BACKGROUND Childhood asthma prevalence has been shown to be higher in urban communities overall without an understanding of differences by neighborhood. OBJECTIVE To characterize the geographic variability of childhood asthma prevalence among neighborhoods in Chicago. METHODS Asthma screening was conducted among children attending 105 Chicago schools as part of the Chicago Initiative to Rai...

Data generated on location-aware social media provide rich information about the places (shopping malls, restaurants, cafés, etc) where citizens spend their time. That information can, in turn, be used to describe city neighborhoods in terms of the activity that takes place therein. For example, the data might reveal that citizens visit one neighborhood mainly for shopping, while another for it...

Anonymous database search protocols allow users to query a database anonymously. This can be achieved by letting the users form a peerto-peer community and post queries on behalf of each other. In this article we discuss an application of combinatorial configurations (also known as regular and uniform partial linear spaces) to a protocol for anonymous database search, as defining the key-distri...

BACKGROUND The probable coexistence of two or more epidemiological profiles in urban Africa is poorly documented. In particular, very few studies have focused on the comparison of cause-specific mortality between two types of neighborhoods that characterize contemporary southern cities: formal neighborhoods, that is, structured or delineated settlements (planned estates) that have full access t...

We study the minimum total weighted completion time problem on parallel machines, which is known to be strongly NP-hard. We develop general ideas leading to exponential neighborhoods in which the best improving neighbor can be determined by calculating a maximum weighted matching of an improvement graph. In a second step we introduce neighborhoods that form the base for the exponential neighbor...

OBJECTIVES The health consequences of neighborhood poverty are a public health problem. Data were obtained to examine links between neighborhood residence and mental health outcomes. METHODS Moving to Opportunity was a randomized, controlled trial in which families from public housing in high-poverty neighborhoods were moved into private housing in near-poor or nonpoor neighborhoods, with a s...

OBJECTIVES This study investigates the independent and joint effects of family income and neighborhood socioeconomic status (SES) on general health and oral health before and after controlling for traditional risk factors in a representative sample of adults aged 18+ years residing in the Detroit tri-county area, Michigan. METHODS Individuals data were obtained through interviews, while neigh...