Due to rapid urbanization, more than half of the world's population now live in cities. By the year 2050, the urbanized population will increase to two–thirds of the global population, which prompted increased international attention to identifying environmental, social and economic challenges of urban development encompassing diverse aspects such as energy, water, waste, infrastructure, transp...

The existing coordinated control methods of green wave are complicated, difficult to operate and mainly applicable intersection groups with symmetrical arriving upstream flows. Based on engineering practice, a new method bidirectional progression coordination was presented by designing particular overlapping phases the basis NEMA dual-ring phasing configuration. Applying characteristics asymmet...

BACKGROUND The increase in urban migrants is one of major challenges for tuberculosis control in China. The different characteristics of tuberculosis cases between urban migrants and local residents in China have not been investigated before. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS We performed a retrospective study of all pulmonary tuberculosis patients reported in Songjiang district, Shanghai, to de...

BACKGROUND Childhood fevers due to malaria remain a major cause of morbidity and mortality among under-five children in Nigeria. The degree of vulnerability perceived by mothers will affect their perception of the severity and threat of their child's fever and the patterns of health care use. This study was undertaken to compare maternal responses to childhood fever in urban and rural areas of ...

Congenital toxoplasmosis involves Toxoplasma gondii type II strains in 95% of cases in France. We used spatial principal component analysis (sPCA) and 15 microsatellite markers to investigate the spatial genetic structure of type II strains involved in 240 cases of congenital toxoplasmosis in France from 2002 through 2009. Mailing addresses of patients were geo-referenced a posteriori in decima...

The effects of five towns on river water pollution were examined along the Łyna River (southern watershed of the Baltic Sea, northern Poland). The relationships among the spatially derived indicators of urbanization, environmental variables, and physico-chemical and microbiological data (heterotrophic plate count at 22 and 37 °C, and fecal coli) obtained from longitudinal river profiling have b...

The principal sources and pathways of pharmaceutical and personal product (PPCP) compounds within an urban drainage system are identified with combined sewer discharges from households and infiltration from landfill/land sludge applications constituting major routeways. Illicit connections, sewer exfiltration and reclaimed domestic wastewaters comprise potentially significant other contaminant ...

A review of material flow analysis (MFA) tools, comparison of case studies and analysis of approximately 20 MFA tools (static, semi-empirical models) are performed. The evaluation of the quantification procedures revealed several deficits in the approaches. The following principal complications for a reliable quantification of inputs from the urban water system are identified: (1) frequently in...

A Cellular Automata model based on Partial Least Squares Approaches is proposed for simulating complex urban systems. The core part of Geo-CA model is the transition rules and a mass of independent spatial variables are involved in the process of creating CA model. Studies have focused on eliminating correlation using Multi-Criteria Evaluation (MCE) and Principal Component Analysis (PCA), but t...