BACKGROUND The U.S. population is aging at an unprecedented rate, resulting in an increased demand for skilled nursing facilities (SNFs) and long-term care. Residents of these facilities are at a high risk for pneumococcal disease or severe influenza-related illnesses and death. For these reasons, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services use influenza and pneumococcal vaccination rates as...

The management of urban sprawl is fundamental to achieving sustainable urban development. Monitoring urban sprawl is, however, challenging. This study proposes the use of two spatial statistics, namely global Moran and local Moran to indentify statistically significant urban sprawl hot and cold spots. The findings reveal that the Moran indexes are sensitive to the distance band spatial weight m...

Over the past ten years, State and Territory housing authorities have stressed the importance of resident participation in community and urban renewal. However, their renewal efforts have lacked a sound evidence base.Why is community participation seen as crucial? What are the most effective ways of promoting participation, and what are the practical barriers to residents getting involved? Mart...

In their landmark study, Divided by Faith, Michael Emerson and Christian Smith articulated the ways in which evangelical spirituality and practice actually contributed to the racialization and segregation of American culture—the very antithesis of the picture of the redeemed community “from every nation, tribe, people and language” (Rev. 7:9).1 We want to consider whether evangelicals tend to e...

an Asymmetric Spin Hamiltonian Leh-Hun Gwa Department of Mathematics, Rutgers University New Brunswick, NJ 08903, USA Herbert Spohn Theoretische Physik, Universit at M unchen Theresienstr. 37, D-8000 M unchen 2, Germany Abstract For a particular choice of vertex weights the two-dimensional six vertex model can be viewed as a probabilistic cellular automaton. Physically it describes then the ...

Anderson, L.M. and Cordell, H.K., 1988. In&tence of trees on residential property values in Athens, Georgia (U.S.A.): a survey based on actual sales prices. Landscape Urban Plann., 15: 1.53-164. A survey of the sales of 844 single family residential properties in Athens, Georgia, U.S.A., indicated that landscaping with trees was associated with 3.5%-4.5% increase in sales prices. During the 197...

This article provides food for thoughts elaborated by peer researchers who, basing on their studies and on current literature on relationships between Universal Design (UD) and Information and Communication Technologies (ICT), wish to share few key issues related to the challenges offered by the involvement of final users in designing product and services. Referring to approaches from different...

This paper investigates the potential of defining a parsing representation for English data in Universal Dependencies, a crosslingual dependency scheme. We investigate structural transformations that change the choices of headedness in the dependency tree. The transformations make auxiliaries, copulas, subordinating conjunctions and prepositions heads, while in UD they are dependents of a lexic...

Adverbs can express a speaker’s attitude in a given situation on a specific matter. We constructed an adverb dictionary in which the attitude of the speaker is described. We also looked into whether or not adverbs could effectively be used as basic data to analyze reputations. We conducted three kinds of experiments to verify how effective and precise our dictionary was. First, we calculated th...

Over the past 20 years, understanding of the functioning of urban ecosystems has increased to the point where fairly sophisticated models of various subsystems have been developed by scientists working for federal, state, and local agencies, often in cooperation with university researchers. Each is designed to collect data and explore a specific urban/environmental system for issues related to ...