information and communication technology (ict) has transformed how we live our lives and the way we interact in different contexts. benefits of ict and its upcoming efficiencies (i.e. energy efficiency) are becoming the heart of many public services’ reforms which have influenced the time, distance and space concepts. at present, not only there is a lack of clarity about what high-quality ictba...

One of the important issues for the majority of the planners is the optimized concentration and distribution of service centers. The well-balanced distribution of these centers and services need appropriate site selection so that all walks of life have easy access to these services. From among service centers, site selection for higher education centers is important in terms of their importance...

CONTEXT In many developing countries, fertility has declined steadily in recent decades, while the average strength of family planning programs has increased and social conditions have improved. However, it is unclear whether the synergistic effect of family planning programs and social settings on fertility, first identified in the 1970s, still holds. METHODS Data from 40 developing countrie...

this paper considers the spatial planning system in russian federation. study of spatial planning system of russia specifies three different stages from each other. the first phase consists of the sixteenth century until the early twentieth century. in this period, base of the spatial planning was formed and gradually developed during approximately 400 years. the next phase is devoted to soviet...

BACKGROUND Dust events have long been recognized to be associated with a higher mortality risk. However, no study has investigated how prolonged dust events affect the spatial variability of mortality across districts in a downwind city. METHODS In this study, we applied a spatial regression approach to estimate the district-level mortality during two extreme dust events in Hong Kong. We comp...

The co-presence of a robot and a human sharing some activities in an industrial setting constitutes a challenging scenario for control solutions, requiring highly flexible controllers to preserve productivity and enforce human safety. Standard methods are not suitable given the lack of methodologies able to evaluate robot execution time variability, caused by the necessity to continuously modif...