BACKGROUND It is hypothesized that neighbourhood satisfaction and subjective happiness are associated with self-rated health or mediate the effect from urbanization levels among youth. METHODS Taiwan Youth Project was a cross-sectional study in two cities, Taipei and Yilan, Taiwan including 5,586 students. Information on neighbourhood satisfaction, happiness, urbanization levels, and self-rat...

BACKGROUND The purpose of this research was to determine the relationship between modeled particulate matter (PM2.5) exposure and birth weight, including the potential modification by maternal risk factors and indicators of socioeconomic status (SES). METHODS Birth records from 2001 to 2006 (N = 231,929) were linked to modeled PM2.5 data from a national land-use regression model along with ne...

In Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) with local neighbourhood, the social part of change in the particle's velocity is computed considering the performance of a set of neighbours. Almost all of the literature uses neighbourhood relations of a fixed topology. This paper introduces a method that computes a local optimum based on geographical, nonfixed neighbourhood in Euclidian space. It compares...

A novel approach to the determination of the neighbourhood and the identification of spatio-temporal dynamical systems is investigated. It is shown that thresholding to convert the pattern to a binary pattern and then applying cellular automata (CA) neighbourhood detection methods can provide an initial estimate of the neighbourhood. A coupled map lattice model can then be identified using the ...

Neighbourhood characteristics influence infant mortality above and beyond individual/household factors. In India, there are very few studies discussing the effects of neighbourhood characteristics on infant mortality. This study examined the effect of neighbourhood socioeconomic characteristics on infant mortality using data from the India’s Third District Level Household Survey conducted in 20...

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...

BACKGROUND There is increasing evidence that individual health is at least partly determined by neighbourhood and regional factors. Mechanisms, however, remain poorly understood, and evidence from Germany is scant. This study explores whether regional as well as neighbourhood deprivation are associated with physical health and to what extent this association can be explained by specific neighbo...