BACKGROUND Where a person lives is not usually thought of as an independent predictor of his or her health, although physical and social features of places of residence may affect health and health-related behavior. METHODS Using data from the Atherosclerosis Risk in Communities Study, we examined the relation between characteristics of neighborhoods and the incidence of coronary heart diseas...

Rates of schizophrenia differ significantly between groups defined at the social level, eg, urban/rural comparisons, neighborhoods, and ethnic minority status. While earlier studies were not able to determine if the social environment influenced the development of schizophrenia (causation) or whether individuals at risk aggregated in adverse social environments (selection), the recent developme...

Health situation analysis has been used to understand complex health processes and to contribute to decision-making in public policies. This paper analyzes the spatial relationship between mortality patterns in the city of Rio de Janeiro (1996-1998) and socioeconomic profiles of neighborhoods. Mortality data were collected from the Municipal Health Department and population data were obtained f...

In this paper we present a new method for solving large instances of the Car Sequencing Problem (CarSP) including constraints defined by the assembly shop and the paint shop. Especially the latter are of greater significance, since they allow no violations. Our approach combines general Variable Neighborhood Search with Integer Linear Programming (ILP) methods and benefits from the advantages o...

Any opinions, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the view of the Center for Local, State, and Urban Policy or any sponsoring agency Abstract This study examines how neighborhoods hosting the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit projects in Miami-Dade County have changed from 1990 to 2000 and how these projects ...

This study attempts to measure neighborhood boundaries in a novel way by creating network neighborhoods based on the density of social ties among adolescents. We create valued matrices based on social ties and physical distance between adolescents in the county. We then perform factor analyses on these valued matrices to detect these network neighborhoods. The resulting network neighborhoods sh...

Following the changes in the paradigm of urban studies in recent years, sustainability has become an increasingly important issue in the neighborhood’s planning and designing. However, this concept has originally been developed for American and European neighborhoods’ planning, it could also be customized for other neighborhoods’. Additionally, in the neighborhood scale, the quality parameter f...

Locality is a standard notion of finite model theory. There are two well known flavors of it, based on Hanf’s and Gaifman’s theorems. Essentially they say that structures that locally look alike cannot be distinguished by first-order sentences. Very recently these standard notions have been generalized in two ways. The first extension makes the notion of “looking alike” depend on logical indist...

In this paper we develop a variable neighborhood search (VNS) heuristic for solving mixed-integer programs (MIPs). It uses CPLEX, the general-purpose MIP solver, as a black-box. Neighborhoods around the incumbent solution are defined by adding constraints to the original problem, as suggested in the recent local branching (LB) method of Fischetti and Lodi (Mathematical Programming Series B 2003...