BACKGROUND We examined the relationship between overweight in preschool children and three environmental factors--the proximity of the children's residences to playgrounds and to fast food restaurants and the safety of the children's neighborhoods. We hypothesized that children who lived farther from playgrounds, closer to fast food restaurants, and in unsafe neighborhoods were more likely to b...

Many mission-critical wireless sensor network applications must resolve the inherent conflict between the tight resource constraints on each sensor node, particularly in terms of energy, with the need to achieve desired quality of service such as end-to-end real-time performance. To address this challenge we propose the Real-time Power-Aware Routing (RPAR) protocol. RPAR achieves required commu...

The number and the size of spatial databases, e.g. for geomarketing, traffic control or environmental studies, are rapidly growing which results in an increasing need for spatial data mining. In this paper, we present new algorithms for spatial characterization and spatial trend analysis. For spatial characterization it is important that class membership of a database object is not only determi...

BACKGROUND Assessing neighborhood vitality is important to understanding how to improve quality of life and health outcomes. The ecocity model recognizes that cities are part of natural systems and favors walkable neighborhoods. This article introduces ecocity mapping, an innovative planning method, to the public health literature on community engagement by describing a pilot project with a new...

BACKGROUND Hierarchical spatial models enable the geographic and ecological analysis of health data thereby providing useful information for designing effective health interventions. In this study, we used a Bayesian hierarchical spatial model to evaluate mortality data in Vietnam. The model enabled identification of socio-ecological risk factors and generation of risk maps to better understand...

Community capacity is used to monitor socioeconomic development. It is composed of a number of dimensions that can be measured to understand issues possibly arising in the implementation of a policy or of a project targeting a community. Measuring these dimensions is thus highly valuable for policymakers and local administrator, though expensive and time consuming. To address this issue, we eva...

participation of people in their cities and neighborhoods has always been emphasized by researchers and experts in order to improve the quality of citizens’ life and having efficient urban management. however, it seems that providing participation contexts at local level by citizens needs preparations and substrates that facilitate participation. in the meantime, establishing a neighborhood man...

The use of localization mechanism is essential in wireless sensor networks either for communication protocols (geographic routing protocol) or for application (vehicle tracking). The goal of localization mechanism is to determine either precisely or coarsely the node location using either a global reference (GPS) or a locale one. In this work, we introduce a new localized algorithm which classi...

We deal with a way of realizing real-time communications required by a distributed interactive simulation (DIS), using multipoint communication technics. These technics would be the basic principles of the data distributed management (DDM) of the simulation tool. We focus here on a classical interactive game between participants distributed on a geographic map, where each participant is associa...

β-skeletons, a prominent member of the neighborhood graph family, have interesting geometric properties and various applications ranging from geographic networks to archeology. This paper focuses on developing a new, more general than the present one, definition of β-skeletons based only on the distance criterion. It allows us to consider them in many different cases, e.g. for weighted graphs o...