1 Baltimore City Infant Mortality: Leading Causes, Risk Factors, and Policy Solutions Introduction The infant mortality rate (IMR) is an important health statistic used by health agencies, economists, government officials, media, and many others as a key indicator of a nation, region, or city’s overall health and standard of living. In addition, the causes of infant mortality contribute, per-pe...

Crowd flow prediction is a fundamental urban computing problem. Recently, deep learning has been successfully applied to solve this problem, but it relies on rich historical data. In reality, many cities may suffer from data scarcity issue when their targeted service or infrastructure is new. To overcome this issue, this paper proposes a novel deep spatiotemporal transfer learning framework, ca...

This paper analyses the implementation of the Open Government Data strategy and portal of the City of Vienna. This evaluation is based on qualitative interviews and online polls after the strategy was implemented. Two groups of users were involved in the evaluation: internal target groups (employees and heads of department in the City of Vienna’s public administration departments) and external ...

On March 11, 2011, after the Great East Japan Earthquake and tsunami, the government declared a nuclear emergency following damage to the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant. A second hydrogen explosion occurred on March 14 at the plant's No. 3 reactor and injured 11 people. At that time the prime minister urged people living 20 to 30 km from the Daiichi plant to stay indoors. Under these cir...

Recent research has underlined the efficiency of the GATT/WTO rules from the standpoint of politically motivated governments, emphasizing that the current multilateral rules are capable of delivering a politically efficient equilibrium. Such an equilibrium is, however, economically inefficient. Global free trade, in particular, is generally unattainable even in a fully cooperative world, provid...

Environmental pollution and greenhouse gas emissions are becoming significant environmental issues in China, thus the sustainable development and revival of the country is impossible using the conventional path of encouraging economic growth at the expense of the environment. In response to the global warming, the prices of the traditional energy rise considerably, and a series of environmental...

Gold has both private uses (depletion uses and service uses) and government uses. It can be obtained from mines with high extraction costs (about $300 per ounce) or from aboveground stocks with no extraction costs. Governments still store massive stocks of gold. Making government gold available for private uses through some combination of sales and loans raises welfare from private uses by remo...

Solid waste or garbage from households and small businesses is managed by a challengeable system in Metropolitan Seoul, South Korea. It is known as the Seoul Volume-based Garbage Collection Fee (VGCF) system. Unlike the preceding system, which charged waste generators a fee for waste disposal in proportion to their property taxes, this newly designed system, which came into full effect in 1995,...

Traditional leaders have a formal role in South Africa’s post-apartheid local government, and in some cities in the country, notably in KwaZulu-Natal, their presence has presented some important political challenges. This paper explores the relationship between longstanding institutional arrangements which support chiefdoms and traditional authority control over land and development, and the em...

This paper will discuss recent initiatives to encourage the development of broadband networks in New Zealand. It is widely believed that the availability of good quality broadband will lead to improved economic development at the regional level. This paper considers the role played by both national and regional government in improving access to broadband. At a national level the government has ...