OBJECTIVE To investigate whether neighbourhood measures of geographical accessibility to outlets selling tobacco (supermarkets, convenience stores and petrol stations) are associated with individual smoking behaviour in New Zealand. METHODS Using geographical information systems, travel times from the population-weighted centroid of each neighbourhood to the closest outlet selling tobacco wer...

Previous studies on the relationship of local food environment with residents' diets have relied exclusively on self-reported information on diet, producing inconsistent results. Evaluation of dietary intake using biomarkers may obviate the biases inherent to the use of self-reported dietary information. This cross-sectional study examined the association between neighbourhood food store availa...

BACKGROUND Studies suggest that the neighbourhoods in which people live influence their health. The main objective of this study was to investigate the associations of neighbourhood-level income and unemployment/social security benefit on pregnancy outcomes: preterm delivery, small for gestational age (SGA), pregnancy-induced hypertension (PIH) and miscarriage/perinatal death in Amsterdam. ME...

A recent trend in local search concerns the exploitation of several different neighbourhood functions so as to increase the ability of the algorithm to navigate the search space. In this work we investigate the use of local search techniques based on various combinations of neighbourhood functions, and we apply it to a timetabling problem. In particular, we propose a set of generic operators th...

This master thesis presents an ant colony optimisation algorithm for the bounded diameter minimum spanning tree problem, a NP-hard combinatorial optimisation problem with various application fields, e.g. when considering certain aspects of quality in communication network design. The algorithm is extended with local optimisation in terms of a variable neighbourhood descent algorithm based on fo...

To develop a method for structured document recognition, it is necessary to know the relative position of the graphical elements in a document. In order to deal with this notion, we build a neighbourhood graph based on Voronoı̈ tessellation. We propose to combine the use of this interesting notion of neighbourhood with an existing generic document recognition method, DMOS, which has been used to...

In this study we examined how the size of non-formal groups between organization members affect the transfer of knowledge in the context of the efficiency and effectiveness of this process. To analyse the dynamics of the transfer of knowledge the cellular automata model was used. The model is based on local interactions between members of the organization, that take place in the nearest neighbo...

OBJECTIVE To explore associations between residents' perceptions of the local residential environment and the likelihood of their smoking. DESIGN Using data (n = 2615) from the West of Scotland Twenty-07 Study, separately by gender, cross-sectional associations between respondents' perceptions of neighbourhood (perceived absence of goods, incivilities and physical environmental problems) and ...

BACKGROUND AND AIM Many multilevel logistic regression analyses of "neighbourhood and health" focus on interpreting measures of associations (e.g., odds ratio, OR). In contrast, multilevel analysis of variance is rarely considered. We propose an original stepwise analytical approach that distinguishes between "specific" (measures of association) and "general" (measures of variance) contextual e...