1,720,962 research outputs found
Towards comfortable communication in future vehicles
No full textThis research aims to study the effect of seat and/or backrest rotation on comfort and quality of conversation. Different sitting arrangements were tested to study the effect of the seat layout on: 1) (dis)comfort experience; 2) conversation quality and 3) postures. Two seats were arranged in different angles (0° 45° 90° and 180°) at the same distance (1 m) and participants were asked to talk to each other. The participants’ postures were acquired by using cameras and markers on the participants’ body. Questionnaires were used to rate the perceived (dis)comfort and quality of conversation. Results show that 90° configuration scored the best both in overall comfort and quality of conversation; while the 0° configuration scored the lowest in both ratings. A strong correlation was established between high comfort and good quality of conversation.Accepted author manuscriptApplied Ergonomics and DesignMechatronic Desig
A method for postural critical factors checking: The case of library chairs
No full textBACKGROUND:According to ergonomic researches regarding a good sitting posture, it is essential to ensure a natural back-curve in order to prevent musculoskeletal disorders. A brief observation among the Scientific Technology Library inside the University of Salerno showed that students used to complain about neck and lumbar pain, especially after a study day. OBJECTIVE:On the light of this background, a sitting posture comfort analysis had been performed on chairs inside the library to check the critical factors that influence the postural comfort and, consequently, the learning. METHODS:A prolonged sitting posture, that is common during the daily study activity, had been simulated with fifteen volunteer students performing 1-hour tests (divided into four 15-minutes tasks). Subjective perceptions had been gathered through questionnaires rating on a 5-point Comfort scale, both the expected comfort at the beginning of the experiment and the Localized Postural Comfort at the end of each task have been investigated. Then, postural angles had been gathered through photographic acquisition and Kinovea®. CaMAN software had been used to calculate the objective (dis)comfort indexes. Finally, subjective and objective data had been statistically processed and compared. RESULTS:Lumbar area scored the lowest perceived comfort while the perceived comfort was independent of participants and tasks, but dependent on time. CONCLUSIONS:After this comfort-driven analysis, critical factors of the chair-design were checked, and a proposal for a future re-design was hypothesized
School combo-desk comfort assessment: A method for weighing postural factors that affect the overall perceived comfort
No full textBACKGROUND:In recent years, a growing interest in ergonomics and comfort perception in secondary schools and universities can be detected, to go beyond the UNI-EN regulations and understanding how practically improve students’ perceived comfort during lessons. OBJECTIVE:This study aimed to analyse the (dis)comfort perceived by students while sitting in a combo-desk during lessons; it proposed a method for understanding and weighing the influence of postural factors on overall (dis)comfort. METHODS:Twenty healthy students performed a random combination of three different tasks in two sessions - listening, reading on a tablet and writing. Subjective perceptions were investigated through questionnaires, in which the expected and the overall comfort were evaluated; postural angles were gathered by processing photos through Kinovea® software and were used for the virtual-postural analysis, using a DHM (Digital Human Modelling) software; statistical analysis was used to investigate the influence of subjective comfort of each body part on the overall perceived comfort. RESULTS:The statistical correlations were used to perform an optimization problem in order to create a general law to formulate the overall comfort function, for each task, as a weighted sum of the comfort perceived in each body part. The test procedure, additionally, evaluated the influence on comfort over time. The results showed how the upper back and the task-related upper limb are the most influencing factors in the overall comfort perception. CONCLUSIONS:The paper revealed a precise and straightforward analysis method that can be easily repeated for other design applications. Obtained results can suggest to designers easy solution to re-design the combo-desk
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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