Cities’ green areas are fragmented patches and often confined to smaller sizes than the higher built-up proportions. Such small-sized can be essential components of infrastructure compensate for biodiversity loss. As a proxy biodiversity, we studied birds in nine small area locations Freiburg eight Regensburg Germany. We investigated neighboring networks (distance nearest water body another are...

OBJECTIVES We evaluated the spatial accessibility of large "chain" supermarkets in relation to neighborhood racial composition and poverty. METHODS We used a geographic information system to measure Manhattan block distance to the nearest supermarket for 869 neighborhoods (census tracts) in metropolitan Detroit. We constructed moving average spatial regression models to adjust for spatial aut...

BACKGROUND We examined the relationship between overweight in preschool children and three environmental factors--the proximity of the children's residences to playgrounds and to fast food restaurants and the safety of the children's neighborhoods. We hypothesized that children who lived farther from playgrounds, closer to fast food restaurants, and in unsafe neighborhoods were more likely to b...

The components analysis family of algorithms learns transformations from constraints as explained in the survey of Yang [34]: ‘‘Relevant Components Analysis (RCA) [10] learns a global linear transformation from (a set of) equivalence constraints. The learned transformation can be used directly to compute (a) distance between any two examples. Discriminative Component Analysis (DCA) and Kernel D...

We investigate recursive nearest neighbor search in a sparse domain at the scale of audio signals. Essentially, to approximate the cosine distance between the signals we make pairwise comparisons between the elements of localized sparse models built from large and redundant multiscale dictionaries of time-frequency atoms. Theoretically, error bounds on these approximations provide efficient mea...

Previous work has shown that speciation can result from the self-organized accumulation of multiple mildly underdominant (nearly neutral) loci in a continuous population, when mating is spatially localized. In contrast, when mating is panmictic, underdominance is quickly eliminated and the population always converges on a single genotype, as predicted by mean-field approximations. The focus of ...

Body area networks is one of the types of wireless area networks which has been created to optimize utilizing hospital resources and for earlier diagnosis of medical symptoms, and ultimately to reduce the cost of medical care. This network like most of the wireless networks is without infrastructure and the embedded sensor nodes in the body have limited energy. Hence, the early power completion...

The weighted sampling methods based on k-nearest neighbors have been demonstrated to be effective in solving the class imbalance problem. However, they usually ignore positional relationship between a sample and heterogeneous samples its neighborhood when calculating weight. This paper proposes novel neighborhood-weighted method named NWBBagging improve Bagging algorithm's performance imbalance...

U.S. policy initiatives have sought to improve health through attracting neighborhood supermarket investment. Little evidence exists to suggest that these policies will be effective, in particular where there are socioeconomic barriers to healthy eating. We measured the independent associations and combined interplay of supermarket access and socioeconomic status with obesity. Using data on 970...