OBJECTIVES To investigate the importance of both individual and neighbourhood socioeconomic characteristics for health care utilization. METHODS Various linkage procedures generated a longitudinal dataset with information on 2,116 Nova Scotians, their residential neighbourhoods, 8 years of health care utilization and vital status. Unilevel and multilevel regression analyses were employed to e...

In multi-agent systems, complex and dynamic interactions often emerge among individual agents. The ability of each agent to learn adaptively is therefore important for them to survive in such changing environment. In this paper, we consider the effects of neighbourhood structure on the evolution of cooperative behaviour in the N-Player Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma (NIPD). We simulate the NIPD as...

Neighbourhood environments have important implications for human health. In this piece, we reflect on the environments and health literature and argue that precise use of language is critical for acknowledging the complex and multifaceted influence that neighbourhood environments may have on physical activity and physical activity-related outcomes. Specifically, we argue that the term "neighbou...

OBJECTIVE Structural and social neighbourhood constructs have been developed for studying a neighbourhood's influence on a variety of health outcomes; community surveys are being increasingly used for capturing such information. This paper has proposed a six-fold approach which integrates existing methodologies (i.e. multilevel factor analysis, ecometrics, multilevel spatial multiple membership...

Given an integer valued weighting of all elements of a 2-connected plane graph G with vertex set V , let c(v) denote the sum of the weight of v ∈ V and of the weights of all edges and all faces incident with v. This vertex coloring of G is proper provided that c(u) 6= c(v) for any two adjacent vertices u and v of G. We show that for every 2-connected plane graph there is such a proper vertex co...

Abstract: A particle moves among the vertices of an (m + 1)-gon which are labeled clockwise as 0, 1, . . . , m. The particle starts at 0 and thereafter at each step it moves to the adjacent vertex, going clockwise with a known probability p, or counterclockwise with probability 1 − p. The directions of successive movements are independent. What is the expected number of moves needed to visit al...

A simple random walk on a graph is defined in which a particle moves from one vertex to any adjacent vertex, each with equal probability. The expected hitting time is the expected number of steps to get from one vertex to another before returning to the starting vertex. In this paper, using the electrical network approach, we provide explicit formulae for expected hitting times for simple rando...

We consider the class ER(n, d, λ) of edge-regular graphs for some n > d > λ, i.e., graphs regular of degree d on n vertices, with each pair of adjacent vertices having λ common neighbors. It has previously been shown that for such graphs with λ > 0 we have n ≥ 3(d − λ) and much has been done to characterize such graphs when equality holds. Here we show that n ≥ 3(d − λ) + 1 if λ > 0 and d is od...

A pebbling move on a graph removes two pebbles at a vertex and adds one pebble at an adjacent vertex. Rubbling is a version of pebbling where an additional move is allowed. In this new move, one pebble each is removed at vertices v and w adjacent to a vertex u, and an extra pebble is added at vertex u. A vertex is reachable from a pebble distribution if it is possible to move a pebble to that v...

As a natural extension of previously defined graph labelings, we introduce in this paper a new magic labeling whose evaluation is based on the neighbourhood of a vertex. We define a 1-vertex-magic vertex labeling of a graph with v vertices as a bijection f taking the vertices to the integers 1, 2, . . . , v with the property that there is a constant k such that at any vertex x, ∑ y∈N(x) f(y) = ...