It is a great pleasure for me to attend the Fourth Annual Forum on City Informatization in the Asian-Pacific Region while having this opportunity to exchange views with the distinguished guests. IT Promotes Development, the theme of the annual forum which fully reveals the significance of sustainable development of informatization and its role in the development. This is a theme which attracts ...

Due to the rapid growth of economy in China, the amount of water usage has increased dramatically in many major cities. The over exploitation of underground water in the north region of China causes severe urban subsidence over last 3 decades. The conventional surveying methods have been used to monitor the subsidence. It is, however, very challenging to identify the coverage of the subsidence ...

land vulnerable to desertification increased in the mediterranean basin since world war ii dueto several interacting factors including climate variations, land-use changes and growing human pressure. itwas hypothesized that the increase in the level of land vulnerability is not distributed homogeneously overtime and space while impacting preferentially landscapes surrounding large urban agglome...

Passive and composite sampling in combination with in vitro bioassays and identification and quantification of individual chemicals were applied to characterize pollution by compounds with several specific modes of action in urban area in the basin of two rivers, with 400,000 inhabitants and a variety of industrial activities. Two types of passive samplers, semipermeable membrane devices (SPMD)...

The brown widow spider, Latrodectus geometricus C. L. Koch, has become newly established in southern California during the first decade of the 21st century. Brown widows and egg sacs were collected within the urban Los Angeles Basin using timed searches. We also collected and compared the abundance and distribution of the native western black widow spider, Latrodectus hesperus Chamberlin & Ivie...

This paper describes genetic subtypes of HIV-1 found in blood samples from 31 HIV-1-infected people who visited the Counseling and Testing AIDS Center of Instituto de Medicina Tropical in Manaus, Brazil. Manaus, the main city in Brazil's Amazon Basin, is also the closest urban connection for more than 100,000 Indians living in the rain forests of this region. Although to date there is no eviden...

Non-point sources of pollution are difficult to identify and control, and are one of the main reasons that urban rivers fail to reach the water quality objectives set for them. Whilst sustainable drainage systems (SuDS) are available to help combat this diffuse pollution, they are mostly installed in areas of new urban development. However, SuDS must also be installed in existing built areas if...

Data from the urban renewal experience in Syracuse, New York are used to examine the impact of race on patterns of intra-urban migration. The results show that, overall, the migration patterns exhibited an exponential decay in frequency with increasing distance. Both blacks and whites display this pattern, but blacks tend to cluster more closely around the point of origin. Indirect evidence is ...