeting "vulnerable" young people, and policies to achieve the urban MDGs. Finally, the paper looks briefly at the potential of concepts such as environment justice and rights to change our understanding of urban inequality and inequity.

Urban Heat Islands

Science.gov (United States)

Luvall, Jeffrey C.; Quattrochi, Dale A.; Rickman, Doug L.; Estes, Maury G.

2011-01-01

It is estimated that by the year 2025, 80% of the world's population will live in cities. This conversion of the natural landscape vegetation into man-made urban structures such as roads and buildings drastically alter the regional surface energy budgets, hydrology, precipitation patterns, and meteorology. Research studies from many cities have documented these effects range from decreases in air quality, increased energy consumption and alteration of regional climate to direct effects on human health.

World-wide risk assessment of the transportation of radioactive materials

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Ericsson, A.M.; Elert, M.

1983-01-01

The aim of the project reported in this paper is to develop the means and methods for a risk analysis of the transportation of radioactive materials throughout the world. The project was initiated by the Standing Advisory Group on the Safe Transport of Radioactive Materials (SAGSTRAM) of the IAEA. In 1979 the Swedish Nuclear Power Inspectorate and the IAEA signed an agreement on the development of a model for calculation of the transport risk. Member States of the IAEA are invited to use the model for a risk assessment of the transportation of radioactive materials in their own country. These assessments will be collected and analyzed and a world-wide risk assessment performed. The IAEA has the overall responsibility for the project and administers it. Sweden manages the project and has performed the applied research with the assistance of research support groups which have supplied data and analyses and performed some other parts of the project. An Oversight Committee with participants from eight Member States has reviewed the progress and has given valuable recommendations. It was important that the model had the sophistication and flexibility required for its use by all Member States but still was easy to handle. The risk calculations are performed by the computer code INTERTRAN which is based on the American computer code RADTRAN II developed by Sandia National Laboratories, Albuquerque, NM. The methodology of the RADTRAN II as well as data and format of the input and output was changed to make the code more internationally oriented. 2 references

Observing Human-induced Linkages between Urbanization and Earth's Climate System

Science.gov (United States)

Shepherd, J. Marshall; Jin, Menglin

2004-01-01

Urbanization is one of the extreme cases of land use change. Most of world s population has moved to urban areas. Although currently only 1.2% of the land is considered urban, the spatial coverage and density of cities are expected to rapidly increase in the near future. It is estimated that by the year 2025, 60% of the world s population will live in cities. Human activity in urban environments also alters atmospheric composition; impacts components of the water cycle; and modifies the carbon cycle and ecosystems. However, our understanding of urbanization on the total Earth-climate system is incomplete. Better understanding of how the Earth s atmosphere-ocean-land-biosphere components interact as a coupled system and the influence of the urban environment on this climate system is critical. The goal of the 2003 AGU Union session Human-induced climate variations on urban areas: From observations to modeling was to bring together scientists from interdisciplinary backgrounds to discuss the data, scientific approaches and recent results on observing and modeling components of the urban environment with the intent of sampling our current stand and discussing future direction on this topic. Herein, a summary and discussion of the observations component of the session are presented.

Cleanly: trashducation urban system

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Reif, Inbal; Alt, Florian; Ramos, Juan David Hincapie

Half the world's population is expected to live in urban areas by 2020. The high human density and changes in peoples' consumption habits result in an ever-increasing amount of trash that must be handled by governing bodies. Problems created by inefficient or dysfunctional cleaning services are e......, which not only motivates our research but also provides useful information on reasons and possible solutions for trash problems....

Community wide interventions for increasing physical activity.

Science.gov (United States)

Baker, Philip Ra; Francis, Daniel P; Soares, Jesus; Weightman, Alison L; Foster, Charles

2011-04-13

Multi-strategic community wide interventions for physical activity are increasingly popular but their ability to achieve population level improvements is unknown. To evaluate the effects of community wide, multi-strategic interventions upon population levels of physical activity. We searched the Cochrane Public Health Group Specialised Register, The Cochrane Library, MEDLINE, MEDLINE in Process, EMBASE, CINAHL, LILACS, PsycINFO, ASSIA, The British Nursing Index, Chinese CNKI databases, EPPI Centre (DoPHER, TRoPHI), ERIC, HMIC, Sociological Abstracts, SPORTDiscus, Transport Database and Web of Science (Science Citation Index, Social Sciences Citation Index, Conference Proceedings Citation Index). We also scanned websites of the EU Platform on Diet, Physical Activity and Health; Health-Evidence.ca; the International Union for Health Promotion and Education; the NIHR Coordinating Centre for Health Technology (NCCHTA) and NICE and SIGN guidelines. Reference lists of all relevant systematic reviews, guidelines and primary studies were followed up. We contacted experts in the field from the National Obesity Observatory Oxford, Oxford University; Queensland Health, Queensland University of Technology, the University of Central Queensland; the University of Tennessee and Washington University; and handsearched six relevant journals. The searches were last updated to the end of November 2009 and were not restricted by language or publication status. Cluster randomised controlled trials, randomised controlled trials (RCT), quasi-experimental designs which used a control population for comparison, interrupted time-series (ITS) studies, and prospective controlled cohort studies (PCCS) were included. Only studies with a minimum six-month follow up from the start of the intervention to measurement of outcomes were included. Community wide interventions had to comprise at least two broad strategies aimed at physical activity for the whole population. Studies which randomised

Genome-wide diversity and differentiation in New World populations of the human malaria parasite Plasmodium vivax.

Science.gov (United States)

de Oliveira, Thais C; Rodrigues, Priscila T; Menezes, Maria José; Gonçalves-Lopes, Raquel M; Bastos, Melissa S; Lima, Nathália F; Barbosa, Susana; Gerber, Alexandra L; Loss de Morais, Guilherme; Berná, Luisa; Phelan, Jody; Robello, Carlos; de Vasconcelos, Ana Tereza R; Alves, João Marcelo P; Ferreira, Marcelo U

2017-07-01

The Americas were the last continent colonized by humans carrying malaria parasites. Plasmodium falciparum from the New World shows very little genetic diversity and greater linkage disequilibrium, compared with its African counterparts, and is clearly subdivided into local, highly divergent populations. However, limited available data have revealed extensive genetic diversity in American populations of another major human malaria parasite, P. vivax. We used an improved sample preparation strategy and next-generation sequencing to characterize 9 high-quality P. vivax genome sequences from northwestern Brazil. These new data were compared with publicly available sequences from recently sampled clinical P. vivax isolates from Brazil (BRA, total n = 11 sequences), Peru (PER, n = 23), Colombia (COL, n = 31), and Mexico (MEX, n = 19). We found that New World populations of P. vivax are as diverse (nucleotide diversity π between 5.2 × 10-4 and 6.2 × 10-4) as P. vivax populations from Southeast Asia, where malaria transmission is substantially more intense. They display several non-synonymous nucleotide substitutions (some of them previously undescribed) in genes known or suspected to be involved in antimalarial drug resistance, such as dhfr, dhps, mdr1, mrp1, and mrp-2, but not in the chloroquine resistance transporter ortholog (crt-o) gene. Moreover, P. vivax in the Americas is much less geographically substructured than local P. falciparum populations, with relatively little between-population genome-wide differentiation (pairwise FST values ranging between 0.025 and 0.092). Finally, P. vivax populations show a rapid decline in linkage disequilibrium with increasing distance between pairs of polymorphic sites, consistent with very frequent outcrossing. We hypothesize that the high diversity of present-day P. vivax lineages in the Americas originated from successive migratory waves and subsequent admixture between parasite lineages from geographically diverse sites

Role of Halden Reactor Project for world-wide nuclear energy development

Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

McGrath, M.A.; Volkov, B.

2011-07-01

The great interest for utilization of nuclear materials to produce energy in the middle of last century needed special investigations using first class research facilities. Common problems in the area of nuclear fuel development motivated the establishment of joint research efforts. The OECD Halden Reactor Project (HRP) is a good example of such a cooperative research effort, which has been performing for more than 50 years. During that time, the Halden Reactor evolved from a prototype heavy water reactor envisaged as a power source for different applications to a research reactor that is able to simulate in-core conditions of modern commercial power reactors. The adaptability of the Halden Reactor enables the HRP to be an important international test facility for nuclear fuels and materials development. The long-term international cooperation is based on the flexible HRP organizational structure which also provides the continued success. [1,2] This paper gives a brief history of the Halden Reactor Project and its contribution to world-wide nuclear energy development. Recent expansion of the Project to the East and Asian countries may also assist and stimulate the development of a nuclear industry within these countries. The achievements of the HRP rely on the versatility of the research carried out in the reactor with reliable testing techniques and in-pile instrumentation. Diversification of scientific activity in the areas of development of alternative energy resources and man-machine technology also provide the HRP with a stable position as one of the leaders in the world scientific community. All of these aspects are described in this paper together with current experimental works, including the investigation of ULBA (Kazakhstan) production fuel in comparison with other world fuel suppliers, as well as other future and prospective plans of the Project.(Author)

Role of Halden Reactor Project for world-wide nuclear energy development

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

McGrath, M.A.; Volkov, B.

2011-01-01

The great interest for utilization of nuclear materials to produce energy in the middle of last century needed special investigations using first class research facilities. Common problems in the area of nuclear fuel development motivated the establishment of joint research efforts. The OECD Halden Reactor Project (HRP) is a good example of such a cooperative research effort, which has been performing for more than 50 years. During that time, the Halden Reactor evolved from a prototype heavy water reactor envisaged as a power source for different applications to a research reactor that is able to simulate in-core conditions of modern commercial power reactors. The adaptability of the Halden Reactor enables the HRP to be an important international test facility for nuclear fuels and materials development. The long-term international cooperation is based on the flexible HRP organizational structure which also provides the continued success. [1,2] This paper gives a brief history of the Halden Reactor Project and its contribution to world-wide nuclear energy development. Recent expansion of the Project to the East and Asian countries may also assist and stimulate the development of a nuclear industry within these countries. The achievements of the HRP rely on the versatility of the research carried out in the reactor with reliable testing techniques and in-pile instrumentation. Diversification of scientific activity in the areas of development of alternative energy resources and man-machine technology also provide the HRP with a stable position as one of the leaders in the world scientific community. All of these aspects are described in this paper together with current experimental works, including the investigation of ULBA (Kazakhstan) production fuel in comparison with other world fuel suppliers, as well as other future and prospective plans of the Project.(Author)

Wide-area decontamination in an urban environment after radiological dispersion: A review and perspectives

Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

Kaminski, Michael D., E-mail: Kaminski@anl.gov [Nuclear Decontamination and Separations, Nuclear Engineering Division, Argonne National Laboratory (United States); Lee, Sang Don; Magnuson, Matthew [US Environmental Protection Agency, Office of Research and Development, National Homeland Security Research Center (United States)

2016-03-15

Highlights: • We review wide area, urban decontamination techniques for rapid response. • We examine historical data and its application to radiological terrorism scenario. • Data is insufficient to ensure a detailed, organized mitigation response. • Primary deficit is lessons-learned and relations to extrapolate a limited data set. • Research is needed to model a mitigation response and help guide data gathering. - Abstract: Nuclear or radiological terrorism in the form of uncontrolled radioactive contamination presents a unique challenge in the field of nuclear decontamination. Potential targets require an immediate decontamination response, or mitigation plan to limit the social and economic impact. To date, experience with urban decontamination of building materials – specifically hard, porous, external surfaces – is limited to nuclear weapon fallout and nuclear reactor accidents. Methods are lacking for performing wide-area decontamination in an urban environment so that in all release scenarios the area may be re-occupied without evaluation and/or restriction. Also lacking is experience in developing mitigation strategies, that is, methods of mitigating contamination and its resultant radiation dose in key areas during the immediate aftermath of an event and after lifesaving operations. To date, the tremendous strategy development effort primarily by the European community has focused on the recovery phase, which extends years beyond the release event. In this review, we summarize the methods and data collected over the past 70 years in the field of hard, external surface decontamination of radionuclide contaminations, with emphasis on methods suitable for response to radiological dispersal devices and their potentially unique physico-chemical characteristics. This review concludes that although a tremendous amount of work has been completed primarily by the European Community (EU) and the United Kingdom (UK), the few studies existing on each

Wide-area decontamination in an urban environment after radiological dispersion: A review and perspectives

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Kaminski, Michael D.; Lee, Sang Don; Magnuson, Matthew

2016-01-01

Highlights: • We review wide area, urban decontamination techniques for rapid response. • We examine historical data and its application to radiological terrorism scenario. • Data is insufficient to ensure a detailed, organized mitigation response. • Primary deficit is lessons-learned and relations to extrapolate a limited data set. • Research is needed to model a mitigation response and help guide data gathering. - Abstract: Nuclear or radiological terrorism in the form of uncontrolled radioactive contamination presents a unique challenge in the field of nuclear decontamination. Potential targets require an immediate decontamination response, or mitigation plan to limit the social and economic impact. To date, experience with urban decontamination of building materials – specifically hard, porous, external surfaces – is limited to nuclear weapon fallout and nuclear reactor accidents. Methods are lacking for performing wide-area decontamination in an urban environment so that in all release scenarios the area may be re-occupied without evaluation and/or restriction. Also lacking is experience in developing mitigation strategies, that is, methods of mitigating contamination and its resultant radiation dose in key areas during the immediate aftermath of an event and after lifesaving operations. To date, the tremendous strategy development effort primarily by the European community has focused on the recovery phase, which extends years beyond the release event. In this review, we summarize the methods and data collected over the past 70 years in the field of hard, external surface decontamination of radionuclide contaminations, with emphasis on methods suitable for response to radiological dispersal devices and their potentially unique physico-chemical characteristics. This review concludes that although a tremendous amount of work has been completed primarily by the European Community (EU) and the United Kingdom (UK), the few studies existing on each

The World Health Organization's mechanisms for increasing the ...

African Journals Online (AJOL)

These scenarios are a mixture of a surcharge on taxable income, an increase in value-added tax and a payroll tax. Five alternative options, suggested by the World Health Organization, are interrogated as ways to decrease the general taxation proposed in the White Paper. The five mechanisms (corporate tax, financial ...

Information on infantile colic on the World Wide Web.

Science.gov (United States)

Bailey, Shana D; D'Auria, Jennifer P; Haushalter, Jamie P

2013-01-01

The purpose of this study was to explore and describe the type and quality of information on infantile colic that a parent might access on the World Wide Web. Two checklists were used to evaluate the quality indicators of 24 Web sites and the colic-specific content. Fifteen health information Web sites met more of the quality parameters than the nine commercial sites. Eight Web sites included information about colic and infant abuse, with six being health information sites. The colic-specific content on 24 Web sites reflected current issues and controversies; however, the completeness of the information in light of current evidence varied among the Web sites. Strategies to avoid complications of parental stress or infant abuse were not commonly found on the Web sites. Pediatric professionals must guide parents to reliable colic resources that also include emotional support and understanding of infant crying. A best evidence guideline for the United States would eliminate confusion and uncertainty about which colic therapies are safe and effective for parents and professionals. Copyright © 2013 National Association of Pediatric Nurse Practitioners. Published by Mosby, Inc. All rights reserved.

Understanding the health impacts of urbanization in China: A living laboratory for urban biogeochemistry research

Science.gov (United States)

Zhu, Y. G.

2015-12-01

China has the largest population in the world, and by 2011, more than 50% of its population are now living in cities. This ongoing societal change has profound impacts on environmental quality and population health. In addition to intensive discharges of waste, urbanization is not only changing the land use and land cover, but also inducing fundamental changes in biogeochemical processes. Unlike biogeochemistry in non-urban environment, the biological component of urban biogeochemistry is dominated by direct human activities, such as air pollution derived from transport, wastewater treatment, garbage disposal and increase in impervious surface etc. Managing urban biogeochemistry will include source control over waste discharge, eco-infrastructure (such as green space and eco-drainage), resource recovery from urban waste stream, and integration with peri-urban ecosystem, particularly with food production system. The overall goal of managing urban biogeochemistry is for human health and wellbeing, which is a global challenge. In this paper, the current status of urban biogeochemistry research in China will be briefly reviewed, and then it will focus on nutrient recycling and waste management, as these are the major driving forces of environmental quality changes in urban areas. This paper will take a holistic view on waste management, covering urban metabolism analysis, technological innovation and integration for resource recovery from urban waste stream, and risk management related to waste recycling and recovery.

P-001: Koi herpes virus world wide: results of the global KHV questionnaire 2007-2009

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Haenen, Olga; Olesen, Niels Jørgen

, prevention, detection, and control of epizootic diseases within Europe to reduce the economic and social impact of future outbreaks of emerging/notifiable diseases, like Foot-and-mouth disease through increased excellence by collaboration. Within EPIZONE, Work package 6.1 covers emerging diseases of fish...... was sent to > 65 countries world wide. By the start of May 2009, 40 countries had responded, i.e. > 60%. The results of the KHV questionnaire will be presented as a poster, and hand-out. Questions of the questionnaire were about koi (1), cultured (2) and wild carp (3), all Cyprinus carpio: • Prevalence...... and confirmation? Did/do you participate in the KHV PCR ring test of CEFAS (UK); • Susceptible fish species: Was KHV isolated from other species than koi/carp? • Latent carriers: Do you have any experience with latency of KHV in koi/carp? • Measures (stamping out, temp change, therapy) and effects in 1, 2, and 3...

URBAN DETECTION, DELIMITATION AND MORPHOLOGY: COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF SELECTIVE "MEGACITIES"

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

B. Alhaddad

2012-08-01

Full Text Available Over the last 50 years, the world has faced an impressive growth of urban population. The walled city, close to the outside, an "island"for economic activities and population density within the rural land, has led to the spread of urban life and urban networks in almost all the territory. There was, as said Margalef (1999, "a topological inversion of the landscape". The "urban" has gone from being an island in the ocean of rural land vastness, to represent the totally of the space in which are inserted natural and rural "systems". New phenomena such as the fall of the fordist model of production, the spread of urbanization known as urban sprawl, and the change of scale of the metropolis, covering increasingly large regions, called "megalopolis" (Gottmann, 1961, have characterized the century. However there are no rigorous databases capable of measuring and evaluating the phenomenon of megacities and in general the process of urbanization in the contemporary world. The aim of this paper is to detect, identify and analyze the morphology of the megacities through remote sensing instruments as well as various indicators of landscape. To understand the structure of these heterogeneous landscapes called megacities, land consumption and spatial complexity needs to be quantified accurately. Remote sensing might be helpful in evaluating how the different land covers shape urban megaregions. The morphological landscape analysis allows establishing the analogies and the differences between patterns of cities and studying the symmetry, growth direction, linearity, complexity and compactness of the urban form. The main objective of this paper is to develop a new methodology to detect urbanized land of some megacities around the world (Tokyo, Mexico, Chicago, New York, London, Moscow, Sao Paulo and Shanghai using Landsat 7 images.

Distributed models coupling soakaways, urban drainage and groundwater

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Roldin, Maria Kerstin

in receiving waters, urban flooding etc. WSUD structures are generally small, decentralized systems intended to manage stormwater near the source. Many of these alternative techniques are based on infiltration which can affect both the urban sewer system and urban groundwater levels if widely implemented......Alternative methods for stormwater management in urban areas, also called Water Sensitive Urban Design (WSUD) methods, have become increasingly important for the mitigation of urban stormwater management problems such as high runoff volumes, combined sewage overflows, poor water quality......, and how these can be modeled in an integrated environment with distributed urban drainage and groundwater flow models. The thesis: 1. Identifies appropriate models of soakaways for use in an integrated and distributed urban water and groundwater modeling system 2. Develops a modeling concept that is able...

Status of NASA Satellite, Field Observations, and Numerical Modeling Addressing the Impact of Urbanization on Short and Long Term Precipitation Variability

Science.gov (United States)

Shepherd, J. Marshall; Manyin, Michael; Burian, Steve; Garza, Carlos

2004-01-01

Howard (1833a) made the first documented observation of a temperature difference between an urban area and its rural environment. Manley (1958) termed this contrast the "urban heat island (UHI)". The UHI has now become a widely acknowledged, observed, and researched phenomenon because of its broad implications. It is estimated that by the year 2025, 60% of the world's population will live in cities (UNFP, 1999). In the United States, the current urban growth rate is approximately 12.5%, with 80% currently living in urban areas. As cities continue to grow, urban sprawl creates unique problems related to land use, transportation, agriculture, housing, pollution, and development for policymakers. Urban expansion and its associated urban heat islands also have measurable impacts on weather and climate processes.

Historical development of world wide guided missiles

Science.gov (United States)

Spearman, M. L.

1978-01-01

This paper attempts to put in perspective the development of missiles from early history to present time. The influence of World War II in accelerating the development of guided missiles, particularly through German scientists, is discussed. The dispersion of German scientists to other countries and the coupling of their work with native talent to develop guided missiles is traced. Particular emphasis is placed on the evolution of the missile in the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. Since the Soviets possess what is probably the world's most complete array of dedicated missile system types, their known inventory is reviewed in some detail.

The use of the World Wide Web by medical journals in 2003 and 2005: an observational study.

Science.gov (United States)

Schriger, David L; Ouk, Sripha; Altman, Douglas G

2007-01-01

The 2- to 6-page print journal article has been the standard for 200 years, yet this format severely limits the amount of detailed information that can be conveyed. The World Wide Web provides a low-cost option for posting extended text and supplementary information. It also can enhance the experience of journal editors, reviewers, readers, and authors through added functionality (eg, online submission and peer review, postpublication critique, and e-mail notification of table of contents.) Our aim was to characterize ways that journals were using the World Wide Web in 2005 and note changes since 2003. We analyzed the Web sites of 138 high-impact print journals in 3 ways. First, we compared the print and Web versions of March 2003 and 2005 issues of 28 journals (20 of which were randomly selected from the 138) to determine how often articles were published Web only and how often print articles were augmented by Web-only supplements. Second, we examined what functions were offered by each journal Web site. Third, for journals that offered Web pages for reader commentary about each article, we analyzed the number of comments and characterized these comments. Fifty-six articles (7%) in 5 journals were Web only. Thirteen of the 28 journals had no supplementary online content. By 2005, several journals were including Web-only supplements in >20% of their papers. Supplementary methods, tables, and figures predominated. The use of supplementary material increased by 5% from 2% to 7% in the 20-journal random sample from 2003 to 2005. Web sites had similar functionality with an emphasis on linking each article to related material and e-mailing readers about activity related to each article. There was little evidence of journals using the Web to provide readers an interactive experience with the data or with each other. Seventeen of the 138 journals offered rapid-response pages. Only 18% of eligible articles had any comments after 5 months. Journal Web sites offer similar

Toolbox for Urban Mobility Simulation: High Resolution Population Dynamics for Global Cities

Science.gov (United States)

Bhaduri, B. L.; Lu, W.; Liu, C.; Thakur, G.; Karthik, R.

2015-12-01

In this rapidly urbanizing world, unprecedented rate of population growth is not only mirrored by increasing demand for energy, food, water, and other natural resources, but has detrimental impacts on environmental and human security. Transportation simulations are frequently used for mobility assessment in urban planning, traffic operation, and emergency management. Previous research, involving purely analytical techniques to simulations capturing behavior, has investigated questions and scenarios regarding the relationships among energy, emissions, air quality, and transportation. Primary limitations of past attempts have been availability of input data, useful "energy and behavior focused" models, validation data, and adequate computational capability that allows adequate understanding of the interdependencies of our transportation system. With increasing availability and quality of traditional and crowdsourced data, we have utilized the OpenStreetMap roads network, and has integrated high resolution population data with traffic simulation to create a Toolbox for Urban Mobility Simulations (TUMS) at global scale. TUMS consists of three major components: data processing, traffic simulation models, and Internet-based visualizations. It integrates OpenStreetMap, LandScanTM population, and other open data (Census Transportation Planning Products, National household Travel Survey, etc.) to generate both normal traffic operation and emergency evacuation scenarios. TUMS integrates TRANSIMS and MITSIM as traffic simulation engines, which are open-source and widely-accepted for scalable traffic simulations. Consistent data and simulation platform allows quick adaption to various geographic areas that has been demonstrated for multiple cities across the world. We are combining the strengths of geospatial data sciences, high performance simulations, transportation planning, and emissions, vehicle and energy technology development to design and develop a simulation

The Impacts of Islandness on the Urbanism and Architecture of Mombasa

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Gerald Steyn

2015-12-01

Full Text Available Most of the Swahili port cities that occupied the western rim of the medieval Indian Ocean long-distance trading system were founded on islands. Dating from as early as the 10th century CE, Lamu and Zanzibar have become ‘museumified’ as World Heritage sites, while other island port cities, such as Kilwa and Pate, are now uninhabited ruins. Mombasa Island, however, despite numerous calamities, is an increasingly important commercial hub and gateway into East Africa. This study aims to determine how some intrinsic benefits of islandness have shaped the settlement patterns and architectural forms that embody this continuous process of urbanisation. A typological analysis serves to explore Mombasa Island’s layers of spatiality and morphology. More than any other East African city, this island reflects the synthesis of the distinctive settlement traditions of the Swahilis, Portuguese, Omanis and, subsequently, the British colonisers, through to its current state as a dynamic, modern urban centre. Compact, complex, and culturally diverse, its unique island concepts offer a wide range of contemporary urban and architectural solutions.

Two virtual astro refresher courses on the world-wide-web

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Goldwein, Joel W.

1997-01-01

Purpose/Objective: The Internet offers a novel venue for providing educational material to radiation oncologists. This exhibit demonstrates its utility for providing the complete content of two past ASTRO refresher courses. Materials and Methods: The audio recording, handout and slides from the 1995 ASTRO refresher course entitled 'Radiation Therapy for Pediatric Brain Tumors; Standards of Care, Current Clinical Trials and New Directions' and the 1996 ASTRO refresher course entitled 'Internet-based communications in Radiation Oncology' were digitized and placed on an Internet World-Wide-Web site. The Web address was posted on the refresher course handout and in the meeting book ('http://goldwein 1.xrt.upenn.edu/brain95.html' and 'http://goldwein 1.xrt.upenn.edu/astro96/'). The computer distributing this material is an Intel-based 486 DEC50 personal computer with a 50 Mhz processor running Windows NT 3.51 workstation. Software utilized to distribute the material is in the public domain and includes EWMAC's 'httpd', and Progressive Network's 'RealAudio Server' and 'Encoder'. The University's dedicated Internet connection is used to 'serve' this material. Results: The two approximately 100 minute lectures have been encoded into several 'RealAudio' files totaling 10 Megabytes in size. These files are accessible with moderate to excellent quality and speed utilizing as little as a 14.4k modem connection to the Internet. Use of 'streaming' technology provides a means for playing the audio files over the Internet after downloading only a small portion of the files. The time required to digitize the material has been approximately 40 hours, with most time related to digitizing slides from a Powerpoint presentation. Not all slides have been digitized as of this time. To date, approximately 400 accesses to this resource have been logged on the system. Seven electronic comment forms for the second course have all rated it as 'superior'. Pitfalls include the difficulty

Cardiovascular Disease Risk Factors in Ghana during the Rural-to-Urban Transition: A Cross-Sectional Study.

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Nuri Kodaman

Full Text Available Populations in sub-Saharan Africa are shifting from rural to increasingly urban. Although the burden of cardiovascular disease is expected to increase with this changing landscape, few large studies have assessed a wide range of risk factors in urban and rural populations, particularly in West Africa. We conducted a cross-sectional, population-based survey of 3317 participants from Ghana (≥18 years old, of whom 2265 (57% female were from a mid-sized city (Sunyani, population ~250,000 and 1052 (55% female were from surrounding villages (populations <5000. We measured canonical cardiovascular disease risk factors (BMI, blood pressure, fasting glucose, lipids and fibrinolytic markers (PAI-1 and t-PA, and assessed how their distributions and related clinical outcomes (including obesity, hypertension and diabetes varied with urban residence and sex. Urban residence was strongly associated with obesity (OR: 7.8, 95% CI: 5.3-11.3, diabetes (OR 3.6, 95% CI: 2.3-5.7, and hypertension (OR 3.2, 95% CI: 2.6-4.0. Among the quantitative measures, most affected were total cholesterol (+0.81 standard deviations, 95% CI 0.73-0.88, LDL cholesterol (+0.89, 95% CI: 0.79-0.99, and t-PA (+0.56, 95% CI: 0.48-0.63. Triglycerides and HDL cholesterol profiles were similarly poor in both urban and rural environments, but significantly worse among rural participants after BMI-adjustment. For most of the risk factors, the strength of the association with urban residence did not vary with sex. Obesity was a major exception, with urban women at particularly high risk (26% age-standardized prevalence compared to urban men (7%. Overall, urban residents had substantially worse cardiovascular risk profiles, with some risk factors at levels typically seen in the developed world.

Sharing skills and knowledge to confront real-world problems | CRDI ...

International Development Research Centre (IDRC) Digital Library (Canada)

Sharing skills and knowledge to confront real-world problems ... because 1.3 billion people cannot read English, and only 163 million people (a fraction ... childhood obesity in urban areas, caused by increases in junk food and lack of exercise.

Demonstration Of A Green-blue Approach For A Strategic Management Of Urban Runoff.

Science.gov (United States)

Jonczyk, J. C.; Quinn, P. F.; Heidrich, O.; James, P.; Harris, N.; Dawson, R. J.; Pearson, D. J.

2016-12-01

With more than half of the world's population now living in cities, there is an increasing need to facilitate urban areas to be more sustainable and resilient to the impacts of extreme events such as surface water flooding. Traditionally, urban storm water is managed predominately through grey infrastructure such as sewer collection systems and flood walls, often with little consideration of the increased water utility costs or downstream flood risk. There is little collaboration between organisations and sectors on managing and mitigating the impacts of flooding at city level, with decisions made in silos. A 24-acre development zone is used as a case study to show how different sectors and organisations came to realise the multiple benefits of a blue-green, joined-up, site-wide approach to managing storm runoff. The Science Central development zone (http://www.newcastlesciencecentral.com/) is at the heart of the city and is jointly owned by Newcastle University and the Newcastle city council with an overall vision for innovation and urban sustainability. The masterplan was reviewed and agreed by the partners in 2016 to include a site-wide holistic conveyance of surface water through a series of measures across the site, and the commercial needs of the building plots were balanced with the need to manage the flood hazard. Uniquely, once constructed, the measures will be monitored to evaluate how they function and the multiple benefits they provide will also be evaluated. This will include monitoring water and air quality parameters, indicators of biodiversity and carbon capture through The Urban Observatory. The Urban Observatory (http://urbanobservatory.ac.uk/) is a research project based at Newcastle University that produces a data portal of open and scalable data from deployments of heterogeneous sensors and 3rd party data sources around the city. The site will also host a new national sustainable urban drainage research facility that will provide research

Real-Time Payload Control and Monitoring on the World Wide Web

Science.gov (United States)

Sun, Charles; Windrem, May; Givens, John J. (Technical Monitor)

1998-01-01

World Wide Web (W3) technologies such as the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) and the Java object-oriented programming environment offer a powerful, yet relatively inexpensive, framework for distributed application software development. This paper describes the design of a real-time payload control and monitoring system that was developed with W3 technologies at NASA Ames Research Center. Based on Java Development Toolkit (JDK) 1.1, the system uses an event-driven "publish and subscribe" approach to inter-process communication and graphical user-interface construction. A C Language Integrated Production System (CLIPS) compatible inference engine provides the back-end intelligent data processing capability, while Oracle Relational Database Management System (RDBMS) provides the data management function. Preliminary evaluation shows acceptable performance for some classes of payloads, with Java's portability and multimedia support identified as the most significant benefit.

Community wide interventions for increasing physical activity.

Science.gov (United States)

Baker, Philip R A; Francis, Daniel P; Soares, Jesus; Weightman, Alison L; Foster, Charles

2015-01-05

Multi-strategic community wide interventions for physical activity are increasingly popular but their ability to achieve population level improvements is unknown. To evaluate the effects of community wide, multi-strategic interventions upon population levels of physical activity. We searched the Cochrane Public Health Group Segment of the Cochrane Register of Studies,The Cochrane Library, MEDLINE, MEDLINE in Process, EMBASE, CINAHL, LILACS, PsycINFO, ASSIA, the British Nursing Index, Chinese CNKI databases, EPPI Centre (DoPHER, TRoPHI), ERIC, HMIC, Sociological Abstracts, SPORT Discus, Transport Database and Web of Science (Science Citation Index, Social Sciences Citation Index, Conference Proceedings Citation Index). We also scanned websites of the EU Platform on Diet, Physical Activity and Health; Health-Evidence.org; the International Union for Health Promotion and Education; the NIHR Coordinating Centre for Health Technology (NCCHTA); the US Centre for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and NICE and SIGN guidelines. Reference lists of all relevant systematic reviews, guidelines and primary studies were searched and we contacted experts in the field. The searches were updated to 16 January 2014, unrestricted by language or publication status. Cluster randomised controlled trials, randomised controlled trials, quasi-experimental designs which used a control population for comparison, interrupted time-series studies, and prospective controlled cohort studies were included. Only studies with a minimum six-month follow up from the start of the intervention to measurement of outcomes were included. Community wide interventions had to comprise at least two broad strategies aimed at physical activity for the whole population. Studies which randomised individuals from the same community were excluded. At least two review authors independently extracted the data and assessed the risk of bias. Each study was assessed for the setting, the number of included components

A study on sustainable urban water management in small and medium sized cities in China

OpenAIRE

Liu, Guang

2012-01-01

Along with the implementation of national urbanization and modernization strategy in China, the urban scale and quantity are increasing systematically. In this process, the role of water is irreplaceable. Urban water system is a multipurpose and integrated system. Considering China's economic and social development requirements, there are many rigorous problems in exploitation, utilization, operation and management of urban water resources comparing with some developed cities in the world. Cu...

Global forecasts of urban expansion to 2030 and direct impacts on biodiversity and carbon pools

OpenAIRE

Seto, Karen C.; Güneralp, Burak; Hutyra, Lucy R.

2012-01-01

Urban land-cover change threatens biodiversity and affects ecosystem productivity through loss of habitat, biomass, and carbon storage. However, despite projections that world urban populations will increase to nearly 5 billion by 2030, little is known about future locations, magnitudes, and rates of urban expansion. Here we develop spatially explicit probabilistic forecasts of global urban land-cover change and explore the direct impacts on biodiversity hotspots and tropical carbon biomass. ...

Virtual Reality Astronomy Education Using AAS WorldWide Telescope and Oculus Rift

Science.gov (United States)

Weigel, A. David; Moraitis, Christina D.

2017-01-01

The Boyd E. Christenberry Planetarium at Samford University (Birmingham, AL) offers family friendly, live, and interactive planetarium presentations that educate the public on topics from astronomy basics to current cutting edge astronomical discoveries. With limited funding, it is not possible to provide state of the art planetarium hardware for these community audiences. In a society in which many people, even young children, have access to high resolution smart phones and highly realistic video games, it is important to leverage cutting-edge technology to intrigue young and old minds alike. We use an Oculus Rift virtual reality headset running AAS WorldWide Telescope software to visualize 3D data in a fully immersive environment. We create interactive experiences and videos to highlight astronomical concepts and also to communicate the beauty of our universe. The ease of portability enables us to set up at Virtual Reality (VR) experience at various events, festivals, and even in classrooms to provide a community outreach that a fixed planetarium cannot. This VR experience adds the “wow” factor that encourages children and adults to engage in our various planetarium events to learn more about astronomy and continue to explore the final frontier of space. These VR experiences encourages our college students to participate in our astronomy education resulting in increased interest in STEM fields, particularly physics and math.

Urban foraging: a ubiquitous human practice overlooked by urban planners, policy, and research

Science.gov (United States)

Charlie Shackleton; Patrick Hurley; Annika Dahlberg; Marla Emery; Harini. Nagendra

2017-01-01

Although hardly noticed or formally recognised, urban foraging by humans probably occurs in all urban settings around the world. We draw from research in India, South Africa, Sweden, and the United States to demonstrate the ubiquity and varied nature of urban foraging in different contexts. Across these different contexts, we distil seven themes that characterise and...

Global Deliberative Democracy and Climate Change: Insights from World Wide Views on Global Warming in Australia

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Chris Riedy

2011-12-01

Full Text Available On 26 September 2009, approximately 4,000 citizens in 38 countries participated in World Wide Views on Global Warming (WWViews. WWViews was an ambitious first attempt to convene a deliberative mini-public at a global scale, giving people from around the world an opportunity to deliberate on international climate policy and to make recommendations to the decision-makers meeting at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen (COP-15 in December 2009. In this paper, we examine the role that deliberative mini-publics can play in facilitating the emergence of a global deliberative system for climate change response. We pursue this intent through a reflective evaluation of the Australian component of the World Wide Views on Global Warming project (WWViews. Our evaluation of WWViews is mixed. The Australian event was delivered with integrity and feedback from Australian participants was almost universally positive. Globally, WWViews demonstrated that it is feasible to convene a global mini-public to deliberate on issues of global relevance, such as climate change. On the other hand, the contribution of WWViews towards the emergence of a global deliberative system for climate change response was limited and it achieved little influence on global climate change policy. We identify lessons for future global mini-publics, including the need to prioritise the quality of deliberation and provide flexibility to respond to cultural and political contexts in different parts of the world. Future global mini-publics may be more influential if they seek to represent discourse diversity in addition to demographic profiles, use designs that maximise the potential for transmission from public to empowered space, run over longer time periods to build momentum for change and experiment with ways of bringing global citizens together in a single process instead of discrete national events.

Global scenarios of urban density and its impacts on building energy use through 2050.

Science.gov (United States)

Güneralp, Burak; Zhou, Yuyu; Ürge-Vorsatz, Diana; Gupta, Mukesh; Yu, Sha; Patel, Pralit L; Fragkias, Michail; Li, Xiaoma; Seto, Karen C

2017-08-22

Although the scale of impending urbanization is well-acknowledged, we have a limited understanding of how urban forms will change and what their impact will be on building energy use. Using both top-down and bottom-up approaches and scenarios, we examine building energy use for heating and cooling. Globally, the energy use for heating and cooling by the middle of the century will be between 45 and 59 exajoules per year (corresponding to an increase of 7-40% since 2010). Most of this variability is due to the uncertainty in future urban densities of rapidly growing cities in Asia and particularly China. Dense urban development leads to less urban energy use overall. Waiting to retrofit the existing built environment until markets are ready in about 5 years to widely deploy the most advanced renovation technologies leads to more savings in building energy use. Potential for savings in energy use is greatest in China when coupled with efficiency gains. Advanced efficiency makes the least difference compared with the business-as-usual scenario in South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa but significantly contributes to energy savings in North America and Europe. Systemic efforts that focus on both urban form, of which urban density is an indicator, and energy-efficient technologies, but that also account for potential co-benefits and trade-offs with human well-being can contribute to both local and global sustainability. Particularly in growing cities in the developing world, such efforts can improve the well-being of billions of urban residents and contribute to mitigating climate change by reducing energy use in urban areas.

Use of World Wide Web Server and Browser Software To Support a First-Year Medical Physiology Course.

Science.gov (United States)

Davis, Michael J.; And Others

1997-01-01

Describes the use of a World Wide Web server to support a team-taught physiology course for first-year medical students. The students' evaluations indicate that computer use in class made lecture material more interesting, while the online documents helped reinforce lecture materials and textbooks. Lists factors which contribute to the…

Gross α/β analysis of spiked qater for IAEA 2008 world-wide open proficiency test

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Zhang Yaoling; Zhao Feng; Wu Meigui; Du Jinzhou

2010-01-01

The gross α/β analysis of the IAEA 2008 world-wide open proficiency test on the determination of natural radionuclides in spiked water was conducted. The Sample 03, Sample 04 and Sample 05 were tested for the gross α/β radioactivity according to the requirement of IAEA. The feedback statistics showed that the values of gross α/β of all of the three samples fell in the acceptable range of IAEA. (authors)

Invisible cities? Urban issues in Oceania

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Dorothée Dussy

2016-08-01

Full Text Available Why have cities stayed for so long an invisible object for the anthropology of Oceania? What is it to be an urban Pacific islander? What are the fields of interest of the anthropologists working in urban Oceania? Drawing on a review of urban research lead during the last decades in the Pacific archipelagos, this article aims at unfolding these different questions. We will evoke how anthropologists’ attraction for the authentic, the rural world and small indigenous communities have for long prevented any close look at the contemporary urban world. Urban cities are recent and have been created by colonisation; they are made of various populations of migrants whose trajectories have been molded by colonisation and globalization. The study of these recent cities associate various issues such as creolization, informal economy, periurbanisation, circular migration, relations between expatriates and indigenous people, and contemporary uses of tradition or “custom”. Eventually, the paper concludes with the will to claim the right for the anthropology of urban Oceania to find its place among the discipline, among the vast collection of studies evoking the rural and so-called traditional worlds of the region.

Urbanization increased metal levels in lake surface sediment and catchment topsoil of waterscape parks

Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

Li, Hong-Bo [Key Laboratory of Urban Environment and Health, Institute of Urban Environment, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Xiamen 361021 (China); Graduate University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100049 (China); Yu, Shen, E-mail: syu@iue.ac.cn [Key Laboratory of Urban Environment and Health, Institute of Urban Environment, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Xiamen 361021 (China); Li, Gui-Lin [Key Laboratory of Urban Environment and Health, Institute of Urban Environment, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Xiamen 361021 (China); Liu, Yi; Yu, Guang-Bin [Key Laboratory of Urban Environment and Health, Institute of Urban Environment, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Xiamen 361021 (China); Graduate University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100049 (China); Deng, Hong [Department of Environmental Sciences, Tiantong National Station of Forest Ecosystem, Key Laboratory of Urbanization and Ecological Restoration, East China Normal University, Shanghai 200062 (China); Wu, Sheng-Chun [State Key Laboratory in Marine Pollution, Biology and Chemistry Department, City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong (China); Wong, Ming-Hung [Croucher Institute for Environmental Sciences, Hong Kong Baptist University, Hong Kong (China)

2012-08-15

Lake surface sediment is mainly derived from topsoil in its catchment. We hypothesized that distribution of anthropogenic metals would be homogenous in lake surface sediment and the lake's catchment topsoil. Anthropogenic metal distributions (cadmium (Cd), copper (Cu), lead (Pb), and zinc (Zn)) in fourteen waterscape parks were investigated in surface sediments and catchment topsoils and possible source homogeneity was tested using stable Pb isotopic ratio analysis. The parks were located along an urbanization gradient consisting of suburban (SU), developing urban (DIU), developed urban (DDU), and central urban core (CUC) areas in Shanghai, China. Results indicated that surface lake sediments and catchment topsoils in the CUC parks were highly contaminated by the investigated anthropogenic metals. Total metal contents in surface sediment and topsoil gradually increased along the urbanization gradient from the SU to CUC areas. Generally, the surface sediments had greater total metal contents than their catchment topsoils. These results suggest that urbanization drives the anthropogenic metal enrichment in both surface sediment and its catchment topsoil in the waterscape parks. Soil fine particles (< 63 {mu}m) and surface sediments had similar enrichment ratios of metals, suggesting that surface runoff might act as a carrier for metals transporting from catchment to lake. Stable Pb isotope ratio analysis revealed that the major anthropogenic Pb source in surface sediment was coal combustion as in the catchment topsoil. Urbanization also correlated with chemical fractionation of metals in both surface sediment and catchment topsoil. From the SU to the CUC parks, amounts of labile metal fractions increased while the residual fraction of those metals remained rather constant. In short, urbanization in Shanghai drives anthropogenic metal distribution in environmental matrices and the sources were homogenous. -- Highlights: Black-Right-Pointing-Pointer Obvious

Urbanization increased metal levels in lake surface sediment and catchment topsoil of waterscape parks

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Li, Hong-Bo; Yu, Shen; Li, Gui-Lin; Liu, Yi; Yu, Guang-Bin; Deng, Hong; Wu, Sheng-Chun; Wong, Ming-Hung

2012-01-01

Lake surface sediment is mainly derived from topsoil in its catchment. We hypothesized that distribution of anthropogenic metals would be homogenous in lake surface sediment and the lake's catchment topsoil. Anthropogenic metal distributions (cadmium (Cd), copper (Cu), lead (Pb), and zinc (Zn)) in fourteen waterscape parks were investigated in surface sediments and catchment topsoils and possible source homogeneity was tested using stable Pb isotopic ratio analysis. The parks were located along an urbanization gradient consisting of suburban (SU), developing urban (DIU), developed urban (DDU), and central urban core (CUC) areas in Shanghai, China. Results indicated that surface lake sediments and catchment topsoils in the CUC parks were highly contaminated by the investigated anthropogenic metals. Total metal contents in surface sediment and topsoil gradually increased along the urbanization gradient from the SU to CUC areas. Generally, the surface sediments had greater total metal contents than their catchment topsoils. These results suggest that urbanization drives the anthropogenic metal enrichment in both surface sediment and its catchment topsoil in the waterscape parks. Soil fine particles (< 63 μm) and surface sediments had similar enrichment ratios of metals, suggesting that surface runoff might act as a carrier for metals transporting from catchment to lake. Stable Pb isotope ratio analysis revealed that the major anthropogenic Pb source in surface sediment was coal combustion as in the catchment topsoil. Urbanization also correlated with chemical fractionation of metals in both surface sediment and catchment topsoil. From the SU to the CUC parks, amounts of labile metal fractions increased while the residual fraction of those metals remained rather constant. In short, urbanization in Shanghai drives anthropogenic metal distribution in environmental matrices and the sources were homogenous. -- Highlights: ► Obvious urbanization effect on metal

Urban Life-Worlds in Motion: In Africa and Beyond Städtische Lebenswelten in Bewegung: in Afrika und darüber hinaus

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Hans Peter Hahn

2010-01-01

Full Text Available Although throughout the history of anthropology the ethnography of urban societies was never an important topic, investigations on cities in Africa contributed to the early theoretical development of urban studies in social sciences. As the ethnography of rural migrants in towns made clear, cultural diversity and creativity are foundational and permanent elements of urban cultures in Africa (and beyond. Currently, two new aspects complement these insights: 1 Different forms of mobility have received a new awareness through the concept of transnationalism. They are much more complex, including not only rural–urban migration, but also urban–urban migration, and migrations with a destination beyond the continent. 2 Urban life-worlds also include the appropriation of globally circulating images and lifestyles, which contribute substantially to the current cultural dynamics of cities in Africa. These two aspects are the reasons for the high complexity of urban contexts in Africa. Therefore, whether it is still appropriate to speak about the “locality” of these life-worlds has become questionable. At the same time, these new aspects explain the self-consciousness of members of urban cultures in Africa. They contribute to the expansive character of these societies and to the impression that cities in Africa host the most innovative and creative societies worldwide. Auch wenn die Ethnographie städtischer Gesellschaften in der Geschichte der Ethnologie nie eine große Rolle gespielt hat, leisteten doch Untersuchungen zu urbanen Lebenswelten in Afrika einen wichtigen Beitrag zur frühen theoretischen Entwicklung sozialwissenschaftlicher Stadtforschung. Wie die Ethnographie von Migranten aus ländlichen Räumen in afrikanischen Städten schon damals deutlich machte, sind kulturelle Diversität und Kreativität grundlegende und dauerhafte Elemente urbaner Kultur in Afrika (und weltweit. In letzter Zeit haben zwei wichtige Aspekte diese fr

Projected Regional Climate in 2025 Due to Urban Growth

Science.gov (United States)

Shepherd, J. Marshall; Manyin, Michael; Messen, Dmitry

2005-01-01

By 2025, 60 to 80 percent of the world s population will live in urban environments. Additionally, the following facts published by the United Nations further illustrates how cities will evolve in the future. Urban areas in the developing world are growing very rapidly. The urban growth rate will continue to be particularly rapid in the urban areas of less developed regions, averaging 2.4 per cent per year during 2000-2030, consistent with a doubling time of 29 years. The urbanization process will continue worldwide. The concentration of population in cities is expected to continue so that, by 2030, 84 percent of the inhabitants of more developed countries will be urban dwellers. Urbanization impacts the whole hierarchy of human settlements. In 2000,24.8 per cent of the world population lived in urban settlements with fewer than 500,000 inhabitants and by 2015 that proportion will likely rise to 27.1 per cent.

Introduction to Global Urban Climatology

Science.gov (United States)

Varquez, A. C. G.; Kanda, M.; Kawano, N.; Darmanto, N. S.; Dong, Y.

2016-12-01

Urban heat island (UHI) is a widely investigated phenomenon in the field of urban climate characterized by the warming of urban areas relative to its surrounding rural environs. Being able to understand the mechanism behind the UHI formation of a city and distinguish its impact from that of global climate change is indispensable when identifying adaptation and mitigation strategies. However, the lack of UHI studies many cities especially for developing countries makes it difficult to generalize the mechanism for UHI formation. Thus, there is an impending demand for studies that focus on the simultaneous analyses of UHI and its trends throughout the world. Hence, we propose a subfield of urban climatology, called "global urban climatology" (GUC), which mainly focuses on the uniform understanding of urban climates across all cities, globally. By using globally applicable methodologies to quantify and compare urban heat islands of cities with diverse backgrounds, including their geography, climate, socio-demography, and other factors, a universal understanding of the mechanisms underlying the formation of the phenomenon can be established. The implementation of GUC involves the use of globally acquired historical observation networks, gridded meteorological parameters from climate models, global geographic information system datasets; the construction of a distributed urban parameter database; and the development of techniques necessary to model the urban climate. Research under GUC can be categorized into three approaches. The collaborative approach (1st) relies on the collection of data from micro-scale experiments conducted worldwide with the aid or development of professional social networking platforms; the analytical approach (2nd) relies on the use of global weather station datasets and their corresponding objectively analysed global outputs; and the numerical approach (3rd) relies on the global estimation of high-resolution urban-representative parameters as

India’s urban future: views from the slum

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Nijman, J.

2015-01-01

About 32% of the Indian population presently resides in towns and cities, and national and state governments are intent on increasing that number. Based on the past experience of most of the developed world, urbanization is considered integral to modernization and progress. However, India’s

The Brussels-Capital Region. Increasing the Density of Urban Spaces and Preserving the Quality of Life

OpenAIRE

Ioulia Pankratieva

2013-01-01

Since its foundation in 1989, Region of Brussels Capital has its own government and conducts an independent urban policy. With the constant increase in population the main objectives for the Region are concentrated on development of housing and infrastructure objects, transport security, and improvement of functioning of urban structures.Urban policy is based on the Regional Plan for Sustainable Development (Plan Régional de Développement Durable - PRDD), which is a strategic tool for urban p...

Global changes, national development and urban poverty: Political engagement among the poor in Mexico City

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Vegelin, C.L.

2016-01-01

As the world approaches the point in which urban poverty is to become the primary characteristic of global poverty by 2030, understanding the drivers, contexts, and conditions for urban poverty is increasingly urgent. This dissertation contributes to such needed understandings by carrying out an

Expert knowledge in palliative care on the World Wide Web: palliativedrugs.org.

Science.gov (United States)

Gavrin, Jonathan

2009-01-01

In my last Internet-related article, I speculated that social networking would be the coming wave in the effort to share knowledge among experts in various disciplines. At the time I did not know that a palliative care site on the World Wide Web (WWW), palliativedrugs.com, already provided the infrastructure for sharing expert knowledge in the field. The Web site is an excellent traditional formulary but it is primarily devoted to "unlicensed" ("off-label") use of medications in palliative care, something we in the specialty often do with little to support our interventions except shared knowledge and experience. There is nothing fancy about this Web site. In a good way, its format is a throwback to Web sites of the 1990s. In only the loosest sense can one describe it as "multimedia." Yet, it provides the perfect forum for expert knowledge and is a "must see" resource. Its existing content is voluminous and reliable, filtered and reviewed by renowned clinicians and educators in the field. Although its origin and structure were not specifically designed for social or professional networking, the Web site's format makes it a natural way for practitioners around the world to contribute to an ever-growing body of expertise in palliative care.

ETDEWEB versus the World-Wide-Web: a specific database/web comparison

Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

Cutler, Debbie

2010-06-28

A study was performed comparing user search results from the specialized scientific database on energy-related information, ETDEWEB, with search results from the internet search engines Google and Google Scholar. The primary objective of the study was to determine if ETDEWEB (the Energy Technology Data Exchange – World Energy Base) continues to bring the user search results that are not being found by Google and Google Scholar. As a multilateral information exchange initiative, ETDE’s member countries and partners contribute cost- and task-sharing resources to build the largest database of energy-related information in the world. As of early 2010, the ETDEWEB database has 4.3 million citations to world-wide energy literature. One of ETDEWEB’s strengths is its focused scientific content and direct access to full text for its grey literature (over 300,000 documents in PDF available for viewing from the ETDE site and over a million additional links to where the documents can be found at research organizations and major publishers globally). Google and Google Scholar are well-known for the wide breadth of the information they search, with Google bringing in news, factual and opinion-related information, and Google Scholar also emphasizing scientific content across many disciplines. The analysis compared the results of 15 energy-related queries performed on all three systems using identical words/phrases. A variety of subjects was chosen, although the topics were mostly in renewable energy areas due to broad international interest. Over 40,000 search result records from the three sources were evaluated. The study concluded that ETDEWEB is a significant resource to energy experts for discovering relevant energy information. For the 15 topics in this study, ETDEWEB was shown to bring the user unique results not shown by Google or Google Scholar 86.7% of the time. Much was learned from the study beyond just metric comparisons. Observations about the strengths of each

World-wide French experience in research reactor fuel cycle transportation

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Raisonnier, D.

1997-01-01

Since 1963 Transnucleaire has safely performed a large number of national and international transports of radioactive material. Transnucleaire has also designed and supplied suitable packagings for all types of nuclear fuel cycle radioactive material from front-end and back-end products and for power or for research reactors. Transportation of the nuclear fuel material for power reactors is made on a regular and industrial basis. The transportation of material for the research reactor fuel cycle is quite different due to the small quantities involved, the categorisation of material and the numerous places of delivery world-wide. Adapted solutions exist, which require a reactive organisation dealing with all the transportation issues for LEU and HEU products as metal, oxide, fresh fuel elements, spent fuel elements including supply of necessary transport packaging and equipment. This presentation will: - explain the choices made by Transnucleaire and its associates to provide and optimise the corresponding services, - demonstrate the capability to achieve, through reliable partnership, transport operations involving new routes, specific equipment and new political constraints while respecting sophisticated safety and security regulations. (author)

Alaskan Auroral All-Sky Images on the World Wide Web

Science.gov (United States)

Stenbaek-Nielsen, H. C.

1997-01-01

In response to a 1995 NASA SPDS announcement of support for preservation and distribution of important data sets online, the Geophysical Institute, University of Alaska Fairbanks, Alaska, proposed to provide World Wide Web access to the Poker Flat Auroral All-sky Camera images in real time. The Poker auroral all-sky camera is located in the Davis Science Operation Center at Poker Flat Rocket Range about 30 miles north-east of Fairbanks, Alaska, and is connected, through a microwave link, with the Geophysical Institute where we maintain the data base linked to the Web. To protect the low light-level all-sky TV camera from damage due to excessive light, we only operate during the winter season when the moon is down. The camera and data acquisition is now fully computer controlled. Digital images are transmitted each minute to the Web linked data base where the data are available in a number of different presentations: (1) Individual JPEG compressed images (1 minute resolution); (2) Time lapse MPEG movie of the stored images; and (3) A meridional plot of the entire night activity.

Urban vs. rural factors that affect adult asthma.

Science.gov (United States)

Jie, Yu; Isa, Zaleha Md; Jie, Xu; Ju, Zhang Long; Ismail, Noor Hassim

2013-01-01

In this review, our aim was to examine the influence of geographic variations on asthma prevalence and morbidity among adults, which is important for improving our understanding, identifying the burden, and for developing and implementing interventions aimed at reducing asthma morbidity. Asthma is a complex inflammatory disease of multifactorial origin, and is influenced by both environmental and genetic factors. The disparities in asthma prevalence and morbidity among the world's geographic locations are more likely to be associated with environmental exposures than genetic differences. In writing this article, we found that the indoor factors most consistently associated with asthma and asthma-related symptoms in adults included fuel combustion, mold growth, and environmental tobacco smoke in both urban and rural areas. Asthma and asthma-related symptoms occurred more frequently in urban than in rural areas, and that difference correlated with environmental risk exposures, SES, and healthcare access. Environmental risk factors to which urban adults were more frequently exposed than rural adults were dust mites,high levels of vehicle emissions, and a westernized lifestyle.Exposure to indoor biological contaminants in the urban environment is common.The main risk factors for developing asthma in urban areas are atopy and allergy to house dust mites, followed by allergens from animal dander. House dust mite exposure may potentially explain differences in diagnosis of asthma prevalence and morbidity among adults in urban vs. rural areas. In addition, the prevalence of asthma morbidity increases with urbanization. High levels of vehicle emissions,Western lifestyles and degree of urbanization itself, may affect outdoor and thereby indoor air quality. In urban areas, biomass fuels have been widely replaced by cleaner energy sources at home, such as gas and electricity, but in most developing countries, coal is still a major source of fuel for cooking and heating

Quantitative analysis of urban sprawl in Tripoli using Pearson's Chi-Square statistics and urban expansion intensity index

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Al-sharif, Abubakr A A; Pradhan, Biswajeet; Shafri, Helmi Zulhaidi Mohd; Mansor, Shattri

2014-01-01

Urban expansion is a spatial phenomenon that reflects the increased level of importance of metropolises. The remotely sensed data and GIS have been widely used to study and analyze the process of urban expansions and their patterns. The capital of Libya (Tripoli) was selected to perform this study and to examine its urban growth patterns. Four satellite imageries of the study area in different dates (1984, 1996, 2002 and 2010) were used to conduct this research. The main goal of this work is identification and analyzes the urban sprawl of Tripoli metropolitan area. Urban expansion intensity index (UEII) and degree of freedom test were used to analyze and assess urban expansions in the area of study. The results show that Tripoli has sprawled urban expansion patterns; high urban expansion intensity index; and its urban development had high degree of freedom according to its urban expansion history during the time period (1984-2010). However, the novel proposed hypothesis used for zones division resulted in very good insight understanding of urban expansion direction and the effect of the distance from central business of district (CBD)

Software Project Management and Measurement on the World-Wide-Web (WWW)

Science.gov (United States)

Callahan, John; Ramakrishnan, Sudhaka

1996-01-01

We briefly describe a system for forms-based, work-flow management that helps members of a software development team overcome geographical barriers to collaboration. Our system, called the Web Integrated Software Environment (WISE), is implemented as a World-Wide-Web service that allows for management and measurement of software development projects based on dynamic analysis of change activity in the workflow. WISE tracks issues in a software development process, provides informal communication between the users with different roles, supports to-do lists, and helps in software process improvement. WISE minimizes the time devoted to metrics collection and analysis by providing implicit delivery of messages between users based on the content of project documents. The use of a database in WISE is hidden from the users who view WISE as maintaining a personal 'to-do list' of tasks related to the many projects on which they may play different roles.

Where to find nutritional science journals on the World Wide Web.

Science.gov (United States)

Brown, C M

1997-08-01

The World Wide Web (WWW) is a burgeoning information resource that can be utilized for current awareness and assistance in manuscript preparation and submission. The ever changing and expanding nature of the WWW allows it to provide up to the minute information, but this inherent changeability often makes information access difficult. To assist nutrition scientists in locating useful information about nutritional science journals on the WWW, this article critically reviews and describes the WWW sites for seventeen highly ranked nutrition and dietetics journals. Included in each annotation are the site's title, web address or Universal Resource Locator (URL), journal ranking and site authorship. Also listed is whether or not the site makes available the guidelines for authors, tables of contents, abstracts, online ordering, as well as information about the editorial board. This critical survey illustrates that the information on the web, regardless of its authority, is not of equal quality.

Energy efficiency in urban management: Russian and world experience

Science.gov (United States)

Pryadko, Igor

2017-10-01

The article discusses the role of energetics in creating a comfortable and safe environment of modern megacities, and the problem is considered in the socio-economic aspect. The object is the energy security of the city, and the subject is the influence of urban society on the formation of energy security. In particular, the problems are raised: ecological problems of urban energy supply, the condition of surface layer of the atmosphere near electric power lines. The author assesses the actions, implemented by the urban authorities in Mytischi, in the southwestern areas of New Moscow. The author assesses these sample areas on the basis of Ch. Landry’s concept of self-training, designated for municipal authorities and urban communities, and offers several successfully implemented self-study cases and in the light of modern methods of ensuring energy security. The forecasts of creation of energy-safe space, made by modern sociologist-urbanist Leo Hollis, are taken into account. The author also considers some of the economic aspects of biosphere safety. In particular, he insists that biosphere safety, convenience, and comfort have developed into competitive advantages in the housing market.

Predictors of women's attitudes toward world health organization framework convention on tobacco control policies in urban China.

Science.gov (United States)

Abdullah, Abu Saleh; Yang, Tingzhong; Beard, Jennifer

2010-05-01

In 2005 China ratified the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC) and committed to implement tobacco control legislation and policies. Wide variation in smoking prevalence between men and women in China and the high exposure of women to secondhand smoke suggest that each component of the FCTC should be analyzed from a gender perspective. This study describes women's attitudes toward and predictors of support for four key FCTC measures in China. Cross-sectional data were collected from 1,408 women in two urban cities on demographics, smoking behavior, and attitudes toward key tobacco control measures. Seventy percent of the study women (n = 1,408) were exposed to secondhand smoke at home, work, or other public places. Support for the four FCTC measures of interest was as follows: 92.5% supported banning smoking in public places, 79.2% supported increasing the cigarette tax, 92% supported stronger health warnings on cigarette packages, and 87.1% favored banning tobacco advertising. The predictors for supporting each of these measures included socioeconomic, attitudinal, and behavioral factors. Urban Chinese women appear to support implementation of key WHO FCTC measures. Predictors of women's attitudes toward the key FCTC measures varied. The formulation process resulting from the tobacco control policy should consider these women-specific predictors in order to facilitate successful implementation of FCTC.

Modeling Air Temperature/Water Temperature Relations Along a Small Mountain Stream Under Increasing Urban Influence

Science.gov (United States)

Fedders, E. R.; Anderson, W. P., Jr.; Hengst, A. M.; Gu, C.

2017-12-01

Boone Creek is a headwater stream of low to moderate gradient located in Boone, North Carolina, USA. Total impervious surface coverage in the 5.2 km2 catchment drained by the 1.9 km study reach increases from 13.4% in the upstream half of the reach to 24.3% in the downstream half. Other markers of urbanization, including culverting, lack of riparian shade vegetation, and bank armoring also increase downstream. Previous studies have shown the stream to be prone to temperature surges on short timescales (minutes to hours) caused by summer runoff from the urban hardscaping. This study investigates the effects of urbanization on the stream's thermal regime at daily to yearly timescales. To do this, we developed an analytical model of daily average stream temperatures based on daily average air temperatures. We utilized a two-part model comprising annual and biannual components and a daily component consisting of a 3rd-order Markov process in order to fit the thermal dynamics of our small, gaining stream. Optimizing this model at each of our study sites in each studied year (78 total site-years of data) yielded annual thermal exchange coefficients (K) for each site. These K values quantify the strength of the relationship between stream and air temperature, or inverse thermal stability. In a uniform, pristine catchment environment, K values are expected to decrease downstream as the stream gains discharge volume and, therefore, thermal inertia. Interannual average K values for our study reach, however, show an overall increase from 0.112 furthest upstream to 0.149 furthest downstream, despite a near doubling of stream discharge between these monitoring points. K values increase only slightly in the upstream, less urban, half of the reach. A line of best fit through these points on a plot of reach distance versus K value has a slope of 2E-6. But the K values of downstream, more urbanized sites increase at a rate of 2E-5 per meter of reach distance, an order of magnitude

Urban/rural interface: Governing the chaos

Science.gov (United States)

Ferreira, António

2016-04-01

Cities have become recently the home for more than half of the world's population. Cities are often seen as ecological systems just a short step away from collapse [Newman 2006]. Being a human construction, cities disrupt the natural cycles and the patterns of temporal and spatial distribution of environmental and ecological processes. Urbanization produces ruptures in biota, water, energy and nutrients connectivity that can lead to an enhanced exposure to disruptive events that hamper the wellbeing and the resilience of urban communities in a global change context. An important issue in what concerns urban sprawl is the interface between the urban and the rural territories. Being an extremely dynamic landscape, and assuring some quality of life and buffering some of the pervasive negative impacts of urban areas in terms of disrupting the function of the natural ecosystems, in limit situations this interface can act as a conveyor belt of catastrophic events originated in the rural world, into the urban space. The Coimbra 2005 wildfire is a fine example of how a poorly managed urban/rural interface can put populations in danger, by allowing the fire to spread towards the urban green infrastructure, burning houses in the process. Major river flows that flood urban areas are also good examples of the lack of management and planning can result in the loss of assets and even put in danger human lives. This presentation reviews the impact of extreme events and the transmission from the urban to the rural worlds, but also from the rural to the urban territories, and establishes the need to govern risk at various levels and using the full range of governance tools.

A space-based, high-resolution view of notable changes in urban NOx pollution around the world (2005-2014)

Science.gov (United States)

Duncan, Bryan N.; Lamsal, Lok N.; Thompson, Anne M.; Yoshida, Yasuko; Lu, Zifeng; Streets, David G.; Hurwitz, Margaret M.; Pickering, Kenneth E.

2016-01-01

Nitrogen oxides (NOx = NO + NO2) are produced during combustion processes and, thus may serve as a proxy for fossil fuel-based energy usage and coemitted greenhouse gases and other pollutants. We use high-resolution nitrogen dioxide (NO2) data from the Ozone Monitoring Instrument (OMI) to analyze changes in urban NO2 levels around the world from 2005 to 2014, finding complex heterogeneity in the changes. We discuss several potential factors that seem to determine these NOx changes. First, environmental regulations resulted in large decreases. The only large increases in the United States may be associated with three areas of intensive energy activity. Second, elevated NO2 levels were observed over many Asian, tropical, and subtropical cities that experienced rapid economic growth. Two of the largest increases occurred over recently expanded petrochemical complexes in Jamnagar (India) and Daesan (Korea). Third, pollution transport from China possibly influenced the Republic of Korea and Japan, diminishing the impact of local pollution controls. However, in China, there were large decreases over Beijing, Shanghai, and the Pearl River Delta, which were likely associated with local emission control efforts. Fourth, civil unrest and its effect on energy usage may have resulted in lower NO2 levels in Libya, Iraq, and Syria. Fifth, spatial heterogeneity within several megacities may reflect mixed efforts to cope with air quality degradation. We also show the potential of high-resolution data for identifying NOx emission sources in regions with a complex mix of sources. Intensive monitoring of the world's tropical/subtropical megacities will remain a priority, as their populations and emissions of pollutants and greenhouse gases are expected to increase significantly.

A Space-based, High-resolution View of Notable Changes in Urban Nox Pollution Around the World (2005 - 2014)

Science.gov (United States)

Duncan, Bryan N.; Lamsal, Lok N.; Thompson, Anne M.; Yoshida, Yasuko; Lu, Zifeng; Streets, David G.; Hurwitz, Margaret M.; Pickering, Kenneth E.

2016-01-01

Nitrogen oxides (NOxNO+NO2) are produced during combustion processes and, thus may serve as a proxy for fossil fuel-based energy usage and committed greenhouse gases and other pollutants. We use high-resolution nitrogen dioxide (NO2) data from the Ozone Monitoring Instrument (OMI) to analyze changes in urban NO2 levels around the world from 2005 to 2014, finding complex heterogeneity in the changes. We discuss several potential factors that seem to determine these NOx changes. First, environmental regulations resulted in large decreases. The only large increases in the United States may be associated with three areas of intensive energy activity. Second, elevated NO2 levels were observed over many Asian, tropical, and subtropical cities that experienced rapid economic growth. Two of the largest increases occurred over recently expanded petrochemical complexes in Jamnagar (India) and Daesan (Korea). Third, pollution transport from China possibly influenced the Republic of Korea and Japan, diminishing the impact of local pollution controls. However, in China, there were large decreases over Beijing, Shanghai, and the Pearl River Delta, which were likely associated with local emission control efforts. Fourth, civil unrest and its effect on energy usage may have resulted in lower NO2 levels in Libya, Iraq, and Syria. Fifth, spatial heterogeneity within several megacities may reflect mixed efforts to cope with air quality degradation. We also show the potential of high-resolution data for identifying NOx emission sources in regions with a complex mix of sources. Intensive monitoring of the world's tropical subtropical megacities will remain a priority, as their populations and emissions of pollutants and greenhouse gases are expected to increase significantly.

African Urban Harvest

International Development Research Centre (IDRC) Digital Library (Canada)

Urban Harvest, a system-wide initiative of the Consultative Group on Agricultural ...... and urban old, using criteria of population density, land availability, and the prevalence of crop ...... Contact between milk and containers or the environment;.

Projected Impact of Urban Growth on Climate Change

Science.gov (United States)

Amato, Federico; Murgante, Beniamino; Martellozzo, Federico

2017-04-01

Human activities on land use such as intensive agricultural techniques and urbanization are generating a number of social and economic benefit for contemporary society. Besides, these phenomena are one of the most significant causes of Land Degradation. Firstly, intensive agriculture is on the one hand creating an advantage in the short-period in terms of food production, while on the other is producing serious long-period problems in terms of loss of ecosystem services, including some important for agriculture itself. Secondly, the rapid growth of urban areas in recent decades is generating deep environmental issues. The World Urbanization Prospect by the United Nations (UN) shows that more than half of the world's population today (54%) lives in urban areas. This figure was only 30% in 1950, and estimates are that it will rise to 66% by 2050. Urban growth is responsible for the increase of air pollution, waste production, energy consumption, and land take. Moreover, the expansion of urban areas is making the problem of urban heat islands more relevant, and studies are proving how land cover changes are among the main factors that affect local microclimates. Consequently, territorial planning will play an important role in the fight to mitigate the effects of climate change, as land cover has a significant impact on the energy exchanges between the earth and the atmosphere. This study couples urban growth simulation models based on cellular automata to multiple linear regression techniques that are used to formulate equations for predicting the effects of simulated urban development on soil surface temperature. The proposed methodology is applied to the case study of the Italian national territory, considering various alternative scenarios of land use changes and of their impact on local surface temperatures. The results show that the areas with the greatest urban pressure might be subject to significant climatic changes due to the increased impact of urban heat

Introducing Urban Cultural Heritage Management into Urban Planning Management

Institute of Scientific and Technical Information of China (English)

2008-01-01

<正>1. Concept comparison of urban cultural heritage management and urban planning management 1.1 Urban cultural heritage managementUrban cultural heritage management is an important component of cultural heritage management which is a systematic conser-vation to maintain the cultural value of cul-tural heritages so as to meet the enjoyment demand of the current or future generations. At present, the cultural heritage conserva-tion principles have been defined by many worldwide laws or charters, such as the Venice Charter of ICOMOS, the UNESCO World Heritage Convention, etc., and have been brought into legislation or policies in many countries. The fi nal goal of urban cul-tural heritage management is to find a real sustainable approach to manage heritages, which could benefit the heritages them-selves, the heritage managers and the local communities as well. Cultural heritage man-agement includes the management of urban cultural heritages, that of natural heritages in non-urban areas and that of intangible cultural heritages.1.2 Urban planning managementUrban planning management is a type of urban management. From the practical viewpoint, urban management should be an overall management which includes urban planning management, urban infrastructure and public facility management, urban en-vironment and public order management, etc., takes urban infrastructures and public resources as management object, and ischaracterized by the goal of exerting the comprehensive effects of economy, society and environment. While from the techni-cal viewpoint, urban planning management refers to the planning management executed by urban governments based on the relevant laws and regulations, including the manage-ment of urban land-use and that of different types of constructions. It actually means the organizing, guiding, controlling and coordinating process focusing on different construction projects in cities. The urban cultural heritage mentioned here includes all the physical

Strengthening Rural-Urban Interactions as a Contemporary ...

African Journals Online (AJOL)

The world's population is increasing by around 85 million every year – the equivalent of another Egypt or Mexico, and by 2025 most of the growth is expected to be within urban areas of developing nations. This implies a continuous supply and dependence on raw materials and other infrastructural developments. This study ...

Taking risks on the world wide web: The impact of families and societies on adolescents' risky online behavior

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Notten, N.J.W.R.; Hof, S. van der; Berg, B. van den; Schermer, B.W.

2014-01-01

Children’s engagement in risky online behavior—such as providing personal information or agreeing to meet with a stranger—is an important predictor of whether they will encounter harmful content on the World Wide Web or be confronted with situations such as sexual harassment and privacy violations.

Detection of Urban-Induced Rainfall Anomalies in a Major Coastal City

Science.gov (United States)

Shepherd, J. Marshall; Burian, Steven J.

2002-01-01

Urban heat islands (UHIs) are caused by the heat-retaining properties of surfaces usually found in urban cities like asphalt and concrete. The UHI can typically be observed on the evening TV weather map as warmer temperatures over the downtown of major cities and cooler temperatures in the suburbs and surrounding rural areas. The UHI has now become a widely acknowledged, observed, and researched phenomenon because of its broad environmental and societal implications. Interest in the UHI will intensify in the future as existing urban areas expand and rural areas urbanize. By the year 2025, more than 60% of the world s population will live in cities, with higher percentages expected in developed nations. The urban growth rate in the United States, for example, is estimated to be 12.5%, and the recent 2000 Census found that more than 80% of the population currently lives in urban areas. Furthermore, the U.S. population is not only growing but is tending to concentrate more in urban areas within the environmentally sensitive coastal zones. Urban growth creates unique and often contentious issues for policymakers related to land use zoning, transportation planning, agricultural production, housing and development, pollution, and natural resources protection. Urban expansion and its associated TJHIs also have measurable impacts on weather and climate processes. The UHI has been documented to affect local and regional temperature, wind patterns, and air quality

An obsolete dichotomy? Rethinking the rural–urban interface in terms of food security and production in the global south.

Science.gov (United States)

Lerner, Amy M; Eakin, Hallie

2011-01-01

The global food system is coming under increasing strain in the face of urban population growth. The recent spike in global food prices (2007–08) provoked consumer protests, and raised questions about food sovereignty and how and where food will be produced. Concurrently, for the first time in history the majority of the global population is urban, with the bulk of urban growth occurring in smaller-tiered cities and urban peripheries, or ‘peri-urban’ areas of the developing world. This paper discusses the new emerging spaces that incorporate a mosaic of urban and rural worlds, and reviews the implications of these spaces for livelihoods and food security. We propose a modified livelihoods framework to evaluate the contexts in which food production persists within broader processes of landscape and livelihood transformation in peri-urban locations. Where and how food production persists are central questions for the future of food security in an urbanising world. Our proposed framework provides directions for future research and highlights the role of policy and planning in reconciling food production with urban growth.

Factors influencing the adoption of the World Wide Web for job-seeking in South Africa

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Fernando Pavon

2010-10-01

Full Text Available In the past decade, the use of the World Wide Web (WWW as a tool for job-seeking and recruitment has increased globally, changing the dynamics for job-seekers and recruitment organisations. The purpose of this study was to gain greater insight into the factors that influence the adoption of the Internet (WWW for job-seeking within a South African context. The impact of the Internet (WWW and newspaper-reading habits on the adoption process was of specific interest. Data was gathered by survey through telephonic interviews with 228 job seekers applying for information technology (IT work in Cape Town, South Africa. The findings show that the income of a job-seeker influences the favourability of internet facilitating conditions they encounter. Facilitating conditions in turn influence Internet (WWW usage habits. Such habits influence performance expectancy, effort expectancy and intentions to use the Internet (WWW for job-seeking. The actual extent of Internet (WWW usage for job-seeking is positively influenced by these usage intentions and negatively influenced by newspaper-reading habits. These and other findings are discussed and implications drawn.

Factors influencing the adoption of the World Wide Web for job-seeking in South Africa

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Fernando Pavon

2010-08-01

Full Text Available In the past decade, the use of the World Wide Web (WWW as a tool for job-seeking and recruitment has increased globally, changing the dynamics for job-seekers and recruitment organisations. The purpose of this study was to gain greater insight into the factors that influence the adoption of the Internet (WWW for job-seeking within a South African context. The impact of the Internet (WWW and newspaper-reading habits on the adoption process was of specific interest. Data was gathered by survey through telephonic interviews with 228 job seekers applying for information technology (IT work in Cape Town, South Africa. The findings show that the income of a job-seeker influences the favourability of internet facilitating conditions they encounter. Facilitating conditions in turn influence Internet (WWW usage habits. Such habits influence performance expectancy, effort expectancy and intentions to use the Internet (WWW for job-seeking. The actual extent of Internet (WWW usage for job-seeking is positively influenced by these usage intentions and negatively influenced by newspaper-reading habits. These and other findings are discussed and implications drawn.

Ecology on the edge: landscape and ecology between town and country

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Tjallingii, S.P.

2000-01-01

The trends are world wide: people and goods are increasingly mobile, compact cities develop into urban networks, industrialising agriculture is becoming footloose, rural life becomes urban life in a green setting. Social segregation, traffic nuisance,urban sprawl and other unwanted impacts of these

WebPresent: a World Wide Web-based telepresentation tool for physicians

Science.gov (United States)

Sampath-Kumar, Srihari; Banerjea, Anindo; Moshfeghi, Mehran

1997-05-01

In this paper, we present the design architecture and the implementation status of WebPresent - a world wide web based tele-presentation tool. This tool allows a physician to use a conference server workstation and make a presentation of patient cases to a geographically distributed audience. The audience consists of other physicians collaborating on patients' health care management and physicians participating in continuing medical education. These physicians are at several locations with networks of different bandwidth and capabilities connecting them. Audiences also receive the patient case information on different computers ranging form high-end display workstations to laptops with low-resolution displays. WebPresent is a scalable networked multimedia tool which supports the presentation of hypertext, images, audio, video, and a white-board to remote physicians with hospital Intranet access. WebPresent allows the audience to receive customized information. The data received can differ in resolution and bandwidth, depending on the availability of resources such as display resolution and network bandwidth.

World-Wide Benchmarking of ITER Nb$_{3}$Sn Strand Test Facilities

CERN Document Server

Jewell, MC; Takahashi, Yoshikazu; Shikov, Alexander; Devred, Arnaud; Vostner, Alexander; Liu, Fang; Wu, Yu; Jewell, Matthew C; Boutboul, Thierry; Bessette, Denis; Park, Soo-Hyeon; Isono, Takaaki; Vorobieva, Alexandra; Martovetsky, Nicolai; Seo, Kazutaka

2010-01-01

The world-wide procurement of Nb$_{3}$Sn and NbTi for the ITER superconducting magnet systems will involve eight to ten strand suppliers from six Domestic Agencies (DAs) on three continents. To ensure accurate and consistent measurement of the physical and superconducting properties of the composite strand, a strand test facility benchmarking effort was initiated in August 2008. The objectives of this effort are to assess and improve the superconducting strand test and sample preparation technologies at each DA and supplier, in preparation for the more than ten thousand samples that will be tested during ITER procurement. The present benchmarking includes tests for critical current (I-c), n-index, hysteresis loss (Q(hys)), residual resistivity ratio (RRR), strand diameter, Cu fraction, twist pitch, twist direction, and metal plating thickness (Cr or Ni). Nineteen participants from six parties (China, EU, Japan, South Korea, Russia, and the United States) have participated in the benchmarking. This round, cond...

Remote monitoring using technologies from the Internet and World Wide Web

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Puckett, J.M.; Burczyk, L.

1997-01-01

Recent developments in Internet technologies are changing and enhancing how one processes and exchanges information. These developments include software and hardware in support of multimedia applications on the World Wide Web. In this paper the authors describe these technologies as they have applied them to remote monitoring and show how they will allow the International Atomic Energy Agency to efficiently review and analyze remote monitoring data for verification of material movements. The authors have developed demonstration software that illustrates several safeguards data systems using the resources of the Internet and Web to access and review data. This Web demo allows the user to directly observe sensor data, to analyze simulated safeguards data, and to view simulated on-line inventory data. Future activities include addressing the technical and security issues associated with using the Web to interface with existing and planned monitoring systems at nuclear facilities. Some of these issues are authentication, encryption, transmission of large quantities of data, and data compression

TOGA COARE Satellite data summaries available on the World Wide Web

Science.gov (United States)

Chen, S. S.; Houze, R. A., Jr.; Mapes, B. E.; Brodzick, S. R.; Yutler, S. E.

1995-01-01

Satellite data summary images and analysis plots from the Tropical Ocean Global Atmosphere Coupled Ocean-Atmosphere Response Experiment (TOGA COARE), which were initially prepared in the field at the Honiara Operations Center, are now available on the Internet via World Wide Web browsers such as Mosaic. These satellite data summaries consist of products derived from the Japanese Geosynchronous Meteorological Satellite IR data: a time-size series of the distribution of contiguous cold cloudiness areas, weekly percent high cloudiness (PHC) maps, and a five-month time-longitudinal diagram illustrating the zonal motion of large areas of cold cloudiness. The weekly PHC maps are overlaid with weekly mean 850-hPa wind calculated from the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) global analysis field and can be viewed as an animation loop. These satellite summaries provide an overview of spatial and temporal variabilities of the cloud population and a large-scale context for studies concerning specific processes of various components of TOGA COARE.

Genome-wide diversity and differentiation in New World populations of the human malaria parasite Plasmodium vivax.

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Thais C de Oliveira

2017-07-01

Full Text Available The Americas were the last continent colonized by humans carrying malaria parasites. Plasmodium falciparum from the New World shows very little genetic diversity and greater linkage disequilibrium, compared with its African counterparts, and is clearly subdivided into local, highly divergent populations. However, limited available data have revealed extensive genetic diversity in American populations of another major human malaria parasite, P. vivax.We used an improved sample preparation strategy and next-generation sequencing to characterize 9 high-quality P. vivax genome sequences from northwestern Brazil. These new data were compared with publicly available sequences from recently sampled clinical P. vivax isolates from Brazil (BRA, total n = 11 sequences, Peru (PER, n = 23, Colombia (COL, n = 31, and Mexico (MEX, n = 19.We found that New World populations of P. vivax are as diverse (nucleotide diversity π between 5.2 × 10-4 and 6.2 × 10-4 as P. vivax populations from Southeast Asia, where malaria transmission is substantially more intense. They display several non-synonymous nucleotide substitutions (some of them previously undescribed in genes known or suspected to be involved in antimalarial drug resistance, such as dhfr, dhps, mdr1, mrp1, and mrp-2, but not in the chloroquine resistance transporter ortholog (crt-o gene. Moreover, P. vivax in the Americas is much less geographically substructured than local P. falciparum populations, with relatively little between-population genome-wide differentiation (pairwise FST values ranging between 0.025 and 0.092. Finally, P. vivax populations show a rapid decline in linkage disequilibrium with increasing distance between pairs of polymorphic sites, consistent with very frequent outcrossing. We hypothesize that the high diversity of present-day P. vivax lineages in the Americas originated from successive migratory waves and subsequent admixture between parasite lineages from geographically

Genome-wide diversity and differentiation in New World populations of the human malaria parasite Plasmodium vivax

Science.gov (United States)

de Oliveira, Thais C.; Rodrigues, Priscila T.; Menezes, Maria José; Gonçalves-Lopes, Raquel M.; Bastos, Melissa S.; Lima, Nathália F.; Barbosa, Susana; Gerber, Alexandra L.; Loss de Morais, Guilherme; Berná, Luisa; Phelan, Jody; Robello, Carlos; de Vasconcelos, Ana Tereza R.

2017-01-01

Background The Americas were the last continent colonized by humans carrying malaria parasites. Plasmodium falciparum from the New World shows very little genetic diversity and greater linkage disequilibrium, compared with its African counterparts, and is clearly subdivided into local, highly divergent populations. However, limited available data have revealed extensive genetic diversity in American populations of another major human malaria parasite, P. vivax. Methods We used an improved sample preparation strategy and next-generation sequencing to characterize 9 high-quality P. vivax genome sequences from northwestern Brazil. These new data were compared with publicly available sequences from recently sampled clinical P. vivax isolates from Brazil (BRA, total n = 11 sequences), Peru (PER, n = 23), Colombia (COL, n = 31), and Mexico (MEX, n = 19). Principal findings/Conclusions We found that New World populations of P. vivax are as diverse (nucleotide diversity π between 5.2 × 10−4 and 6.2 × 10−4) as P. vivax populations from Southeast Asia, where malaria transmission is substantially more intense. They display several non-synonymous nucleotide substitutions (some of them previously undescribed) in genes known or suspected to be involved in antimalarial drug resistance, such as dhfr, dhps, mdr1, mrp1, and mrp-2, but not in the chloroquine resistance transporter ortholog (crt-o) gene. Moreover, P. vivax in the Americas is much less geographically substructured than local P. falciparum populations, with relatively little between-population genome-wide differentiation (pairwise FST values ranging between 0.025 and 0.092). Finally, P. vivax populations show a rapid decline in linkage disequilibrium with increasing distance between pairs of polymorphic sites, consistent with very frequent outcrossing. We hypothesize that the high diversity of present-day P. vivax lineages in the Americas originated from successive migratory waves and subsequent admixture between

Analyzing the Effects of Spatial Interaction among City Clusters on Urban Growth—Case of Wuhan Urban Agglomeration

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Ronghui Tan

2016-08-01

Full Text Available For the past two decades, China’s urbanization has attracted increasing attention from scholars around the world. Numerous insightful studies have attempted to determine the socioeconomic causes of the rapid urban growth in Chinese cities. However, most of these studies regarded each city as a single entity, with few considering inter-city relationships. The present study uses a gravity-based model to measure the spatial interaction among city clusters in the Wuhan urban agglomeration (WUA, which is one of China’s most rapidly urbanizing regions. The effects of spatial interaction on urban growth area were also analyzed. Empirical results indicate that, similar to urban population or employment in secondary and tertiary industries in the WUA from 2000 to 2005, the spatial interaction among city clusters is one of the main drivers of urban growth. In fact, this study finds the effects of spatial interaction as the only socioeconomic factor that affected the spatial expansion from 2005 to 2010. This finding suggests that population migration and information and commodity flows showed greater influence than the socioeconomic drivers of each city did on promoting urbanization in the WUA during this period. We thus argue that spatial interaction among city clusters should be a consideration in future regional planning.

Interactive fluka: a world wide web version for a simulation code in proton therapy

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Garelli, S.; Giordano, S.; Piemontese, G.; Squarcia, S.

1998-01-01

We considered the possibility of using the simulation code FLUKA, in the framework of TERA. We provided a window under World Wide Web in which an interactive version of the code is available. The user can find instructions for the installation, an on-line FLUKA manual and interactive windows for inserting all the data required by the configuration running file in a very simple way. The database choice allows a more versatile use for data verification and update, recall of old simulations and comparison with selected examples. A completely new tool for geometry drawing under Java has also been developed. (authors)

Increasing urban water self-sufficiency: New era, new challenges

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Rygaard, Martin; Binning, Philip John; Albrechtsen, Hans-Jørgen

2011-01-01

and 15 in-depth case studies, solutions used to increase water self-sufficiency in urban areas are analyzed. The main drivers for increased self-sufficiency were identified to be direct and indirect lack of water, constrained infrastructure, high quality water demands and commercial and institutional...... pressures. Case studies demonstrate increases in self-sufficiency ratios to as much as 80% with contributions from recycled water, seawater desalination and rainwater collection. The introduction of alternative water resources raises several challenges: energy requirements vary by more than a factor of ten...... amongst the alternative techniques, wastewater reclamation can lead to the appearance of trace contaminants in drinking water, and changes to the drinking water system can meet tough resistance from the public. Public water-supply managers aim to achieve a high level of reliability and stability. We...

The psychological world of adolescence: a comparative evaluation between rural and urban girls.

Science.gov (United States)

Dhoundiyal, Manju; Venkatesh, Renuka

2009-01-01

A cross-sectional study was conducted to get an insight into the psychological world of adolescence and to study the influence of locality and school-going activity on it. The study group comprised of 240 girls in the age group 12-18 years equally representing urban and rural areas. Using two psychological tests, namely Strengths and Difficulty Questionnaire and Health-Related Quality of Life Inventory, the results revealed that two-third of them were in the problematic and borderline category as per SDQ and one-third as per PedsQL. Further, there was a definite linear relationship between the total problem score of both scales. This was irrespective of the locale and school-going activity. The results indicate the need for building psychological infrastructure into the social system to help adolescents girls grow to their potential.

Quality and sensitivity of high-resolution numerical simulation of urban heat islands

Science.gov (United States)

Li, Dan; Bou-Zeid, Elie

2014-05-01

High-resolution numerical simulations of the urban heat island (UHI) effect with the widely-used Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model are assessed. Both the sensitivity of the results to the simulation setup, and the quality of the simulated fields as representations of the real world, are investigated. Results indicate that the WRF-simulated surface temperatures are more sensitive to the planetary boundary layer (PBL) scheme choice during nighttime, and more sensitive to the surface thermal roughness length parameterization during daytime. The urban surface temperatures simulated by WRF are also highly sensitive to the urban canopy model (UCM) used. The implementation in this study of an improved UCM (the Princeton UCM or PUCM) that allows the simulation of heterogeneous urban facets and of key hydrological processes, together with the so-called CZ09 parameterization for the thermal roughness length, significantly reduce the bias (Changing UCMs and PBL schemes does not alter the performance of WRF in reproducing bulk boundary layer temperature profiles significantly. The results illustrate the wide range of urban environmental conditions that various configurations of WRF can produce, and the significant biases that should be assessed before inferences are made based on WRF outputs. The optimal set-up of WRF-PUCM developed in this paper also paves the way for a confident exploration of the city-scale impacts of UHI mitigation strategies in the companion paper (Li et al 2014).

Does urban poverty increase body fluctuating asymmetry?

Science.gov (United States)

Ozener, Bariş

2011-12-01

Perturbations during development leave enduring signs on the adult body. Fluctuating asymmetry (FA) is a good bio-indicator of stress during ontogeny. The aim of this study is to determine the effect of urban poverty on the fluctuating asymmetry of young Turkish males. Young males from a lower socioeconomic group (N = 140, Mean age = 18.17 +/- 0.61) were selected from slum areas of Ankara, the capital of Turkey, where urban poverty is intense. An upper socioeconomic group, on the other hand, consisted of students from two private colleges and included children from some of the richest families in Turkey (N = 120, Mean age = 18.08 +/- 0.54). Eight anthropometric traits of all subjects were measured. Considering the seven measurements demonstrate ideal FA, the individuals living in poor areas of the city displayed higher FA. The discrepancy between the two groups was even greater for a measure of composite FA. In conclusion, poor living conditions in Ankara, where urban poverty is intense, adversely impact the developmental stability of young Turkish males.

Steep increases in tuberculosis notification among young men in the industrialised districts of Danang, Vietnam

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Duc, L. V.; Vree, M.; Sy, D. N.; Co, N. V.; Borgdorff, M. W.; Cobelens, F. G. J.

2007-01-01

BACKGROUND: Tuberculosis (TB) notification is increasing among young adults in urban provinces in Vietnam, despite having achieved World Health Organization targets for treatment success and case detection. OBJECTIVES: To identify causes for non-declining TB case rates in an urban area of Vietnam,

Prioritizing conservation areas for coastal plant diversity under increasing urbanization.

Science.gov (United States)

Doxa, Aggeliki; Albert, Cécile Hélène; Leriche, Agathe; Saatkamp, Arne

2017-10-01

Coastal urban expansion will continue to drive further biodiversity losses, if conservation targets for coastal ecosystems are not defined and met. Prioritizing areas for future protected area networks is thus an urgent task in such urbanization-threatened ecosystems. Our aim is to quantify past and future losses of coastal vegetation priority areas due to urbanization and assess the effectiveness of the existing protected area network for conservation. We conduct a prioritization analysis, based on 82 coastal plants, including common and IUCN red list species, in a highly-urbanized but biotically diverse region, in South-Eastern France. We evaluate the role of protected areas, by taking into account both strict and multi-use areas. We assess the impact of past and future urbanization on high priority areas, by combining prioritization analyses and urbanization models. We show that half of the highly diverse areas have already been lost due to urbanization. Remaining top priority areas are also among the most exposed to future urban expansion. The effectiveness of the existing protected area (PA) network is only partial. While strict PAs coincide well with top priority areas, they only represent less than one third of priority areas. The effectiveness of multi-use PAs, such as the Natura 2000 network, also remains limited. Our approach highlights the impact of urbanization on plant conservation targets. By modelling urbanization, we manage to identify those areas where protection could be more efficient to limit further losses. We suggest to use our approach in the future to expand the PA network in order to achieve the 2020 Aichi biodiversity targets. Copyright © 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

MIMAS, setting the world-wide standard for plutonium recycling

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Vandergheynst Alain; Yvon Vanderborck

2005-01-01

Deployment of MIMAS MOX fuel irradiation started in 1985 with loading and irradiation in French 900 MWe PWR of EDF. A 20-year comprehensive R and D programme preceded it. This success was greatly facilitated by some early strategy advantages: 1) Development and licensing of a 'UO 2 -like' MOX fuel rod fully interchangeable with UO 2 rods; 2) Joint SCK/BN operation of the BR2 (MTR) and BR3 (PWR) reactors, pilot and industrial MOX fuel plants, PIE hot laboratories in the Mol/Dessel site. The period since 1985 saw the occurrence of some concurrent facts, that have incontestably led MIMAS to the world-wide leader position (99 % of actual MOX fuel is MIMAS): 1) BN-MIMAS has been selected by Cogema for its plants MELOX and Cadarache and has demonstrated to be a flexible, scalable, and industrial process. 2) MIMAS has been further selected by JNFL for its Japanese domestic MOX plant (Rokkasho-mura) and by US-DOE for its domestic MOX plant (Savannah-NC) for the disposition of 34-ton weapon-Pu. 3) Satisfactory fabrication and irradiation over 1840 metric tons of MIMAS MOX fuel. In order to face the worldwide on-going electricity market liberalisation, MIMAS makers and vendors must definitely improve the MOX performances to compete with continuously improving UO 2 fuel. The facing of this continuous challenge is also reviewed in the paper. (authors)

Effective utilization of technology to meet the information needs of the world-wide natural gas industry

Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

Markuszewski, R.; Capadocia, S.R.; Worster, C.L.; Kosman, J.E. [IGT (United States)

1997-11-01

Surveys on technical information relevant to the gas industry showed that no single information source was sufficient for all needs, while a number of sources include some pertinent information as part of their mission. The surveys concluded that access was difficult and wide usage of electronic resources had some real as well as some perceived problems. With the availability of the Internet and World Wide Web, many of these difficulties are being overcome. The natural gas industry is moving rapidly toward an era of electronic information with global access to a wide variety of technical, financial, and operational information. The most important sources of technical information are reviewed, and access to resources is briefly described. Cost comparison, relevancy, ease of use, and other factors are also discussed. The current status and future developments of gas industry information resources and technology are addressed in terms of emerging technologies and management issues which will bring critical information to the desktop of engineers, planners, and marketers. (au)

Monetary, Subjective and Quantitative Approaches to Assess Urban Quality of Life and Pleasantness in Cities : (Hedonic Price, Willingness-to-pay, Positional Value, Life Satisfaction, Isobenefit Lines)

NARCIS (Netherlands)

L. D'Acci (Luca)

2013-01-01

textabstractThe magnitude increase of Urban Quality of Life studies is directly connected with the increase of the urban population in the world. Urban Quality of Life is a hierarchical multi-attribute concept whose attributes can be defined and evaluated by several kinds of methods such as

Sea surface temperature data from a world wide distribution from 01 January 1971 to 31 December 2000 (NODC Accession 0000712)

Data.gov (United States)

National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Department of Commerce — Sea surface temperature data were collected in a world wide distribution from January 1, 1971 to December 31, 2000. Data were submitted by Japan Meteorological...

Effects of urbanization on carnivore species distribution and richness

Science.gov (United States)

Ordenana, Miguel A.; Crooks, Kevin R.; Boydston, Erin E.; Fisher, Robert N.; Lyren, Lisa M.; Siudyla, Shalene; Haas, Christopher D.; Harris, Sierra; Hathaway, Stacie A.; Turschak, Greta M.; Miles, A. Keith; Van Vuren, Dirk H.

2010-01-01

Urban development can have multiple effects on mammalian carnivore communities. We conducted a meta-analysis of 7,929 photographs from 217 localities in 11 camera-trap studies across coastal southern California to describe habitat use and determine the effects of urban proximity (distance to urban edge) and intensity (percentage of area urbanized) on carnivore occurrence and species richness in natural habitats close to the urban boundary. Coyotes (Canis latrans) and bobcats (Lynx rufus) were distributed widely across the region. Domestic dogs (Canis lupus familiaris), striped skunks (Mephitis mephitis), raccoons (Procyon lotor), gray foxes (Urocyon cinereoargenteus), mountain lions (Puma concolor), and Virginia opossums (Didelphis virginiana) were detected less frequently, and long-tailed weasels (Mustela frenata), American badgers (Taxidea taxus), western spotted skunks (Spilogale gracilis), and domestic cats (Felis catus) were detected rarely. Habitat use generally reflected availability for most species. Coyote and raccoon occurrence increased with both proximity to and intensity of urbanization, whereas bobcat, gray fox, and mountain lion occurrence decreased with urban proximity and intensity. Domestic dogs and Virginia opossums exhibited positive and weak negative relationships, respectively, with urban intensity but were unaffected by urban proximity. Striped skunk occurrence increased with urban proximity but decreased with urban intensity. Native species richness was negatively associated with urban intensity but not urban proximity, probably because of the stronger negative response of individual species to urban intensity.

Status and Trends of Nuclear Power World-wide

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Gueorguiev, B.; Spiegelberg-Planer, R.

1996-01-01

The reliable and adequate supply of energy, especially electricity, is necessary not only for economic development but to enhance the quality of life. Nuclear power is a proven technology which already supplies about 17% of the world''s electricity generation. In 1995, seven countries produce more than 40% of their electricity from nuclear power plants: Lithuanian, France, Belgium, Sweden, Bulgaria, Slovak and Hungary. It is quite clear that many countries are heavily reliant on nuclear power and are well beyond the point where nuclear power could be replaced by some other source, so, nuclear power remains one of the few technologically proven, economically promising and environmentally benign energy sources. An important factor in the continued development of nuclear power is the extent to which nuclear generated electricity remains economically competitive. Factors such as plant availability, standardisation of systems, components and equipment, as well as the cost of equipment to meet safety and environmental regulations play also an important role in determining the relative competitiveness of nuclear power plants. Many operating organizations have already impressive results in the reduction of plant unavailability. The number of nuclear power plants currently operating with annual availability factor exceeding 85% is increasing. Good performance of some operators should establish performance targets for operators everywhere. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has the only international and almost complete information system, the Power Reactor Information System (PRIS) with nuclear power plant status and performance data. This paper presents the current status of nuclear power plants, according to information contained in the IAEA. It discusses the plant performance indicators available in PRIS and the improvement trend in the performance of nuclear power plants based on these indicators. It also presents the future trends of nuclear power focusing

Globalising Dublin: indicators of an urban society in transition

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Niamh M. Moore

2004-12-01

Full Text Available Globalisation – political, economic or cultural - is controlled from, but is simultaneously shaping, urban places. Much of the recent research on globalisation and urban transformati-on has focused on the emergence of an international urban system. Within this system, the role and place of Dublin has been highly contested. This is due in part to the unique way in which the city has attempted to re-position itself within a global framework, but is also due to the difficulty in defining what actually constitutes a world city. Friedmann (1986 argues that one of the key characteristics of these places is that they become destination points for both domestic and international migrants, while Sassen (1991 argues that they are typified by significant socio-spatial polarisation. This paper examines some of the ways in which Dublin, a former peripheral city in global terms, is becoming increasingly embedded in the global urban system. It highlights how the city is beginning to exemplify many of the eco-nomic, social and cultural characteristics associated with ‘world cities’ and discusses a suitable framework for understanding this transition.

World population trends in 1960-70.

Science.gov (United States)

Tabah, L; Kono, S

1974-01-01

The rapid rise in world population for the 4 periods 1950-1955, 1955 -1960, 1960-1965, and 1965-1970 is mainly due to a decline in the crude death rate from 24/1000 in 1950-1955 to 16.1/1000 in 1965-1970. 1950 was a turning-point in mortality rates because for the first time public health measures became widely available in less developed regions. These less developed regions contained 63.4% of the world population in 1930, 65.5% in 1950, and 70.0% in 1970. World population increased by 22% in 1960-1970, compared to 20% in 1950-1960, which was twice as much as the 20% registered for the 20 years 1930-1950. Developed regions contributed a 14% increase between 1950-1960 and 12% between 1960-1970; in less developed regions the increases were 23% and 27% respectively. Demographic conferences have begun to neglect mortality, but this is still a vital part of total population growth. Evidence is that the mortality decline in less developed countries is beginning to level off so that previous population projections may not be reached. What decline has been seen in crude birth rates in less developed countries is largely attributable to declines in East Asia, notably in the People's Republic of China, Republic of Korea, and other Chinese or Chinese culture-related populations, as well as some of the smaller Latin American countries and some small islands off Africa. Such demographic giants as India, Indonesia, Pakistan, and sub-Saharan Africa have shown little change. In areas with high fertility there are more mothers under age 20 and more births to women over age 35 while in low-fertility areas births are concentrated in the 20-35 year groups. An interesting example is Japan which has 50% of its births to mothers 25-29 years of age. Less developed countries have a larger proportion o f the population under age 14 while developed countries which have had lower fertility for a number of years have larger numbers in the older age groups. In less developed areas the greatest

Urban Ecology: Patterns of Population Growth and Ecological Effects

Science.gov (United States)

Wayne C. Zipperer; Steward T.A. Pickett

2012-01-01

Currently, over 50% of the world’s population lives in urban areas. By 2050, this estimate is expected to be 70%. This urban growth, however, is not uniformly distributed around the world. The majority of it will occur in developing nations and create megacities whose populations exceed at least 10 million people. Not all urban areas, however, are growing. Some are...

More Livable Urban Space for Children: Practices around the World

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Okşan TANDOĞAN

2014-02-01

Full Text Available Rather than by any personal or mental features, a child’s behaviour is shaped by the spaces he/she occupies, namely his/her physical environment. In this context, urban open spaces such as the immediate surroundings of the home, the school garden and playground, all of which constitute the child’s physical environment and the spaces the child interacts in, are of great importance in the formation of the child as a member of society, and his/her socialization and development. In light of the role it plays in child development, making the physical environment more livable for children has become crucial, particularly in northern European countries, and various studies, projects and practices are being realised in these countries. Foremost among these studies are Child Friendly City initiatives. Other studies and practices may be analysed under headings such as street, school garden, playgrounds and the child’s transportation between school and home. In this study, the aim is to highlight the importance of physical environment for children, and, in this context, to put together a literature study related to applied and on-going studies and practices around the world in the effort to make the physical environment more livable for children.

SOCIO - DEMOGRAPHIC PROFILE OF OLD AGE PEOPLE LIVING IN URBAN & URBAN SLUM AREAS IN MAHARASHTRA, KARAD: A COMPARATIVE STUDY

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Leena Rahul Salunkhe

2015-01-01

Full Text Available NTRODUCTION: Aging refers to normal, progressive and irreversible biological changes that occur over an individual’s life span. The advancement of medical science and increased awareness among the people has brought about a sharp decline in mortality and a steady decline in fertility. This has resulted in a worldwide shift in the demographic profile and has led to significant increase in the aged population. About two thirds of all older people are concentrated in the developing world. OBJECTIVES: to study & compare socio - demographic variables of old age people living in Urban & Urban slum areas. MATERIAL & METHODS: all the old age people living in urb a n slum area & rando mly selected one urban area of K arad town were interviewed by using pre structured proforma about socio - demographic variable & compared with each other. OBSERVATIONS: Total 153 from urban & 135 from urban slum were enrolled for the study. Nearly 2/3 rd subjects were above age 65yrs in both areas with more female proportions in slum area than urban area. Significant difference was found with education, occupation & socio - economic status in both areas. CONCLUSION: Ageing is a universal phenomenon, with advanced fertility control, improvement in health and social services life expectancy has increased. Ageing has profound effect on the individual status in the family, the work force, goals and organization of health, social services, policies and practices of the government

Micronutrient deficiency in urban Indonesia.

Science.gov (United States)

Gross, R; Schultink, W

1997-06-01

The economic situation of Indonesia is characterized by a large increase in the gross national product which has been on average 7% annually during the last ten years. This was accompanied by rapid urbanization. With the economic improvement, "First World" and "Third World" health and nutrition problems are coexisting in Indonesia. In 1992, the most common of death cause was cardiovascular disease whereas tuberculosis was the second ranking. About 40% of the preschool children are stunted. The main stable food and energy source is rice, although the urban population has a more diverse food pattern than the rural population. In Jakarta, many children receive too late colostrum feeding and mothers are not aware about the importance of correct breastfeeding practices after delivery. Three studies had shown that about one fifth of preschool children and one fourth of elderly take micronutrient supplements. Nevertheless, micronutrient deficiencies are prevalent in Jakarta. About one third of women suffer from moderate vitamin A deficiency (plasma retinol middle class to spend more time and money to solve their own problems.

Countering urban segregation: Theoretical policy innovation from around the globe

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Smets, P.G.S.M.; Salman, A.J.

2008-01-01

New forms of urban segregation and exclusion have emerged in the contemporary globalised world. Processes of globalisation, especially those cloaked as free international trade and state withdrawal from economics, have led to increasing inequalities between and within cities. In response, the state,

More than 500 million Chinese urban residents (14% of the global urban population) are imperiled by fine particulate hazard.

Science.gov (United States)

He, Chunyang; Han, Lijian; Zhang, Robin Q

2016-11-01

China's urbanization and the subsequent public vulnerability to degenerated environment is important to global public health. Among the environmental problems, fine particulate (PM 2.5 ) pollution has become a serious hazard in rapidly urbanizing China. However, quantitative information remains inadequate. We thus collected PM 2.5 concentrations and population census records, to illustrate the spatial patterns and changes in the PM 2.5 hazard levels in China, and to quantify public vulnerability to the hazard during 2000-2010, following the air quality standards of World Health Organization. We found that 28% (2.72 million km 2 ) of China's territory, including 78% of cities (154 cities) with a population of >1 million, was exposed to PM 2.5 hazard in 2010; a 15% increase (1.47 million km 2 ) from 2000 to 2010. The hazards potentially impacted the health of 72% of the total population (942 million) in 2010, including 70% of the young (206 million) and 76% of the old (71 million). This was a significant increase from the 42% of total the population (279 million) exposed in 2000. Of the total urban residents, 76% (501 million) were affected in 2010. Along with PM 2.5 concentration increase, massive number of rural to urban migration also contributed greatly to China's urban public health vulnerability. Copyright © 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Environment, urban poverty and scavenging: review of relationship and its effectiveness

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Chamhuri Siwar; Amzad Hossain; Norshamleeda Chamhuri

2001-01-01

Urban poverty and environment is interrelated to each other. Environmental degradation is a crucial factor for urban poverty and vice-versa. The generation of solid waste all over the world has reached an alarming proportion and constitutes one of the world's greatest sources of environmental degradation (fagan, 1974). Solid waste is one of the three major environmental problems faced by municipalities in Malaysia (World Bank, 1993) which is one of the major cause or contributor to urban poverty. However, urban solid waste consists of two strata such as source of environmental degradation and income generating agents for urban poor scavengers. In Malaysia, full-time and part-time scavengers are recycling 6% of total generated residential solid waste in some selected areas other wise its emitted or disposed to the environment. On the other hand, by doing this work full-time scavengers are earning wages of RM750 per month which is equal to that of the majority of Third world urbanities; part-time scavengers are earning 33% of their daily income. This paper discusses a theoretical framework of the relationship of environment and urban poverty. Policies, issues and some case studies of scavenging as a means of urban poverty reduction and environmental improvements of sustainable urban development are also explored. (Author)

Impact of urbanization on inflows and water quality of rawal lake

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Awais, M.; Afzal, M.

2016-01-01

Two phenomena playing important role in affecting water resources all over the world are: urbanization and climate changes. Urban and peri-urban water bodies are very vulnerable to these phenomena in terms of quality and quantity protection. This study was aimed to perceive the impact of ever-increasing urbanization on water quality in the catchment area of Rawal Lake. Rawal Lake supplies water for domestic use to Rawalpindi city and Cantonment area. The water was found biologically unfit for human consumption due to total and faecal coliforms counts higher than WHO limits. Similarly, turbidity and calcium was more than WHO standards. There should be detailed study on climate change parallel to urbanization in the Rawal catchment to quantify its impacts on water quality and inflows. (author)

Enhanced photosynthetic efficiency in trees world-wide by rising atmospheric CO2 levels

Science.gov (United States)

Ehlers, Ina; Wieloch, Thomas; Groenendijk, Peter; Vlam, Mart; van der Sleen, Peter; Zuidema, Pieter A.; Robertson, Iain; Schleucher, Jürgen

2014-05-01

signals is a fundamental advantage of isotopomer ratios (Augusti et al., Chem. Geol 2008). These results demonstrate that increasing [CO2] has reduced the ratio of photorespiration to photosynthesis on a global scale. Photorespiration is a side reaction that decreases the C gain of plants; the suppression of photorespiration in all analyzed trees indicates that increasing atmospheric [CO2] is enhancing the photosynthetic efficiency of trees world-wide. The consensus response of the trees agrees with the response of annual plants in greenhouse experiments, with three important conclusions. First, the generality of the isotopomer shift confirms that the CO2 response reflects the ratio of photosynthesis to photorespiration, and that it creates a robust signal in tree rings. Second, the agreement between greenhouse-grown plants and trees indicates that there has not been an acclimation response of the trees during the past centuries. Third, the results show that the regulation of tree gas exchange has during past centuries been governed by the same rules as observed in manipulative experiments, in contradiction to recent reports (Keenan et al., Nature 2013).

Increasing STEM Competence in Urban, High Poverty Elementary School Populations

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Sueanne McKinney

2017-10-01

Full Text Available Enhancing STEM competence (e.g., interests, knowledge, skills, and dispositions among urban, high poverty, elementary school populations in the United States (U.S. is and remains a growing national concern, especially since Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM competence is and will continue to be a necessary requisite for gainful employment in the future, according to workforce development experts. In an attempt to address this gap, many urban elementary schools have begun to offer STEM-related programs to increase STEM learning at an early age. STEM competence (interest, knowledge, skills, and dispositions, however, remains low. This paper results in a matrix used to analyze children's fictional literary selections and a model that argues that elementary teachers, as the first point of contact with young students, can affect STEM competence. By adopting a more culturally responsive pedagogy that attends to the 21st Century Learning Skills and the Next Generation Science Standards, teachers can choose literature that serves to excite and reinforce STEM learning.

Better Urban Practice

Institute of Scientific and Technical Information of China (English)

YUAN YUAN

2010-01-01

@@ Greek philosopher Aristotle once said,"People come to cities for a living,and live in cities for a better life."The Urban Best Practices Area(UBPA)of the World Expo in Shanghai illustrates this year's Expo:For the first time,cities are provided with a chance to participate in the World Expo as independent players.

Growing ‘Smart’? Urbanization Processes in the Pune Urban Agglomeration

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Carsten Butsch

2017-12-01

Full Text Available The Indian city of Pune witnessed rapid growth and deep transformation processes in the last three decades. This paper assesses past developments and recent structures and processes against the concept of urban sustainability. Following an overview of the historical development, the dimensions of sustainability are discussed separately, based on empirical findings. Urban growth puts enormous pressure on Pune’s land and water resources, changing the ecology of the area. The increasing water demand of Pune’s growing population competes with growing energy and water demands. An assessment of future climate change impacts indicates that the storage capacity of the reservoirs is more frequently not met during the rainy season. In addition, extreme dry years can aggravate the effects of land use change on water resources in the future. The city’s growth and especially the large in-migration has also changed Pune’s social fabric significantly. Wealth is distributed unevenly in the city and social disparities can be observed along two fault lines, namely along classes and caste groups. The population development and the increasing socioeconomic polarization are linked to the economic development of the city. Pune’s formal economy has a robust base. However, as in many cities of the Global South, the informal economy is the most relevant source of income for large parts of the population. Pune’s development is challenged by informality, poor infrastructure and inadequate planning and governance. Recently new approaches towards urban renewal and smart city development were launched. These new approaches aim at overcoming blockades in the traditional planning. A special challenge for urban planning is the transformation of urban fringe areas of the city, as this process is currently taking place in an unsustainable manner. The paper concludes that urban development has to become holistic, integrative and participative and should abandon the

The world food situation: New driving forces and required actions [In Chinese

OpenAIRE

von Braun, Joachim

2008-01-01

"The world food situation is currently being rapidly redefined by new driving forces. Income growth, climate change, high energy prices, globalization, and urbanization are transforming food consumption, production, and markets. The influence of the private sector in the world food system, especially the leverage of food retailers, is also rapidly increasing. Changes in food availability, rising commodity prices, and new producer–consumer linkages have crucial implications for the livelihoods...