University of Canterbury

About: University of Canterbury is a education organization based out in Christchurch, New Zealand. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Population & Large Hadron Collider. The organization has 11100 authors who have published 29846 publications receiving 893232 citations. The organization is also known as: Te Whare Wānanga o Waitaha & Canterbury College.

The contextual effects of neighbourhood access to supermarkets and convenience stores on individual fruit and vegetable consumption

Abstract: 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 systems, travel times from the population-weighted centroid of each neighbourhood to the closest supermarket and convenience store were calculated for 38 350 neighbourhoods. These neighbourhood measures of accessibility were appended to the 2002–3 New Zealand Health Survey of 12 529 adults. Results: The consumption of the recommended daily intake of fruit was not associated with living in a neighbourhood with better access to supermarkets or convenience stores. Similarly, access to supermarkets was not related to vegetable intake. However, individuals in the quartile of neighbourhoods with the best access to convenience stores had 25% (OR 0.75, 95% CI 0.60% to 0.93%) lower odds of eating the recommended vegetable intake compared to individuals in the base category (worst access). Conclusion: This study found little evidence that poor locational access to food retail provision is associated with lower fruit and vegetable consumption. However, before rejecting the commonsense notion that neighbourhood access to fruit and vegetables affects personal consumption, research that measures fruit and vegetable access more precisely and directly is required.

Tourism and post-disciplinary enquiry.

Abstract: In recent times there has been discussion about whether studies of tourism are variously a disciplinary, multi-disciplinary or inter-disciplinary pursuit and how these relate to the institutional landscapes and practices of higher education. For some academics, these discourses are somewhat arid, but we would contend they are vital as they serve to set the epistemological terms of references for tourism scholars and play a not insignificant role in orchestrating knowledge production about tourism. This paper revisits some of these concerns relating to disciplinarity, and it suggests that disciplines as we understand them today are an artefact of previous academic divisions of labour which still dominate current institutional regulatory regimes. The purpose of the paper is to suggest that tourism studies would benefit greatly from a post-disciplinary outlook, i.e. a direction ‘beyond disciplines’ which is more problem-focused, based on more flexible modes of knowledge production, plurality, synthesis and s...

An Optimal PMU Placement Method Against Measurement Loss and Branch Outage

Abstract: This paper presents a new method for an optimal measurement placement of phasor measurement units (PMUs) for power system state estimation. The proposed method considers two types of contingency conditions (i.e., single measurement loss and single-branch outage) in order to obtain a reliable measurement system. First, the minimum condition number of the normalized measurement matrix is used as the criteria in conjunction with the sequential elimination approach to obtain a completely determined condition. Next, a sequential addition approach is used to search for necessary candidates for single measurement loss and single-branch outage conditions. These redundant measurements are optimized by binary integer programming. Finally, in order to minimize the number of PMU placement sites, a heuristic technique to rearrange measurement positions is also proposed. Numerical results on the IEEE test systems are demonstrated