1,721,068 research outputs found

    Environmental Fluid Mechanics: Current issues and future outlook

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    All forms of life on earth are immersed in a fluid or another, either the air of the atmosphere or the water of a river, lake or ocean; even, soils are permeated with moisture. So, it is no exaggeration to say that life, including our own, is bathed in fluids. A slightly closer look at the situation further reveals that it is the mobility of fluids that actually makes them so useful to the maintenance of life, both internally and externally to living organisms. For example, it is the flow of air that our lungs that supplies oxygen to our blood stream. The forced air flow created by our respiration, however, is not sufficient; without atmospheric motion around us, we would choke sooner or later in our own exhaust of carbon dioxide. Likewise, most aquatic forms of life rely on the natural transport of water for their nutrients and oxygen. Our industrial systems, which release pollution on a continuing basis, would not be permissible in the absence of transport and dilution of nearly all emissions by ambient motions of air and water. In sum, natural fluid motions in the environment are vital, and we have a strong incentive to study the naturally occurring fluid flows, particularly those of air in the atmosphere and of water in all its streams, from underground aquifers to surface flows in rivers, lakes, estuaries and oceans. The study of these flows has received considerable attention over the years and has spawned several distinct disciplines: meteorology, climatology, hydrology, hydraulics, limnology and oceanography. Whereas the particular objectives of each of these disciplines, such as weather forecasting in meteorology and design of water-resource projects in hydraulics, encourage disciplinary segregation, environmental concerns compel experts in those disciplines to consider problems that are essentially similar: the effect of turbulence on the dispersion of a dilute substance, the transfer of matter or momentum across an interface, flow in complex geometries, the rise of a buoyant plume, and the impact of flow over a biotic system. The study of environmental flows is also fully integrated in the contemporary emphasis on environmental impacts and sustainable life on planet Earth. According to physicists, the world scientific community will be occupied during the 21st century in large part by problems related to the environment, particularly those stemming from the concern over climate change (Rodhe et al., 2000) as well as many other problems spanning a wide range of spatial and temporal scales. This marks the first time in the history of science that environmental problems lie at the forefront of scientific research. The following chapters of this book are illustrative of a number of these problems. The common points encourage interdisciplinarity to a degree that is increasing in proportion to the acuity of our environmental problems. This overlap between the various disciplines concerned with the environmental aspects of natural fluid flows has given rise to a body of knowledge that has become known as Environmental Fluid Mechanics. The interdisciplinary aspects become especially manifest in the study of processes at the interfaces between environmental systems

    Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis

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    The 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

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    “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

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    We 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

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    We 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

    Author Index

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    koamabayili/VECTRON-author-checklist: VECTRON author checklist

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    We 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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