In this paper, we present national maps of relative rates of mortality associated with short-term exposure to particulate matter < 10 pm in aerodynamic diameter (PM 10). We report results for 88 of the largest metropolitan areas in the United States from 1987 to 1994 for all-cause mortality, combined cardiovascular and respiratory deaths, and other causes of mortality. Maximum likelihood estima...

Geographical space is an important factor across a wide range of decision-making problems, not only because many human and environmental processes vary markedly from one place to another, but also because space determines people's perception of the world and ultimately determines what we call 'local' and ‘global’. The ability of individuals and social groups to map out, in a true geographic sen...

In this paper we illustrate the Geo Data Annotator (GDA), a framework which helps a user to build a ground-truth dataset, starting from two separate geographical datasets. GDA exploits two kinds of indices to ease the task of manual annotation: geographical-based and string-based. GDA provides also a mechanism to evaluate the quality of the built ground-truth dataset. This is achieved through a...

The map() function in S permits a wide range of line and filled area maps to be drawn for use with map-oriented data analysis. The data underlying these maps is stored in a geographical database. This report describes the format of the geographical database and the steps involved in constructing one. The process is illustrated by our experience in creating a database for the coastlines and nati...

Over the past two centuries, surveillance technology has advanced in three major spurts. In the first instance the surveillance instrument was a specially designed building, Bentham’s Panopticon; in the second, a tightly controlled television network, Orwell’s Big Brother; today, an electronic human-tracking service. Functionally, each technology provided total surveillance within the confines ...

Geographical Bioinformatics Systems (GBS) represent the marriage between two distinct and well established fields, GIS & Bioinformatics. Bioinformatics refer to the use of computers to handle biological information—that is, the use computers to store, compare, retrieve, analyze and predict the composition or structure of biomolecules. On the other hand, the term Geographic Information Systems (...

We propose a coloring algorithm for sparse random graphs generated by the geographical threshold graph (GTG) model, a generalization of random geometric graphs (RGG). In a GTG, nodes are distributed in a Euclidean space, and edges are assigned according to a threshold function involving the distance between nodes as well as randomly chosen node weights. The motivation for analyzing this model i...

Humans tend to interpret a temporal series of geographical spatial data in terms of geographical processes. They also often ascribe certain properties to processes (e.g. a process may be said to accelerate). Given a spatial region of observation, distinct properties may be observed in different subregions and at different times, which causes difficulties for humans to identify them. The concept...

People judged the inclination of hills viewed either out-of-doors or in a computer-simulated virtual environment. Angle judgments were obtained by having people (1) provide verbal estimates, (2) adjust a representation of the hill's cross-section, and (3) adjust a tilt board with their unseen hand. Geographical slant was greatly overestimated according to the first two measures, but not the thi...

Population counts and longitude and latitude coordinates were estimated for the 50 largest cities in the United States by computational linguistic techniques and by human participants. The mathematical technique Latent Semantic Analysis applied to newspaper texts produced similarity ratings between the 50 cities that allowed for a multidimensional scaling (MDS) of these cities. MDS coordinates ...