This vignette describes gdistance, an R package which provides functionality to calculate various distance measures and routes in heterogeneous geographic spaces represented as grids. Distances are fundamental to geospatial analysis (Tobler 1970). The most commonly used geographic distance measure is the great-circle distance, which represents the shortest line between two points, taking into a...

Offshore software development projects provoke new issues to the collaborative endeavor of software development due to their global distribution and involvement of various people, processes, and tools. These problems relate to the geographical distance and the associated time-zone differences; cultural, organizational, and process issues; as well as language problems. However, existing tool sup...

Background. Male involvement is an important determinant of prevention of mother-to-child transmission of HIV. However, male involvement in prevention of mother-to-child transmission of HIV in Ethiopia is not well known. Objectives. To assess male partners involvement in prevention of mother-to-child transmission of HIV and associated factors in Arba Minch town and Arba Minch Zuria woreda. Meth...

Accessibility to healthcare service providers, the quantity, and the quality of them are important for national health. In this study, we focused on geographic accessibility to estimate and evaluate future demand and supply of healthcare services. We constructed a simulation model called the patient access area model (PAAM), which simulates patients' access time to healthcare service institutio...

BACKGROUND Access to health care can be described along four dimensions: geographic accessibility, availability, financial accessibility and acceptability. Geographic accessibility measures how physically accessible resources are for the population, while availability reflects what resources are available and in what amount. Combining these two types of measure into a single index provides a me...

INTRODUCTION Iran introduced the urban family physician reform, based on the primary healthcare (PHC) approach, in 2012. The reform is restricted to two pilot provinces, which are Fars and Mazandaran and its policymakers request evidence of the reform progress. The study aimed to determine the accessibility of health care in the two pilot sites. METHODS A cross-sectional study using Primary C...

This paper presents minisum and minimax location problems for helicopter emergency medical service (HEMS) systems. Given demand points (origins) and hospitals (destinations), the locations of rendezvous points and helicopter stations are selected to minimize the total demand-weighted transport time (minisum objective) and the maximum transport time (minimax objective) to a hospital. Rendezvous ...

Note to Readers: This paper's pagination is " off " (relative to the original and to the Table of Contents shown here), and its graphics are disfigured. These problems are due to the document's original creation in WordPerfect and later retrieval into Word 97. Please see Transportation Research Record 1607 for a short version of this paper, and please see the original thesis (at the U.C. Berkel...

a place-name or a toponym is a word used to indicate, denote or identify a geographic locality. place-names are formed in the course of history of a region and are affected by various linguistic, social, political and cultural events. toponymy is the taxonomic study of place-names, based on etymological, historical and geographical information. this paper first defines toponym and topnymy and i...