1,720,953 research outputs found
Biodiversity Indicators: The Accounting Point of View
No full textAbstractAccording to the Convention on Biological Diversity, biodiversity is the variability among living organisms from all sources including, inter alia, terrestrial, marine and other aquatic ecosystems and the ecological complexes of which they are part; this includes diversity within species, between species and of ecosystems. The key value of biodiversity lies in its role in ensuring the functioning of ecosystems and their ability to provide services to humans and other living organisms that comprise them. For that reason, maintaining a sufficient degree of biodiversity is the key to the continued delivery of essential ecosystem services and the need to ensure the conservation of biological diversity is now widely accepted. In spite of this global sentiment, there is not a national or international convergence towards a framework to report to different stakeholders’ groups the performance of organizations like protected areas and national parks, in terms of their biodiversity and the conservation activities they are achieving. After describing the concept of biodiversity, its value and the information needs of the community related to it, the main purpose of the paper is to propose a theoretical and systemic framework for its reporting by public sector organizations established for the protection of the natural capital, by means of some specific indicators deduced mainly by the literature concerning biological sciences. Following the GRI (Global Reporting Initiative) guidelines, these indicators, interpreted in terms of KPI (Key Performance Indicators), should lead to an increase in the transparency and in the accountability of Protected Areas
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
The survey for cultural and economic value assessment of food and food- ways in Bio-Districts: the case of "Bio-Distretto della Via Amerina e delle Forre"
No full text1. Theoretical Background
The knowledge and the cultural heritage concerning traditional recipes based on local and ancient crop varieties are very diffused in small rural areas and in local communities, in particular in Italy. This kind of knowledge, that is at the heart of the relationship between communities and their food habits, if well recognised and documented can contribute to the sustainable development of territories in which it developed through oral transmission of local people. At the same time, Traditional Knowledge (TK), at the light of the UN Convention for Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage, must be preserved for future generations. Thus, it is important to identify and to develop some tools and techniques to obtain data for the valorisation and the promotion of food heritage in the light of TK and also Knowledge Transfer (KT). In this process, a crucial step is the involvement of local communities, in order to elicit and to track the information of which they are custodians, their feelings as well as their attitudes and preferences towards the use of this intangible heritage. The final goal is to engage them in the management and transfer of food knowledge for the sustainable economic, social and environmental development of their territory.
2. Research Objective
The objective of the paper is to conduct a survey, in a very specific territory, that is the “Bio-Distretto della Via Amerina e delle Forre”, in the Central Italy, in order to gather information concerning the actual awareness of local people and organizations concerning their food heritage and the values (cultural and economic) they attribute to it. The information retrieved will than be used as a basis for the preparation of a theoretical framework of valuation and management of food heritage through citizen engagement in other areas/organizations. The Bio-District seems particularly suitable for this kind of investigation, as it is a geographical area where farmers, citizens, tourist operators, associations and public authorities enter into an agreement for the sustainable management of local resources, based on organic production and consumption (short food chain, purchasing groups, organic canteens in public offices and schools). The local knowledge concerning foodways and traditional techniques that smallholder farmers apply, indeed derive from the deep understanding of the context they interact with and are adapted to. As a matter of fact, all stakeholders of the Bio-District are natural depositary of intangible heritage, potential sources of information and of subsequent management of their knowledge.
3. Methodology
The paper will be based on an inductive approach, using the survey method as an instrument to collect data to derive a theoretical framework for assessing cultural and economic values of food heritage. The survey will be conducted in the Bio-District of “Via Amerina e delle Forre”, located in Lazio Region, in the Central Italy.
The survey will have the structure of a questionnaire, used to elicit awareness, feelings and wishes about the food heritage and their desired management for the development of the territory, in order to achieve information about cultural (in particular historical, social and religious) and economic values of this heritage. In particular, for the latter type of values, a Contingent Valuation Method (CVM) will be used. CVM is an approach designed to create the missing market for heritage considered as public goods by determining what people would be willing to pay (WTP) for specified changes in the quantity or quality of such goods or what they would be willing to accept (WTA) in compensation for well-specified reductions/losses in the provision of these goods. CVM circumvents the absence of markets for food heritage by presenting consumers with a choice situation in which they have the opportunity to buy or to sell the flow of services/benefits deriving from this kind of intangible heritage.
4. Expected Results
The expected result in terms of Knowledge Management and Transfer will be the development of a tool that can be interpreted as a Participatory Rural Assessment (PRA) method. PRA not only aims at gathering knowledge about skills of local communities and their values, it also aims directly at empowering citizens. Indeed, the mix of surveys and public engagement techniques aimed at understanding values and knowledge that local populations in Bio-Districts wish to sustain, allows an informed and communitarian preservation of food intangible heritage.
The main limitation of the paper is the restricted investigation area and the limited data collected
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
Author-wise bibliometric analysis based on entropy.
No full textAuthor-wise bibliometric analysis based on entropy.</p
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