1,721,011 research outputs found
The use of non-invasive ventilation during acute respiratory failure due to pneumonia
No full textThe use of non-invasive ventilation in patients with community-acquired pneumonia is controversial since this is associated with high rates of treatment failure, compared with other causes of severe acute respiratory failure. The populations of patients with community-acquired pneumonia who have demonstrated better response to non-invasive ventilation are those with previous cardiac or respiratory disease, particularly chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. By contrast, the use of non-invasive ventilation in patients with community-acquired pneumonia without these pre-existing diseases should be very cautious and under strict monitoring conditions, since there are increasing evidences that the unnecessary delay in intubation of those patients who fail treatment with non-invasive ventilation is associated with lower survival. Pulmonary complications of immunosuppressed patients are associated with high rates of intubation and mortality. The use of non-invasive ventilation in these patients may decrease the need for intubation and improve the poor outcome associated with these complications. Continuous positive airway pressure has been used to treat acute respiratory failure in several conditions characterised by alveolar collapse. While this is extremely useful in patients with acute cardiogenic pulmonary oedema, the efficacy in pneumonia seems limited to immunosuppressed patients with pulmonary complications. Conversely, there are no sufficient evidences on the efficacy of continuous positive airway pressure in immunocompetent patients with pneumonia and severe acute respiratory failure
Assessment of the seismic risk associated with small earth dams: a simplified approach
Get PDFSmall earth dams are characterized by a reduced height of the retaining structure and by a limited reservoir volume of water. They are often located along slopes close to populated areas, therefore the risk associated with their potential rupture could be considerable. Also for this reason, the evaluation of their seismic vulnerability is of paramount importance for Civil Protection purposes. In addition, the usual lack of technical information represents a significant further challenge. In this regards, a simplified methodology based on a reduced number of parameters was required for vulnerability assessment studies. A simplified procedure was developed to systematically classify a large number of small earth dams. The proposed methodology is based on the compilation of data-sheets that lead to a preliminary classification of structures in terms of their associated seismic risk. The application of this procedure to about a hundred earth dams in the Piedmont region allowed
identifying the most critical structures, which require a priority in the planning of further investigations and analyses
Evolving fabric and its impact on the shearing behaviour of a compacted clayey silt exposed to drying-wetting cycles
No full textThe fabric and the hydro-mechanical behaviour of compacted clayey silt samples were investigated before and after drying-wetting cycles. Drying-wetting cycles changed the soil fabric by increasing the macro-porosity, while the total void ratio remained almost constant. The cycled samples were more compressible than the original ones and experienced a smaller decrease of suction during shearing at constant water content. The higher compressibility is associated to a more evident reduction of macroporosity.
The smaller suction decrease is reproduced with a double structure water retention model accounting for changes in macro-porosity during shearing. Cycled samples mobilised higher strength and showed a higher dilatancy than original samples sheared at the same initial total stress and suction; furthermore, dilatancy increased with suction for both fabrics. The Li and Dafalias stress-dilatancy relationship, formulated in terms of a macro-structural Bishop stress and accounting for a suction dependency, allowed reproducing the experimental results accurately
Erratum: Dynamic behavior of shallow founded historic towers: Validation of simplified approaches for seismic analyses (International Journal of Geotechnical Engineering 9:1 (13-29) DOI: 10.1179/1939787914Y.0000000066)
No full textA Simplified Methodology for the Assessment of the Seismic Risk Associated with Small Earth Dams
No full text
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
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