1,721,132 research outputs found
Livestock vulnerability to flooding
Full text linkThis paper investigates the vulnerability of livestock to flooding. A conceptual model is developed to evaluate the toppling and sliding instability of farm animals exposed to floodwaters. Numerical simulations are also employed to assess the drag, lift and contraction coefficients for some animals among the most commonly farmed. Using the results of the above model together with the few information available in literature, the vulnerability functions for these farm animals exposed to floodwaters are proposed. This is expected to improve flood damage assessment in the agricultural sector, while also enhancing flood risk evaluation and communication to farmers
Stima dell'allagamento della piana a Sud di Latisana (sinistra Tagliamento) mediante modellazione matematica bidimensionale
No full textAssessing 40 years of flood risk evolution at the micro-scale using an innovative modeling approach: the effects of urbanization and land planning
Full text linkThe present work is aimed at assessing the change in time of flood risk as a consequence of landscape modifications. The town of San Donà di Piave (Italy) is taken as a representative case study because, as most parts of the North Italy floodplains, it was strongly urbanized and anthropized in the last several decades. As a proxy for flood risk, we use flood damage to residential buildings. The analysis is carried out at the local scale, accounting for changes to single buildings; GIS data such as high-resolution topography, technical maps, and aerial images taken over time are used to track how the landscape evolves over time, both in terms of urbanized areas and of hydraulically relevant structures (e.g., embankments). Flood hazard is determined using a physics-based, finite element hydrodynamic code that models in a coupled way the flood routing within the Piave River, the formation of levee failures, and the flooding of adjacent areas. The expected flood damage to residential buildings is estimated using an innovative method, recently proposed in the literature, which allows estimating how the damage evolves during a single flood event. The decade-scale change in the expected flood damage reveals the detrimental effect of urbanization, with flood risk growing at the pace of a fraction of urbanized areas. The within-event time evolution of the flood damage, i.e., how it progresses in the course of past or recent flood events, reflects changes in the hydrodynamic process of flooding. The general methodology used in the present work can be viewed as a promising technique to analyze the effects on the flood risk of past landscape evolution and, more importantly, a valuable tool toward an improved, well-informed, and sustainable land planning
A Comparative Sensitivity Analysis of GPS Receivers
Full text linkGNSS technologies are progressively becoming one
of the key elements in most of innovative wireless
applications. Most location-based services and
systems are in fact employing standalone GPS,
GPS+EGNOS (or WAAS), Assisted-GPS and
Differential GPS as core technologies and therefore
more and more companies have been integrating
GNSS receivers into their consumer products. By
considering the large number of available GPS
receivers on the market and the lack of standard
specifications on the performance, a general
evaluation of low cost GPS chipset is very
interesting. The present paper describes the
performance tests of a set of GPS receivers by
different manufacturers in different environmental
conditions (outdoor, light indoor, temporary
blockage of the signal). The results of the tests are
compared with the claimed performance reported on
the data sheets.
The comparative study on the performance is
performed according to different figures of merit:
acquisition sensitivity, Time To First Fix (TTFF)
and the accuracy.
Performance of the different receivers were tested
by means of a hardware platform and a software tool
called Sat-Surf and Sat-Surfer respectively
Flow under vertical sluice gates: Flow stability at large gate opening and disambiguation of partial dam-break multiple solutions
No full textThe present paper deals with two open issues concerning the free orifice flow under vertical sluice gates, namely, the flow stability at large gate openings and the disambiguation of multiple solutions in the case of partial dam-break. The study of these problems, which are mutually connected, is based on ad hoc laboratory experiments and numerical simulations with a computational fluid dynamics model tracking the free surface with the two-phase volume of fluid method. A series of quasi-steady states is used to assess the threshold of relative gate openings that determines the passage from orifice flow to non-interacting flow; in addition, a set of dam-break experiments with partial gate opening (i.e., lower than the initial upstream water level) is performed to find reliable criteria to disambiguate multiple exact solutions supplied by the one-dimensional shallow water theory. It is found that the dependence of contraction and discharge coefficients on the relative gate opening has a dramatic impact on the stability of orifice flow at large gate openings
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
Transient Retention of Floating Particles Captured by Emergent Vegetation Through Capillarity
Full text linkThis work presents and discusses a series of experiments focusing on the transport of floating particles, mimicking seeds and propagules, within an array of randomly arranged cylinders mimicking emergent vegetation stems. The focus is on the temporary capture process by which particles colliding with a cylinder are trapped by surface tension for finite but relatively long retention times, thus promoting a large mechanical dispersion. Video analysis of the particle paths within the array shows that the probability of particles being captured, either temporarily or permanently, as well as the mean retention time, vary with flow velocity while being weakly affected by stem density. On the contrary, stem density plays a significant role in determining the frequency of the temporary captures; in particular, the probability of having temporary, rather than permanent, captures increases with vegetation density. We also propose some relationships to predict the probability of having temporary capture events and their mean duration based on experimental results
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
- …
