BACKGROUND It is often suggested that neighbourhood access to food retailers affects the dietary patterns of local residents, but this hypothesis has not been adequately researched. We examine the association between neighbourhood accessibility to supermarkets and convenience stores and individuals' consumption of fruit and vegetables in New Zealand. METHODS Using geographical information sys...

Naturalness of the neutrino mass hierarchy and mixing is studied. First we select among 12 neutrino mixing patterns a few patterns, which could form the natural neutrino mass matrix. Further we show that if the Dirac neutrino mass matrix is taken as the natural one in the quark sector, then only two mixing patterns without the large mixing lead to the natural right-handed Majorana mass matrix. ...

b a c k g r o u n d & aim: the excess hazard rate proposed by andersen and vaeth may underestimate the long-term excess hazard rate for cancer survival. zahl explained the phenomenon by continuous selection of the most robust individuals after diagnosis. he applied correlated inverse gaussian and gamma  frailty  models  to estimate  excess  intensity  and reached  a better  estimate  of the rat...

Dynamic texture is an extension of texture to the temporal domain. Description and recognition of dynamic textures has attracted growing attention. In this paper, a new method for recognizing dynamic textures is proposed. The textures are modeled with volume local binary patterns (VLBP), which are an extension of the LBP operator widely used in still texture analysis, combining the motion and a...

Distributed Software Development involves a number of different business models. Most of the companies, when searching for external solutions in other countries (offshoring), usually have two main options: offshore outsourcing (contracting services with an external organization) and internal offshoring (contracting with a wholly owned subsidiary). Both models have been studied for a long time, ...

The paper deals with the quality issue in the market of regional products. It shows that the particular institutional mechanisms at the core of their quality definition and perception, can hamper regional products in successfully coping with the current competitive changes in the international food system. The standardization of food consumption patterns, the consolidation of food manufacture a...

A new method for action modelling is proposed, which combines the trajectory beam obtained by semi-dense point tracking and a local binary trend description inspired from the Local Binary Patterns (LBP). The semi dense trajectory approach represents a good trade-off between reliability and density of the motion field, whereas the LBP component allows to capture relevant elementary motion elemen...

In this paper we present a novel approach for automatic recognition of ring worm skin disease based on LBP (Local Binary Pattern) feature extracted from the affected skin images. The proposed method is evaluated by extensive experiments on the skin images collected from internet. The dataset is tested using three different classifiers i.e. Bayesian, MLP and SVM. Experimental results show that t...