The Digital Life of Walkable Streets

Walkability has many health, environmental, and economic benefits. That is why web and mobile services have been offering ways of computing walkability scores of individual street segments. Those scores are generally computed from survey data and manual counting (of even trees). However, that is costly, owing to the high time, effort, and financial costs. To partly automate the computation of those scores, we explore the possibility of using the social media data of Flickr and Foursquare to automatically identify safe and walkable streets. We find that unsafe streets tend to be photographed during the day, while walkable streets are tagged with walkability-related keywords. These results open up practical opportunities (for, e.g., room booking services, urban route recommenders, and real-estate sites) and have theoretical implications for researchers who might resort to the use social media data to tackle previously unanswered questions in the area of walkability.Comment: 10 pages, 7 figures, Proceedings of International World Wide Web Conference (WWW 2015

Design and implementation of a program quality assessment tool : three case studies of primary health services in developing countries

The total service quality paradigm has been slow in diffusing to the health service domain, and TQM techniques are even less widely used to govern primary health services in the developing world. This interdisciplinary work analyzes the design of a TQM-based quality assessment tool (PQAT) used to evaluate quality of care in family planning programmes in Africa, Asia, and the South Pacific. It shows how family planning service quality models have failed to keep pace with advances in management theory, introduces the process theory model to overcome the limitations of the variance model, and grounds the tool in the context of quality theory. The paper goes on to report results from field use of the PQAT in three widely varying sites in the Asia Pacific region, and to draw useful conclusions for primary health researchers and practitioners