What is the Internet doing to local community? Analysts have debated about whether the Internet is weakening community by leading people away from meaningful in-person contact; transforming community by creating new forms of community online; or enhancing community by adding a new means of connecting with existing relationships. They have been especially concerned that the globe-spanning capabi...

In metropolitan areas of China, farmland functions have undergone tremendous changes due to rapid urbanization and rising income per capita in the past three decades. This study examines tempo-spatial changes in the farmland functions, using a case study of the Beijing metropolitan area. The results indicate that: (1) during the past three decades, agricultural production experienced two transi...

In regards to “suburb,” many Americans have strong cultural ideas of what constitutes a “suburb.” The typical image includes post-World War II tract housing built for car-owning families, cul de sacs, and shopping malls. Yet, suburbs are actually extremely heterogeneous in their demographic composition, economy, and land use patterns; most bear little resemblance to these stereotypical images. ...

BACKGROUND The role played by lay knowledge in understanding health inequalities has received increased interest recently. Very little is known, however, about how lay knowledge of food and health varies across social class. The present exploratory study compared and contrasted ways in which people from different social backgrounds draw on and use different forms of lay knowledge about food and...

Given that Mandarin is a tone language and English is not, the present study investigated the perception of Mandarin tones in young school-aged children with or without tone language exposure. Mandarin Monolingual (MM), English-Mandarin Bilingual (EMB) and English Monolingual (EM) children aged 6 to 8 years participated in tone identification and discrimination tasks. Tone identification and di...

Al-Razi rose to become a hospital director both in Rayy (his home town, and now a suburb of Tehran) and Baghdad. This hospital environment proved important for his medical research. By the 10th century, hospitals in Baghdad had developed into quite sophisticated institutions. For instance, in the 920s and 930s, a powerful vizier by the name ‘Ali ibn ‘Isa endeavoured to improve public health, bo...

Finnish national research project, Userand Businessoriented Suburb Renovation Concept (KLIKK), was started in January 2012 and will end in June 2014. The perspective of energy efficiency is emphasised in the project, but also it addresses what improving the energy efficiency of suburban apartment buildings means from the standpoint of architecturally valuable buildings representing different pe...

Leptospirosis is a worldwide zoonosis caused by Leptospira interrogans. This study was conducted toevaluate serologic and bacteriologic findings of leptospirosis in clinically-suspected cows. 380 sera and 33urine samples were collected from 6 industrial dairy farms in Tehran suburb, from December 2004 to June2005. The prevalence of disease was determined by microscopic agglutination test (MAT),...