BACKGROUND Childhood asthma prevalence has been shown to be higher in urban communities overall without an understanding of differences by neighborhood. OBJECTIVE To characterize the geographic variability of childhood asthma prevalence among neighborhoods in Chicago. METHODS Asthma screening was conducted among children attending 105 Chicago schools as part of the Chicago Initiative to Rai...

Data generated on location-aware social media provide rich information about the places (shopping malls, restaurants, cafés, etc) where citizens spend their time. That information can, in turn, be used to describe city neighborhoods in terms of the activity that takes place therein. For example, the data might reveal that citizens visit one neighborhood mainly for shopping, while another for it...

Anonymous database search protocols allow users to query a database anonymously. This can be achieved by letting the users form a peerto-peer community and post queries on behalf of each other. In this article we discuss an application of combinatorial configurations (also known as regular and uniform partial linear spaces) to a protocol for anonymous database search, as defining the key-distri...

Many societal decision problems lie in high-dimensional continuous spaces not amenable to the voting techniques common for their discrete or single-dimensional counterparts. These problems are typically discretized before running an election or decided upon through negotiation by representatives. We propose a meta-algorithm called Iterative Local Voting for collective decision-making in this se...

BACKGROUND The probable coexistence of two or more epidemiological profiles in urban Africa is poorly documented. In particular, very few studies have focused on the comparison of cause-specific mortality between two types of neighborhoods that characterize contemporary southern cities: formal neighborhoods, that is, structured or delineated settlements (planned estates) that have full access t...

Growing tendency for Urbanization and rapid development of the cities has resulted in urban neighborhoods obstructing the access of each other to the natural sources e.g. solar energy, natural ventilation. Sunlight as the main part of input energy in urban energy balance equation and natural lighting is of vital importance. This paper attempts to achieve an optimum morphology for residential bl...

let $mathcal{r}$ be a  commutative ring with identity, let $a$ and $b$ be two $mathcal{r}$-algebras and $varphi:blongrightarrow a$ be an $mathcal{r}$-additive algebra homomorphism. we introduce a new algebra $atimes_varphi b$, and give some basic properties of this algebra. generalized $2$-cocycle derivations on $atimes_varphi b$ are studied. accordingly, $atimes_varphi b$ is considered from th...

the goal of this work is to present a case study demonstrator, presenting the field trial experience while extending network connectivity services in the campus, by enabling SDN-based equipment and coexisting with legacy hardware. The demonstrator aims to show the benefits of gradually adopting SDN technologies. This adoption will also improve and provide added value to traditional campus conne...

Numerous methods based on square rasters have been proposed for polygon generalization. However, these ignore the inconsistent distance measurement among neighborhoods of squares, which may result in an imbalanced generalization different directions. As alternative raster, a hexagon has consistent connectivity and isotropic neighborhoods. This study hexagon-based method using morphological oper...