This article explores participatory governance in the context of participatory mechanisms of accountability for urban services. In the past few years, accountability has become a buzzword internationally and, as is the case with many such terms, there is confusion as to what exactly is meant. The people and organizations promoting accountability view it as critical to solving problems with urba...

Municipalities as well as any other organization have needed assessment and efficiency measurement to make better use of their limited resources and greater effectiveness. The aim of this study is to evaluate the efficiency of municipalities, determining efficient and inefficient municipalities using data envelopment analysis, and classifying the municipalities using Anderson Peterson technique...

OBJECTIVE To describe patterns of vision care among Medicaid-enrolled children. METHODS We evaluated claims data over a 1-year period among children who were 18 years and younger, living in Michigan, and continuously enrolled in Medicaid but did not have a complex medical condition or were disabled. For this study, vision care comprised eye care services provided by optometrists or ophthalmol...

Background Urban renewal has become an important issue in Hong Kong, which is experiencing considerable population growth pressures and urban decay in various districts. Ho et al. [1] noted that urban renewal often creates not only environmental problems such as demolition waste, but also social problems such as destruction of existing social networks and the fabric of long-established communit...

this study will provide detailed specification of those variables and determinants of unpredictable health expenditure in iran, and the requirements to reduce extensive effects of the factors affecting households' payments for health and other goods and services inappropriately.this study aims to identify measures of fair financing of health services and determinants of fair financing contribut...

Vegetation is a basic component of urban-suburban environments with significant area coverage. As a major vegetation type in US cities, urban turfgrass provides a range of important ecological services. This study examined the biological carbon fixation of turfgrass in a typical residential neighborhood by linking ground-based measurements, high resolution satellite remote sensing, and ecologic...

The Gudaga Study is a prospective, longitudinal birth cohort study of Australian urban Aboriginal children. Mothers of Aboriginal infants were recruited using a survey of all mothers admitted to the maternity ward of an outer urban hospital in Sydney. These data established initiation rates among Gudaga infants and those of non-Aboriginal infants born locally (64.7% and 75.2%, respectively) and...

Inferring the physical locations of social network users is one of the core tasks in many online services, such as targeted advertisement, recommending local events, and urban computing. In this paper, we introduce the Collective Geographical Embedding (CGE) algorithm to embed multiple information sources into a low dimensional space, such that the distance in the embedding space reflects the p...

Urban agglomerations have become the new spatial unit of global economic competition. The intense socioeconomic activities attributed to development urban are bound cause damage ecosystem services these agglomerations. This study adopts Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei agglomeration in China as research object, analyzes spatiotemporal evolution its critical service capacity address regional ++-development...