Cryptosporidium and Giardia pose a threat to human health in rural environments where water supplies are commonly untreated and susceptible to contamination from agricultural animal waste/manure, animal wastewater, septic tank effluents and septage. Our goals for this paper are to: (1) explore the prevalence of these protozoan parasites, where they are found, in what quantities, and which genot...

The signals that are available for navigation depend on the environment. To operate reliably in a wide range of different environments, a navigation system is required to adopt different techniques based on the environmental contexts. In this paper, an environmental context detection framework is proposed, building the foundation of a context adaptive navigation system. Different land environme...

BACKGROUND Healthier urban environments influence the distribution of cardiovascular risk factors. Our aim was to design and implement a multicomponent method based on Geographic Information Systems to characterize and evaluate environmental correlates of obesity: the food and the physical activity urban environments. METHODS Study location comprised a socio-demographically average urban area...

Recent research has demonstrated how scavenging, the act of consuming dead animals, plays a key role in ecosystem structure, functioning, and stability. A growing number of studies suggest that vertebrate scavengers also provide key ecosystem services, the benefits humans gain from the natural world, particularly in the removal of carcasses from the environment. An increasing proportion of the ...

In a companion paper, the authors presented a formulation and evaluation of an urban parameterization designed to represent the urban energy balance in the Community Land Model. Here the robustness of the model is tested through sensitivity studies and the model’s ability to simulate urban heat islands in different environments is evaluated. Findings show that heat storage and sensible heat flu...

The rapidly increasing number of so-called media façades is one prominent example of how new digital technologies are augmenting urban environments. The majority of media façades covers most of the outer shell of a building, which gives them a 3D form factor. Due to their size and visibility, as well as the dynamic public urban environment they are usually situated in, they offer great potentia...

Modelling Large Urban Environments using traditional modelling techniques would prove too time consuming a process. Consequently a method is required for generating large urban environments quickly without requiring a labour intensive process or expensive data. Some approaches to resolve this problem have been undertaken through the use of procedural modelling or statistics. However the test su...

The Autonomous City Explorer (ACE) project aims to create a robot capable of navigating unknown urban environments without the use of GPS data or prior map knowledge. The robot finds its way by interacting with pedestrians and building a topological representation of its surroundings. This paper outlines the necessary ingredients for successful low-level navigation on sidewalks, information ret...

In November 2007 the international competition DARPA Urban Challenge took place on the former George Airforce Base in Victorville, California to significantly promote the research and development on autonomously driving vehicles for urban environments. In the final race only eleven out of initially 89 competitors participated and “Boss” from Carnegie Mellon University succeeded. This paper summ...

Housing and urban environments represent the physical context for everyday life and have a significant impact on population health and well-being. Depending on the quality of housing and urban conditions, they can support or restrict the health of their residents through a variety of aspects such as air pollution, noise, thermal conditions, safety aspects and environmental contamination. Theref...