Nowadays, many big cities are suffering from heavy air pollution and continuous haze weather. Compared with the threat on physical health, the influence of haze on people’s mental health is much less discussed in the current literature. Emotion is one of the most important indicators of mental health. To understand the negative impact of haze weather on the emotion of the people, we conducted an investigation based on historical weather records and microblog data in Tianjin, China. Specifically, an emotional thesaurus was generated with a microblog corpus collected from sample data. Based on the thesaurus, the public emotion under haze was statistically described. Then, through correlation analysis and comparative study, the relation and seasonal variation of haze and negative emotion of the public were well discussed. According to the study results, there was indeed a correlation between haze and negative emotion of the public, but the strength of this relationship varied under different conditions. The level of air pollution and weather context were both important factors that influence the mental effects of haze, and diverse patterns of negative emotion expression were demonstrated in different seasons of a year. Finally, for the benefit of people’s mental health under haze, recommendations were given for haze control from the side of government.

Satisfying the growing care demands of the elderly has become a major policy issue under the trend of rapidly aging of the population, especially in developing countries. Although the market-oriented transformation on the supply side is a sustainable way to cope with the pressing demands of elderly care in the long term, the conflict between private and public interests seriously impedes the transformation process in its early stage. From the perspective of maximizing social welfare, this study took the specific situation of China as an example and applied a Stackelberg game model to explore the optimal transformation policy that can balance such conflict of interests. By comparing the effects of two forms of subsidy in China, the results first theoretically verified the importance of subsidy in stimulating the private supply of elderly care, and then emphasized that the size of the gap between supply and demand is the fulcrum of differentiated subsidy, which determines the optimal policy for the development of the elderly care market (ECM) in each aging region. Additionally, the study showed that in the process of market-oriented transformation, the government’s positive response to the demands and preferences of the public, the establishment of market supervision measures, and the increase in the elderly’s affordability all play important roles in improving social welfare. These findings not only have policy implications for the marketization of elderly care in China, but also provide meaningful references for other developing countries in the word that are experiencing or about to experience elderly care problems.

China’s resource-based cities have made tremendous contributions to national and local economic growth and urban development over the last seven decades. Recently, such cities have been in transition from resource-centered development towards human-oriented urbanization to meet the requirements of long-term sustainability for the natural environment and human society. A good understanding of urban expansion and evolution as a consequence of urbanization has important implications for future urban and regional planning. Using a series of remote sensing (RS) images and geographical information system (GIS)-based spatial analyses, this research explores how a typical resource-based mining city, Datong, has expanded and evolved over the last two decades (2000–2018), with a reflection on the role of urban planning and development policies in driving the spatial transformation of Datong. The RS images were provided and processed by the Google Earth Engine (GEE) platform. Spatial cluster analysis approaches were employed to examine the spatial patterns of urban expansion. The results indicate that the area of urban construction land increased by 132.6% during the study period, mainly along with the Chengqu District, the Mining Area, and in the southeast of the Nanjiao District, where most new towns are located. Reflection on the factors that influence urban expansion shows that terrain, urban planning policies, and social economy are driving Datong’s urban development.

Recently, Uber released datasets named Uber Movement to the public in support of urban planning and transportation planning. To prevent user privacy issues, Uber aggregates car GPS traces into small areas. After aggregating car GPS traces into small areas, Uber releases free data products that indicate the average travel times of Uber cars between two small areas. The average travel times of Uber cars in the morning peak time periods on weekdays could be used as a proxy for average one-way car-based commuting times. In this study, to demonstrate usefulness of Uber Movement data, we use Uber Movement data as a proxy for commuting time data by which commuters’ average one-way commuting time across Greater Boston can be figured out. We propose a new approach to estimate the average car-based commuting times through combining commuting times from Uber Movement data and commuting flows from travel survey data. To further demonstrate the applicability of the commuting times estimated by Uber movement data, this study further measures the spatial accessibility of jobs by car by aggregating place-to-place commuting times to census tracts. The empirical results further uncover that 1) commuters’ average one-way commuting time is around 20 min across Greater Boston; 2) more than 75% of car-based commuters are likely to have a one-way commuting time of less than 30 min; 3) less than 1% of car-based commuters are likely to have a one-way commuting time of more than 60 min; and 4) the areas suffering a lower level of spatial accessibility of jobs by car are likely to be evenly distributed across Greater Boston.

Road extraction from high-resolution remote-sensing images has high application values in various fields. However, such work is susceptible to the influence of the surrounding environment due to the diverse slenderness and complex connectivity of roads, leading to false judgment and omission during extraction. To solve this problem, a road-extraction network, the global attention multi-path dilated convolution gated refinement Network (GMR-Net), is proposed. The GMR-Net is facilitated by both local and global information. A residual module with an attention mechanism is first designed to obtain global and other aggregate information for each location’s features. Then, a multi-path dilated convolution (MDC) approach is used to extract road features at different scales, i.e., to achieve multi-scale road feature extraction. Finally, gated refinement units (GR) are proposed to filter out ambiguous features for the gradual refinement of details. Multiple road-extraction methods are compared in this study using the Deep-Globe and Massachusetts datasets. Experiments on these two datasets demonstrate that the proposed method achieves F1-scores of 87.38 and 85.70%, respectively, outperforming other approaches on segmentation accuracy and generalization ability.

To address the low performance of health care service delivery in the half-market system, the Chinese government has begun to advocate the medical alliance (MA) recently. Instead of strict regulations on the procedure of diagnosis and treatment, flexible resource sharing among medical institutions of different grades inside each MA is encouraged. By now, many attempts have been made for MA establishment from different perspectives, but there is no effective model maturely developed. For the promotion of the spatial accessibility to medical services at different levels, it is important to organize the hierarchial medial services according to the distributions of different grades of health care facilities in a city. With the city proper of Tianjin as the study case, we explored the optimal establishment of MAs using the geographic information system (GIS). By means of the Voronoi Diagrams, the service regions of different medical institutions were precisely defined and the organizational structure of hierarchical medical services in MAs was determined. Through interpolation analysis, accessibility to different levels of medical services was measured, and on this basis, discussions were conducted on the service efficiency of the MAs. According to the results from Tianjin, (1) under the proposed organizational model for MAs, the fit of the service regions of the first grade and the other two higher grades of medical institutions was good. but the fit of the second and the third grade medical institutions was insufficient. (2) Although the overall service efficiency was excellent, there were still deficiencies in a number of the MAs. (3) Increasing the number of second and third grade medical institutions in specific regions near the city’s edge, as well as the number of first grade institutions, could further improve the performance of hierarchical medical services.