The landscape pattern of Daqing city, China has undergone a significant change in 1990–2000 as a result of the rapid urbanization process. The focus of this paper is to quantitatively capture landscape pattern and its spatial dynamics of Daqing city at the landscape level over the 10 years span. A traditional supervised classification (maximum likelihood classification) was carried out on Daqin...

This paper develops a method for appraising health status in elderly people. A frailty index was defined as the proportion of accumulated deficits (symptoms, signs, functional impairments, and laboratory abnormalities). It serves as an individual state variable, reflecting severity of illness and proximity to death. In a representative database of elderly Canadians we found that deficits accumu...

was associated with a 28% lower risk of death even after these factors, as well as depression and health behaviors, had been taken into account. Other factors may be responsible for the remaining association between enjoyment and survival. It may be caused by unmeasured confounding factors such as other pre-existing illnesses. Only 3 health behaviors were assessed, and other aspects such as die...

Sensor measurement uncertainty has never been fully considered in prior appraisals of global average surface air temperature. The estimated average ±0.2 C station error has been incorrectly assessed as random, and the systematic error from uncontrolled variables has been invariably neglected. The systematic errors in measurements from three ideally sited and maintained temperature sensors are c...