1,720,968 research outputs found
Extreme temperatures in urban areas: assessment of inequalities looking at high-resolution climate data and vulnerabilities associated with socioeconomic factors and the built environment
No full textSevere increases in temperature are projected in European regions, with more intense and prolonged extreme events for cities located in the Mediterranean Basin. Due to anthropogenic greenhouse emissions, the average annual temperature in Italy increases by 1.1°C since 1980. In this regard, evaluate the context specific health vulnerabilities to temperatures in cities is essential, reason why it is largely reflected in the to date literature state-of-the-art. However, little is known about the risk evolution of temperature-mortality associations looking at social inequalities and built environment characteristics. Therefore, the main scope of this PhD thesis is to investigate trends in cold- and heat- mortality risk and burden by socio-economic factors, through the development of a flexible and validated methodology that can be reproduced in other urban contexts. The case study of this research is based on a record-linkage time series of the city of Turin, from 1982 to 2018. Overall, results demonstrated an increase in risk trends under both cold and heat conditions, highlighting heterogeneous associations across different factors influencing the population vulnerability to extreme burden of temperatures. A better understanding on how the most vulnerable population sub-groups have adapted at the urban and at the sub-urban scale to cold and heat in the last decades it is essential to improve public awareness, health care and social services, but also to prevent risks using targeted public health responses to adapt to future extreme temperature events due to climate change impacts
The heat-health nexus in the urban context: A systematic literature review exploring the socio-economic vulnerabilities and built environment characteristics
Full text linkOf all-natural disasters, extreme high temperatures events are the main cause of weather-related mortality. The compact urban settings of cities, the dependency on infrastructural systems as well as the larger concentration of people and economic activities make urban areas particularly vulnerable to health risks due to heat. To investigate vulnerabilities to heat, the study illustrates how vulnerability factors together with the hazard and the urban parameters determine the nexus between the heat and the health outcome, here called heat-health nexus. Peer-reviewed articles with no language limitations were searched from the first available record subjected to the imposed selection criteria. First, the information related to the study area were analysed, taking into consideration the level of resolution to investigate the scale of analysis. Then, the specific hazard parameters, divided in simple or combined weather indices, were evaluated. For sensitivity and adaptive capacity aspects, the study considered four distinct categories of de- terminants: mental and physical health, demographics, social and economic status. Finally, when looking at enhanced exposure, groups of determinants of vulnerability, divided between those describing indoor and outdoor environment conditions were analysed. Results demonstrated a heterogeneous spatial distribution of the identified case studies about heat and health in the urban context and highlighted different characteristics related to climate hazard, exposure, vulnerability and enhanced exposure factors in relation to the health of the population. This literature review demonstrate that a detailed identification of sensitivity, adaptive capacity and enhanced exposure elements is crucial in the implementation of effective adaptation measures in the health context
From CFD to GIS: a methodology to implement urban microclimate georeferenced databases
Full text linkThe objective of this paper is to present a methodology for the integration between a Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) microclimate simulation and a Geographic Information System (GIS). The first workflow involves the attribution of spatial coordinates to the point data extracted from the CFD, the implementation of a SQLite database, and the connection to the database for visualizing and using information on environmental and comfort variables. The second workflow involves the georeferencing of the CFD raster output, the attribution of an ID to the point data, the creation of a point grid in a GIS environment, and the merging of these with the point data on the microclimate. For demonstration purposes, the methodology is tested on a real case study using ENVI-met and ArcGIS Pro
Past and future hydrogeological risk assessment under climate change conditions over urban settlements and infrastructure systems: the case of a sub-regional area of Piedmont, Italy
No full textHydrogeological impacts due to flood and landslides are among the most significant disasters in the world. In the last decades, these events result in forthcoming losses of life and damages to private and public properties and criticalities increase due to very often increasing losses as consequence of changes in the rainfall regimes as well as the increase in average temperatures. This paper describes an applied hydrogeological risk assessment methodology carried out as part of an interdisciplinary European project between France and Italy (Interreg Alcotra ARTACLIM). We developed a practical framework to assess the risk of urban settlements and infrastructural assets within a sub-regional area of Piedmont (north-west of Italy). Past and future climate drivers are here analyzed using high-resolution data to highlight the temporal and spatial distribution of elements under threat. Using geographic information systems, we elaborate climate and socioeconomic data to develop an effective procedure for a sub-regional integrated research on the intrinsic and external conditions of potential instability. The results of the analyses produce a geo-localized risk score that can be used to rank assets in a screening process that aims to assist urban planner and local policymaker to prioritize the adaptation measures required for taking action to reduce hydrogeological damages to their assets
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
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
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Full text linkWe 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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