BACKGROUND Over the past two decades, major epidemics of hand, foot, and mouth disease (HFMD) have occurred throughout most of the West-Pacific Region countries, causing thousands of deaths among children. However, few studies have examined potential determinants of the incidence of HFMD. METHODS Reported HFMD cases from 2912 counties in China were obtained for May 2008. The monthly HFMD cumu...

Soil organic carbon stock plays a key role in the global carbon cycle and the precision agriculture. Visible and near-infrared reflectance spectroscopy (VNIRS) can directly reflect the internal physical construction and chemical substances of soil. The partial least squares regression (PLSR) is a classical and highly commonly used model in constructing soil spectral models and predicting soil p...

A 0 A0, so that Dov = Aov + μ obeys the GWR (for μ in some allowed interval). The standard Neuberger fermion uses the Wilson operator D0 = DW [4]. The guide-line for our concept to improve overlap fermions [5] is the following observation: ifD0 is already a GW fermion (with respect to a fixed kernel R), then Dov = D0. We can explicitly construct an approximate solution to the GWR, use it as D0,...

BACKGROUND Geographically weighted regression (GWR) is a modelling technique designed to deal with spatial non-stationarity, e.g., the mean values vary by locations. It has been widely used as a visualization tool to explore the patterns of spatial data. However, the GWR tends to produce unsmooth surfaces when the mean parameters have considerable variations, partly due to that all parameter es...

Numerous studies have identified associations between the surface urban heat island (SUHI) effect (i.e., SUHI, hereinafter is referred to as UHI) and urban growth, particularly changes in land cover patterns. This research questions their causal links to answer a key policy question: If cities restrict urban expansion and encourage people to live within existing urban areas, will that help in c...