Driven by rising income and urban population growth, China has experienced rapid urban expansion since the 1980s. Urbanization can have positive effects on the urban environment; however, improvement of urban environment quality, especially its divergence between relatively developed and undeveloped cities in China, is currently a rather rudimentary and subjective issue. This study analyzed urb...

OBJECTIVE To determine epidemiology of cardiovascular risk factors according to geographic distribution and macrolevel social development index among urban middle class subjects in India. METHODS We performed cross-sectional surveys in 11 cities in India during years 2005-2009. 6198 subjects aged 20-75 years (men 3426, women 2772, response 62%) were evaluated for cardiovascular risk factors. ...

This paper is about the efficient generation of dense, colored models of city-scale environments from range data and in particular, stereo cameras. Better maps make for better understanding; better understanding leads to better robots, but this comes at a cost. The computational and memory requirements of large dense models can be prohibitive. We provide the theory and the system needed to crea...

This paper assesses the claim that sanctuary cities – defined as cities that expressly forbid city officials or police departments from inquiring into immigration status – are associated with post-hoc increases in crime. We employ a causal inference matching strategy to compare similarly situated cities where key variables are the same across the cities except the sanctuary status of the city. ...

Similar to physical cities, which emerged over many years in the physical world, we envision many kinds of large-scale “information cities” (iCities) to emerge over the Internet in the coming years. Some of these iCities will mimic small and large “physical” cities. They will provide local and global information and various valueadded services to inhabitants. Just like physical cities, these in...

I study U.S. gasoline prices following Hurricane Rita to show that short-lived geographical differences in the severity of wholesale gasoline price spikes are associated with long-lasting geographical differences in retail prices. In most U.S. cities, wholesale prices spiked significantly for roughly two weeks following the hurricane. However, in cities where this spike was particularly large, ...

Sustainability consists of economic, environmental, and societal aspects. Concomitant with China’s rapid growth, the evaluation of China’s ability for sustainable development (SD) has become a topic of interest. Unlike previous studies that are based on provincial regions and focus on economic and/or environmental evaluations, we have evaluated the comprehensive SD ability of 34 major cities in...