OBJECTIVE This study sought to extend previous analyses of food insecurity in Montreal by examining the relationship between neighbourhood sociodemographic and urban form variables and sources of food both unhealthful (fast-food outlets, FFO) and healthful (stores selling fruits and vegetables, FVS). METHODS Densities of FFO and FVS were computed for 862 Census tract areas (CTA) (defined as c...

6th century BCE, probably as part of the expansion into the region of the Persian Achaemenid Empire. Lying on one of the main branches of the ancient Silk Roads, which connected Europe and Africa to the Far East, a succession of cities flourished. By the early medieval period these encompassed over 1,000ha (Fig. 1). The great Islamic city of Sultan Kala, capital of the eastern Islamic world, wa...

Mitigating traffic congestion on urban roads, with paramount importance in urban development and reduction of energy consumption and air pollution, depends on our ability to foresee road usage and traffic conditions pertaining to the collective behavior of drivers, raising a significant question: to what degree is road traffic predictable in urban areas? Here we rely on the precise records of d...

Mainland China accounted for about 7% of the global road fatalities in 2008. Road crashes happening on Chinese roads were deadly. On average, one person died in every four reported traffic crashes. Despite the scarcity of data, substantial rural-urban differences were found. In the rural areas, higher-order Highways, roads with no lighting and some heavy vehicles warrant particular attention fr...

This work describes a color Vision-based System intended to perform stable autonomous driving on unmarked roads. Accordingly, this implies the development of an accurate road surface detection system that ensures vehicle stability. Although this topic has already been documented in the technical literature by different research groups, the vast majority of the already existing Intelligent Trans...

Linear feature extraction has always been a center of attraction for various applications such as urban planning, GIS database update, disaster management, tracking and monitoring and so on. So an accurately extracted image containing roads as the principle component is the need of the hour. With the development of various satellite image processing technologies, the extraction or mapping of li...

Study on landscape spatial pattern in the center of Chengdu City is based on the Landsat-8 image by using 3S technique and spatial pattern analysis software Fragstats 3.3. The results showed that there covered an area of 193.92 km2 in the center of Chengdu City. 55.24% of the total area was made up of buildings, covering an area of 107.12 km2, and the overall landscape of impervious ground-base...

In large urban areas, until recently, people used to choose a route having in mind the general, high-level mental map of the urban traffic network. With the dissemination of the use of navigation devices such as GPS, all roads may now be part of a path. Therefore two questions arise, that are related to the performance of the traffic network as a whole, and to the effects of the use of these na...

BACKGROUND Urban environments generate constant loud noise, which creates a formidable challenge for many animals relying on acoustic communication. Some birds make vocal adjustments that reduce auditory masking by altering, for example, the frequency (kHz) or timing of vocalizations. Another adjustment, well documented for birds under laboratory and natural field conditions, is a noise level-d...