The 1970s spawned a 'first generation' of growth controls which featured explicit (or implicit) restrictions on residential housing construction. These restrictions were gpically implemented in small, affluent, and predominantly white suburban communities. Policy analysis responded by focusing almost singlemindedly on how such supply-side restrictions might increase housing prices and drive out...

Due to environmental pollution, the climate is worsening. The fog days up to 60% of the year in inland certain segments, which it has seriously affected the marine electronic cruise normal operation and navigation safety. According to the inland video image becomes gray and lack of visibility in foggy weather conditions, and in order to remove the haze to get a clear image color and contour, th...

Measurement methods for chemicals in biological and personal environmental samples have expanded rapidly and become a cornerstone of health studies and public health surveillance. These measurements raise questions about whether and how to report individual results to study participants, particularly when health effects and exposure reduction strategies are uncertain. In an era of greater publi...

Block-matching and 3D filtering (BM3D) denoising algorithm [1] proposed recently has a problem of computational burden especially for low noise level and a sharp performance drop for high noise level. To solve it, an improved version of BM3D is proposed. The solution combines the digital image characteristic with added noise pollution levels, and adaptively selects block-matching threshold in g...

millennium, a type of air pollution called ground-level ozone threatens future growth. Texas cities that do not meet U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) standards for this type of pollution could face sharp restrictions on new businesses and could bear significant new environmental costs. Many Texas cities are either in nonattainment with EPA guidelines for ozone or close to it. Although...

Environmental degradation is one of the major issues confronting many governments around the world. This problem is acute in developing countries where the lack of proper regulatory enforcement and ineffective monitoring mechanisms due to weak legislation have led to serious environmental degradation in the form of soil, air, water pollution, degradation of native and planted vegetation and sca...

We investigate the effect of pollution on worker productivity in the service sector by focusing on two call centers in China. Using precise measures of each worker’s daily output linked to daily measures of pollution and meteorology, we find that higher levels of air pollution decrease worker productivity by reducing the number of calls that workers complete each day. These results manifest the...

OBJECTIVE To conduct a health impact assessment (HIA) to quantify health benefits for several PM and O3 air pollution reduction scenarios in the Mexico City Metropolitan Area (MCMA). Results from this HIA will contribute to the scientific support of the MCMA air quality management plan (PROAIRE) for the period 2011-2020. MATERIALS AND METHODS The HIA methodology consisted of four steps: 1) se...

Industrial pollution was endemic to the industrial cities of the 19th century and remains a feature of some modern cities, particularly industrial cities in emerging economies. This study compares the relationship between pollution and mortality in both the historical and modern context, focusing on English cities in the mid-19th century and Chinese cities in 2000. For both contexts, we constru...

It is well known that even slight changes in nonuniform illumination lead to a large image variability and are crucial for many visual tasks. This paper presents a new ICA related probabilistic model where the number of sources exceeds the number of sensors to perform an image segmentation and illumination removal, simultaneously. We model illumination and reflectance in log space by a generali...