So far, the increased emergence of financial investments on housing markets has mainly been examined in metropolises or a national level. Research focused primarily institutional actors. The investigation space cities below metropolitan level and by individuals so far neglected. In present study, I therefore focus manifestation private investors outside using mixed-method approach quantitative ...

Accurate and continuous position calculation is a key task for vehicle navigation and telematics applications. In most portable car navigation and telematics devices, the position is calculated based only on GPS data. However, in urban canyons stand-alone GPS suffers signal masking and reflections of the signal from buildings, large vehicles, and other reflective surfaces. Driving tests in such...

Traditional computer applications in civil engineering are mainly for analysis, design and construction of buildings and other structures, which are basic components of social infrastructures. No doubt computer technology has been promoting productivities in the engineering aspect, but few successful efforts have been made in solving social and human related problems, such as disaster mitigatio...

Most often, the homogenization argument subspeciates into either an argument about Americanization, or an argument about 'commoditization', and very often the two arguments are closely linked. What these arguments fail to consider is that at least as rapidly as forces from various metropolises are brought into new societies they tend to become indigenized in one or other way: this is true of mu...

Large numbers of people are currently migrating from the poor, inland areas of West Coast Africa to the major cities of Lagos, Accra, Abidjan, and other budding metropolises (Figures 1 and 2). The infrastructure of the Sub-Saharan African cities is inadequate to service their burgeoning populations. An argument is presented for using scientifically derived neighborhoods as the building blocks f...

This study used the concepts of comparison credibility and magnitude credibility to assess perceived news media credibility in China. It also investigated which sources people trusted more when they encountered conflicting reports regarding different kinds of stories including entertainment news, disaster news and political news. A random sample from three major metropolises (n = 1,844) were te...

Can cities be smart? In this article we define what a smart city is and formulate categories and indicators of smart and/or informational cities. Based on these measures, we investigate four Japanese cities as case studies that appear to be highly developed modern metropolises. We focus on infrastructures essential for an informational city as base for a ubiquitous, smart (in a narrow sense), c...