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Due to rapid development, historic city areas are faced with urbanization damage to their characteristic urban identity besides physical deterioration and economic decay. The purpose of this paper is to address the following questions: What are the constituent elements of locality for historic areas? How does one classify historic areas according to locality elements? What are the characteristics of each kind of historic area? How does one identify to-be-protected locality elements according to different historic areas to realize sustainable development?

As a historic cultural city with a building history of over 3,000 years, Beijing has a myriad of distinctive historic areas, of which 367 were selected as the research samples. This paper classifies historic areas into the following four categories: distinctive areas, permanent areas, adaptive areas and inherited areas by analyzing the locality elements of 8,905 geo-tagged photos related to Beijing historic areas. The correlation among locality elements – the basis for joint protection – is also examined by Pearson’s correlation analysis.

The results are as follows: the reaction degree of carrier elements is generally higher than that of information elements, of which the representative architecture is the main constituent element of locality; folk customs, traditional activities and other intangible cultural heritage in historic areas receive only slight attention and need to be further stressed; controlled by non-human factors, permanent elements bear a high degree of autocorrelation; and emerging tourism and business activities have, to some extent, grown into constituent parts of the locality elements in historic areas.

This paper seeks to strike a dynamic balance between city renewal and historic area protection, providing a reference for understanding the dynamics of locality.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate local climate change mitigation planning in California with the goal of understanding how the relationships between the state, the local air agencies, and the localities within their jurisdictions shape the willingness and capacity of local communities to plan for climate change mitigation through greenhouse gas emissions reduction.

The research: analyses documents relating to localities' climate change mitigation planning activities, including the production of action plans, general plan elements, emissions inventories, or official resolutions supporting mitigation planning, establishment of partnerships with other governmental and non‐governmental organizations, and development of community input processes and planning committee membership and structure. It also involves measurement and descriptive analysis of variables capturing: local air agencies' institutional character, orientation regarding climate change policymaking, and mitigation planning activities and programs; and localities' mitigation planning processes and policies, institutional and demographic characteristics, and relationships with other sub‐state entities working on climate change mitigation.

Intergovernmental partnerships can powerfully impact localities' technical and financial capacities for pursuing climate change mitigation planning. This exploratory study points to the potential for strong leadership by air quality control agencies to greatly influence the decision of localities within their jurisdictions to engage in voluntary mitigation planning. Furthermore, decentralized collaboration does not prevent, and may encourage, policy harmonization through localities' widespread reliance on the technical assistance from specialized non‐governmental organizations.

Findings might enable advocates of local‐level climate change mitigation planning to target their resources for maximal returns in terms of geographic policy coverage and pledged GHG emissions reductions. Theoretically, this study contributes to discussions on the relationship between the quality of policy outputs and various forms of environmental governance.

Climate change mitigation planning in the USA is in a formative stage. In fact, the authors found that even the California Governor's Office of Planning and Research (OPR) must work continuously and with imperfect data to compile a list of the state's local‐level mitigation planning efforts. This study contributes to the growing body of knowledge of local planning policy innovations in California and highlights the importance of leadership from the regional scale for city‐level engagement with mitigation planning.

Peer‐to‐peer (P2P) streaming quickly emerges as an important application over the internet. A lot of systems have been implemented to support peer‐to‐peer media streaming. However, some problems still exist. These problems include non‐guaranteed communication efficiency, limited upload capacity and dynamics of suppliers which are all related to the overlay topology design. The purpose of this paper is to propose a novel overlay construction framework for peer‐to‐peer streaming.

To exploit the bandwidth resource of neighboring peers with low communication delay, application of the grouping method was proposed to construct a flexible two‐layered locality‐aware overlay network. In the proposed overlay, peers are clustered into locality groups according to the communication delays of peers. These locality groups are interconnected with each other to form the top layer of the overlay. In each locality group, peers form an overlay mesh for transmitting stream to other peers of the same group. These overlay meshes form the bottom layer of the overlay.

Through simulations, the performance was compared in terms of communication efficiency, source‐to‐end delivery efficiency and reliability of the delivery paths of the proposed solution currently. Simulation results show that the proposed method can achieve the construction of a scalable, efficient and stable peer‐to‐peer streaming environment.

The new contributions in this paper are a novel framework which includes the adaptability, maintenance and optimization schemes to adjust the size of overlay dynamically according to the dynamics of peers; and considering the importance of locality of peers in the system.

Internet studies have rarely addressed gender and/or ethnic differences in health information seeking on social media. Moreover, the role of locality size in explanation of this phenomenon has been overlooked. This study proposed a diversification approach to address these issues. According to it, belonging to numerous disadvantaged groups increases the probability of health-related Internet/social media use.

The data were collected via telephone survey. The sample consisted of 798 Israeli Internet users who reported using social media for any purpose, gender, ethnic affiliation and locality of residence. The data were analysed using a logistic regression technique.

Arab female social media users, who resided in small localities, were more likely than the other studied social groups to seek both non-medical and medical information on social media. Furthermore, Arab female social media users were found having the highest likelihood among all studied social groups to seek information regarding physical activity and medications on social media.

The findings largely supported the diversification approach and signal a major need for a greater supply of public health information for members of minority groups, especially those residing in small localities.

The study investigates triple social disadvantage in health-related social media use.

The concern of this paper lies with empowerment of middle managers in a community health trust. It considers the impact of traditional structures and cultures upon the level of decision which middle managers are empowered to make. The conclusion reached is one which suggests that the level of discretion available to middle managers was one of making task‐orientated decisions rather than decisions about strategic change. However, even this was compromised by financial constraints and by “best practices” imposed by the personnel function.

The purpose of the paper is to explore the relation between locality and college students' binge drinking. The aim is to deepen understanding of the influence of three kinds of localities, such as: family home, residential halls and public venue on students' binge drinking.

The research method employed was four focus groups interview conducted with 25 college students in Poland and Canada where the incidence of binge drinking is high. Focus group data were transcribed, the Polish sample was translated into English, and all data were then analyzed.

Various localities distinguished in this paper seem to have different influences on students' binge drinking. Notably, students living in college residential halls binged on more occasions than their counterparts.

The qualitative character of research presented in this paper means the results cannot be uncritically generalized. Exploration of the influence of locality on students' binge drinking requires further investigation.

The influence of locality on binge drinking had not previously been explored in isolation. Consideration of these factors in isolation using a qualitative lens identified that locations involving homogeneous inhabitants, e.g. college residential halls and socialist housing blocks with large numbers of young people who are co‐located can be associated with higher levels of binge drinking. Such homogenous locations are characterized by individuals who are all in a similar stage of life, with common interests and aspirations. Other locations such as the family home involve heterogeneous influences and these result in lower levels of binge drinking.

The importance of mental health promotion is increasingly being recognised as a policy issue in the UK, although little is known yet about progress towards implementing mental health promotion approaches within mental health services. This paper presents an overview of the topic, and reports on a survey of local authorities in England to identify examples of good practice in mental health promotion and the extent to which they are underpinned by evidence.

Despite extensive research on the determinates of audit report timeliness, there is limited empirical evidence on the effect of auditor locality on audit report timeliness. Therefore, this study aims to examine the relationship between auditor locality and audit report timeliness. Furthermore, this study investigates the moderating roles of audit committee, corporate governance and auditor quality in this relationship.

In this study, the information of 157 companies listed on the Tehran Stock Exchange during the period 2013–2019 has been collected. Moreover, multivariate linear regressions were used to test the hypotheses.

Findings show that in general, there is no significant relationship between auditor locality and audit report timeliness. However, empirical evidence suggests that in companies with specialized audit committees, strong corporate governance and high-quality auditors, auditor locality improves audit report timeliness.

Overall, the results indicate that there are some circumstances in which auditor locality affects the audit report timeliness. Specifically, the association of auditor locality and audit report timeliness is conditional to audit committee, corporate governance and auditor quality.

Whole system working is critical to improving health and social care services while using scarce resources more efficiently and this article aims to look at the urgent need to develop measures for it. It seeks to describe the development of a simple, practical, set of measures for benchmarking and analysing local use of key whole system resources as the basis for discussion and planning. Practical and usable tools are needed urgently as national measures are not available at present and key resource decisions need to be made now.

The paper looks at a simple framework for looking at integration in localities and some proposed measures as the basis for discussion. It describes the development and application of a simple, practical set of measures to use locally in the absence of a national set. It uses nationally available, comparable measures wherever possible to minimise work. It briefly describes how the comparative data enables localities to identify key differences in use of resources and outcomes and areas for improvement.

Taking a whole system, whole person approach and applying it across localities provides a useful framework to help local health and social care systems focus on improving patient outcomes while reducing unnecessary costs – particularly unnecessary use of high cost institutional care. The measures including the Audit Commission whole system measures identified key issues re different use of resources, costs and outcomes between localities. This article looks ahead to the implications of greater personalisation of services and the need to develop more effective information systems based on the individual patient which allow more rigorous measurement of service effectiveness including outcomes as well as activity.

In the absence of national measures of whole system integration, this paper describes how a simple, practical framework and measures were developed to analyse use of resources and identify key areas for improvement. It can be used by localities to provide a quick benchmark of use of resources and outcomes (especially whole system use of expensive institutional resources) to support value for money and service effectiveness work. It describes how it worked in practice and looks at how information systems could be further developed in line with personalisation to allow ongoing improvement based on individual outcomes, costs and service effectiveness.

This study describes the need to develop whole system measures to show the effectiveness of moves towards integration. In the absence of national measures, it describes the development of a simple set of local whole system outcome measures based on a framework based on recent work on whole system integration. The paper uses both health and social care evidence and summarises key elements that work. It shows how the measures have been applied in practice in localities as a first step in a local system improvement programme.

Local public officials rely on tax and non-tax incentive packages to develop their economies. No conclusive evidence supports the economic improvement incentives afford. We investigate, with an experimental approach, the political reasons public officials use tax incentives. The experiment uses simulation gaming to model local economic development as an auction, in that way permitting us to compare the impact that motives, goals, and contexts have on outcomes. Our findings suggest that the majority of economic development competitors fall victim to the “winner’s curse”-overestimating and overbidding the potential payoff for business development.