Perhaps the greatest development in rural communication technology in the middle of the 19 th century was an eight foot board tied to the back of a horse. The King Road Drag scraped along country roads leveling humps and filling potholes. 1 The flat roads permitted rural postal deliveries, the development of parcel post and eventually a flood of information from catalog companies and publishers...

Copyright: © 2016 Roads et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

We combined a natural experiment with field surveys and GIS to investigate the effects of dust from recreational trails and access roads on the federally threatened Valley elderberry longhorn beetle ("VELB," Desmocerus californicus dimorphus) and its host plant, elderberry (Sambucus mexicana). Dust is listed in the species recovery plan as a threat to the VELB and unpaved surfaces are common th...

Cement-based materials are fundamental resources used to in construction. The increase in requests for and consumption of cement products, especially in Iran, indicates that more cement plants should be equipped. This study developed a geographical information system using pairwise comparison based on grey numbers to identify potential sites in which to set up cement plants. A group of five exp...

Recent growth of geospatial information online has made it possible to access various maps and orthoimagery. Conflating these maps and imagery can create images that combine the visual appeal of imagery with the attribution information from maps. The existing systems require human intervention to conflate maps with imagery. We present a novel approach that utilizes vector datasets as “glue” to ...

In this article we describe a low-cost, minimally-intrusive system for the efficient management of parking spaces on both public roads and controlled zones. This system is based on wireless networks of photoelectric sensors that are deployed on the access roads into and out of these areas. The sensors detect the passage of vehicles on these roads and communicate this information to a data centr...

Assessing changes in poverty levels over time is bedevilled by problems in questionnaire design, the choice of the poverty line, the exact timing of the survey and uncertainty about the appropriate cost-of-living deflators. In this paper, we focus on testing the robustness of measured changes in poverty to these common problems, using household panel data collected in rural Ethiopia in 1989, 19...

Like most physical maps, recent research has suggested that cognitive maps of familiar environments may have a north-up orientation. We demonstrate that north orientation is not a necessary feature of cognitive maps and instead may arise due to coincidental alignment between cardinal directions and the built and natural environment. Experiment 1 demonstrated that pedestrians have difficulty poi...

We examine the link between highways and urban development by employing both hedonic analysis and multiple sales techniques to study the impact of the construction of toll roads in Orange County, California, on house prices. Urban economic theory predicts that if highways improve accessibility, that accessibility premium will be reflected in higher land prices. Our empirical analyses of house s...