Towards Identifying and Reducing the Bias of Disease Information Extracted from Search Engine Data.

The estimation of disease prevalence in online search engine data (e.g., Google Flu Trends (GFT)) has received a considerable amount of scholarly and public attention in recent years.

Neighborhood commuting environment and obesity in the United States: an urban-rural stratified multilevel analysis.

Objective: Automobile dependency and longer commuting are associated with current obesity epidemic. We aimed to examine the urban-rural differential effects of neighborhood commuting environment on obesity in the US METHODS: The 1997-2005 National Health Interview Survey (NHIS) were linked to 2000 US Census data to assess the effects of neighborhood commuting environment: census tract-level automobile dependency and commuting time, on individual obesity status.

Results: Higher neighborhood automobile dependency was associated with increased obesity risk in urbanized areas (large central metro (OR 1.

Environmental impacts of the emerging digital economy: the e-for-environment e-commerce?

The Internet-led digital economy is changing both the production and consumption patterns at the global scale. Although great potential exists to harness information technology in general and the Internet in particular and improve the environment, possible negative impacts of e-commerce on the environment should also be considered and dealt with. In this forum, we discuss both the potential positive and negative impacts of e-commerce.