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Published by Taylor & Francis.This paper addresses the issues that affect school building conditions as a case study of the Philippines. Geographic information systems were utilized to investigate the allocation of public school resources and the extent of disparity in education facilities among 75 Philippine provinces. Four clusters of the provinces were identified by applying spatial statistics and regionalization techniques to the public school data. Overall, the building conditions are of high quality in the northern provinces. The greater region of the capital is overcrowded but well maintained. The eastern seaboard region and the southern provinces have poor conditions due to frequent natural calamities and the prolonged civil unrest, respectively. Since the spatial analysis result shows that the school building requirements are largely unmet, some recommendations are proposed so that they can be implemented by the government in order to improve the school facilities and mitigate the existing disparities among the four clusters of the Philippines.

The government of Brunei currently is implementing a spatially enabling government that requires a national geocoded address database as a key building block because a geocoded address database is essential for geoinformation services and location-based services. This paper presents a conceptual model and a framework for Brunei's geocoded address database by investigating the interrelationship among the existing geoinformation resources such as text-based address files, digital cadastral databases, and topographic maps, i.e., the proposed national geocoded address database utilizes reusable components of existing infrastructure. Integrating a reliable dataset to the national geocoded address database using common keys and having an additional attribute as a status flag are the main methods for our framework. We show that the framework is practical for Brunei's spatially enabling government but impacted by quality issues identified during the development of the framework that are partially solved by using a reference dataset.

The automatic detection of bias in news articles can have a high impact on society because undiscovered news bias may influence the political opinions, social views, and emotional feelings of readers. While various analyses and approaches to news bias detection have been proposed, large data sets with rich bias annotations on a fine-grained level are still missing. In this paper, we firstly aggregate the aspects of news bias in related works by proposing a new annotation schema for labeling news bias. This schema covers the overall bias, as well as the bias dimensions (1) hidden assumptions, (2) subjectivity, and (3) representation tendencies. Secondly, we propose a methodology based on crowdsourcing for obtaining a large data set for news bias analysis and identification. We then use our methodology to create a dataset consisting of more than 2,000 sentences annotated with 43,000 bias and bias dimension labels. Thirdly, we perform an in-depth analysis of the collected data. We show that the annotation task is difficult with respect to bias and specific bias dimensions. While crowdworkers' labels of representation tendencies correlate with experts' bias labels for articles, subjectivity and hidden assumptions do not correlate with experts' bias labels and, thus, seem to be less relevant when creating data sets with crowdworkers. The experts' article labels better match the inferred crowdworkers' article labels than the crowdworkers' sentence labels. The crowdworkers' countries of origin seem to affect their judgements. In our study, non-Western crowdworkers tend to annotate more bias either directly or in the form of bias dimensions (e.g., subjectivity) than Western crowdworkers ...

Disclosing the energy performance information for buildings has been expected to become an important policy for controlling energy demand and reducing CO2 emissions, but its effectiveness remains controversial. This study investigates the effect of energy performance information on consumer residential choice by using a discrete choice experiment in South Korea. The estimation results confirmed that the energy efficiency level of the given housing has a significant effect on consumer residential choice when the related information is actually delivered. Combined with evidence from the simulation study, we suggest that obligating the owners to provide energy performance information to potential buyers/tenants would be necessary for enhancing the use of the information during the consumer decision-making process. Additionally, the simulation result implies that the effectiveness of the policy can be underestimated by the price premium related to energy efficiency. Therefore, we suggest that the government should control the price premium for high-efficiency buildings at the early stage so that the policy related to disclosing the energy performance can be on track.

Background Despite many decades of declining mortality rates in the Western world, cardiovascular disease remains the leading cause of death worldwide. In this research we evaluate the optimal mix of lifestyle, pharmaceutical and population-wide interventions for primary prevention of cardiovascular disease. Methods and Findings In a discrete time Markov model we simulate the ischaemic heart disease and stroke outcomes and cost impacts of intervention over the lifetime of all Australian men and women, aged 35 to 84 years, who have never experienced a heart disease or stroke event. Best value for money is achieved by mandating moderate limits on salt in the manufacture of bread, margarine and cereal. A combination of diuretic, calcium channel blocker, ACE inhibitor and low-cost statin, for everyone with at least 5% five-year risk of cardiovascular disease, is also cost-effective, but lifestyle interventions aiming to change risky dietary and exercise behaviours are extremely poor value for money and have little population health benefit. Conclusions There is huge potential for improving efficiency in cardiovascular disease prevention in Australia. A tougher approach from Government to mandating limits on salt in processed foods and reducing excessive statin prices, and a shift away from lifestyle counselling to more efficient absolute risk-based prescription of preventive drugs, could cut health care costs while improving population health.