1,720,958 research outputs found
Qualitative and Quantitative Methods for Assessing Urban Walkability At City-Wide and Intersection-Level Scales
Get PDFCities are opting to pursue various smart growth strategies which include the process of
integrating more walkable environments. WalkScore.com offers users the ability to
measure the alleged level of walkability at a given location. The problem with the
website’s tool is that while it does consider nearby amenities for its calculation of
walkability, it does not consider other equally important factors. In his book, city planner
Jeff Speck presents the case that to be walkable an urban environment must be safe,
useful, comfortable, and interesting for pedestrians. This thesis explores these four
walkable categories with qualitative and quantitative approaches. The scale of the
analysis is set to a macro city-wide analysis which uses collected GIS data from online
sources, as well as manually digitized data. There is also a micro intersection-focused
analysis that utilizes a direct observation method of collecting and operationalizing data
Re-greening Opportunities in Northern Virginia Based on Land Cover Patterns and Social Vulnerability Criteria
Get PDFThis research reviews a number of socio-demographic and environmental criteria in the interest of identifying suitable areas for re-greening in Northern Virginia. The study area encompasses nine county and county equivalents in Northern Virginia whose sprawling development, demographic characteristics, and historical evolution towards an urban fringe landscape places it at potential risk for adverse effects related to the urban heat island (UHI) effect. Various methods and techniques have been explored to help combat the implications of the UHI, which can result in higher-than-average heat indices, place both the natural and built environment at risk, as well as increase health impacts in local populations with known risk factors. One of the most effective and affordable mitigation techniques is the use of vegetation in the form of grasses, trees, and shrubs that help to cool urban surfaces and reduce ambient temperatures.
This premise is the basis of the research question, which asks based on a series of input criteria, where are the most vulnerable, and therefore the best suited areas within the study area for re-greening efforts? This study utilizes an adapted multi-criteria analysis technique and GIS to overlay land surface temperature, land cover change, and socio-demographic characteristics to try and identify such areas. These layers from publicly available sources such as USGS, DOE, and NLCD were pre-processed, scaled and reclassified, weighted, and added together to determine suitability scores per pixel area.
Overall, the research found a number of case study areas that scored as high candidates for re-greening, and whose spatial range aligned with expected trends related to the UHI and areas that tend to be hotter such as those that have shifted from forested to development over the course of 18 years (2001 to 2019). The research showed that these areas often exist alongside vulnerable communities as well. Pockets of re-greening suitability include areas in southeastern Prince William, Loudoun County, Manassas and Manassas Park, Alexandria, and parts of eastern Fairfax County. Some areas have major focus on economic development thus resulting in urban and suburban sprawl, while more established neighborhoods that have been developed for quite some time but whose infrastructure tends to leave communities more at risk for heat related issues. The results were highly dependent on the unique status of the region, but this research found that there are many hectares worth of suitable areas that would certainly benefit from additional green space in light of climate change and UHI trends
The Geographic Roots of Cultural and Liturgical Differences Amongst American Catholics
Get PDFThis paper addresses the geographic components of American Catholicism from 1972-2020. The study found significant, previously undiscussed geographic variations in the character and expression of the Catholic faith within the United States. This project fills a geography-sized gap in existing literature, which hitherto has only discussed regional differences at the broadest geographic scale. This paper found significant spatial variations amongst Catholic settlement and growth patterns, regional ancestral composition, age, rural/urban divisions, as well as inter-regional migration. Relationships and intersections between the variables were also examined, as well as the temporal evolution of these spatially distributed attributes. The study found that the modern Catholic Church in America was far from spatially uniform, varying across regions in a myriad of ways. Additionally, an examination on sociopolitical attitudinal differences between Catholics of different regions towards controversies within the Church is conducted using statistics from studies undertaken throughout the late 20th and 21st centuries. Opensource data on the locations of parishes categorized by liturgical styles were examined to discern spatial differences in traditionalist and modernist approaches to the Mass, as well as the distribution of parishes offering the Traditional Latin Mass. Data from the General Social Survey, Pew Research Center, county-level religious censuses of the United States, as well as a variety of survey data on Catholics from the previous thirty years were examined at the smallest geographic scale possible. The results of county, state, diocese, and census-division level analysis found that previous assessments of the geographic trends and characteristics of Catholics were missing key nuances which were only discernable by examining the data at these scales
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe 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
Variations on the Author
Get PDF“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
Get PDFWe 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
Get PDFWe 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
- …
