BACKGROUND Widespread availability of geographic information systems software has facilitated the use of disease mapping in academia, government and private sector. Maps that display the address of affected patients are often exchanged in public forums, and published in peer-reviewed journal articles. As previously reported, a search of figure legends in five major medical journals found 19 art...

Smart environments collect huge amounts of low-level data, but tend to fail to provide this data in an accessible, user-friendly, and meaningful way. Given the amount of time we spend inside buildings, the indoor environmental quality has a strong influence on our productivity and health. We developed the system SmartSpaces that aggregates and visualizes environmental data in a smartphone appli...

in the current engineering practices, buildings are commonly designed for an effective lifetime of 50 years. this lifetime can increase the cost of buildings with short lifetimes and can reduce the safety level of buildings with large lifetimes. in this paper, a “service-life factor” has been defined. applying this factor into the nominal values of live, earthquake, wind, and snow loads, the ef...

t his study investigates the factors affecting the demand for new residential buildings in urban areas of iran during 1976-2010. the demand function for new residential buildings in urban areas was estimated and then the existence of a long-run relationship among variables of this function was studied using the bounds testing of the autoregressive distributed lag co-integration procedure. the t...

Exposure to volatile organic compounds (VOCs) has been an indoor environmental quality (IEQ) concern in schools and other buildings for many years. Newer designs, construction practices and building materials for "green" buildings and the use of "environmentally friendly" products have the promise of lowering chemical exposure. This study examines VOCs and IEQ parameters in 144 classrooms in 37...

iran is located in a high-risk seismic zone of earthquakes. it has thousands of valuable historic buildings, mostly made of unreinforced masonry, which is quite vulnerable to natural hazards, especially earthquakes. the conservation and seismic upgrading of these buildings is vital for their survival. however, resources are limited and some sort of prioritization is needed in order to allocate ...

reducing energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions have become a worldwide necessity. iran has the sixteenth ranking position of global greenhouse gas emissions and its rate of growth is above global average. built environments are responsible for about 40% of energy consumption and it is generally approved that the greatest portion of built environment is dedicated to residential land us...