1,720,960 research outputs found
Take advantage of the black swan to improve the urban environment
No full textThe outbreak of the Covid-19 virus for all humanity is a typical example of the birth of the black swan, a
metaphor that indicates an unpredictable crisis event, because its very low probability. Statistics and
probability theory teache that any deterministic hypothesis of forecasting this type of event is a chimera.
More concretely, it is necessary to pay attention to the robustness of the socio-ecosystem, with respect to
any crisis advent, not the pursuit of the specific black swan, which, by the way, takes different forms: from
financial perfect storms to pandemics, to the unpredictable effects of climate change etc.. The paper refers
to the health risk investigating the process of Urban Heat Island (UHI) which is a cause of health risk and
of the increase in air pollution hazard. At the moment, there is a debate about the link between air pollution
and Covid-19 diffusion, but, in any case, the precautionary principle pushes to take the opportunity of the
crisis for a more sustainable city in terms air quality and citizen wellness. This paper presents a simple
method to spatially classify areas of the city with different UHI-air pollution hazard, according to their
morphology and land use. The possible employment of a such approach for planning has been discussed,
to potentially pursue mitigation of the whole supply chain of urban climate-pollution-virus diffusion
Integrating supervised classification in social participation systems for disaster response. A pilot study
No full textThe recent evolution of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) and mobile devices has strongly encouraged social participation as a tool for decision-support systems. These social participation tools are labelled as Participatory Geographic Information System (PGIS). The use of these tools has also extended to several domains – such as natural disasters, humanitarian crises, political conflicts – with the main aim to help affected populations and provide useful information for survival. Nonetheless, social participation tools present some drawbacks for managing non-structured information retrieved from large databases and Social Networks. The limitations concern either the need to understand knowledge in (almost) real time or data classification according to a specific domain. The present work aims at understanding the use of supervised classification models in situations of emergencies (i.e. disaster response) to classify message requests asking for/offering to help. To achieve the above aim we use machine learning techniques to compare classification models and evaluate their effectiveness and potentials to integrate them into existing PGIS systems. Main results suggest the existence of a relatively high accuracy of test and training classification by employing Random Forest, Neural Networks and Support Vector Machine (SVM) models. We argue in favour of supervised classification for its usefulness as a tool to be integrated in social participation for disaster response
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
The Estimation of the Depreciation of Property Due to Environmental Risk: The Case of Taranto
No full textThe environmental damage due to industrial pollution activities to produce the adaptations in the behavior of economic agents involved: if there is a decrease of environmental quality, it may lead to a negative change in real estate market values, identified the quantities and the prices of traded goods. Starting from these considerations a situation analysis was carried out about three municipalities of Apulia Region (Brindisi, Bari and Taranto), which are affected by major environmental industrial detractors. The "Federico II" coal power plant and the Coal Docks in the harbour of Brindisi, the presence of the "Fibronit" Asbestos plant, in which the production of asbesto-cement mixed materials has ceased but the site has partially been cleanup in Bari, and the presence of the "ILVA" steel plant in Taranto.
Since the verifications that the presence of these plants led a negative impact on nearby real estate value, the case of Taranto has been studied and, through the estimate of the impact of the perceived health damage on real estate market variation, the value of the property of the District "Tamburi" and other neighborhoods adjacent to the industrial area has been quantified. If they had not been affected by the same pole, thereby arriving at an estimate of the decrease of the real estate value by the use of damage estimate of the externality on real estate market, as the difference between the values that could be in the absence and in the presence of the perceived industrial risk.
Thus reversing some considerations that the possible upgrade or change the destination could generate economic benefits for the same areas
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Full text linkWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
koamabayili/VECTRON-author-checklist: VECTRON author checklist
No full textWe have done our best to complete the author checklist relating to the use of animals in the hut study. Note that the objective for the hut study was to evaluate the IRS treatment applications for residual efficacy against Anopheles mosquitoes, including the local An. coluzzii mosquito population. Cows were only used to attract mosquitoes into the huts and no tests were carried out directly on the cows. The author checklist is intended for use with studies where experiments are carried out on animals, which is why we have had such difficulty in completing this for the hut study, as many of the questions do not relate to how the cows were used
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