1,720,997 research outputs found
Major european stressors and potential of available tools for assessment of urban and buildings resilience
Get PDFRecent data show that there are intensifications of phenomena related to climate change, such as the increasing of heavy rains, more frequent and intense droughts connected with fires, and alterations of the local climatic conditions, including heat islands with consequent impacts on cities, districts, and buildings. Not only are natural hazards stressing Europe but also human-induced events like low-magnitude earthquakes as a direct cause of fracking or mining. This study aimed to investigate the significant stressors and summarize what impact is the most dangerous in each European country. There is a need to secure the operating conditions of urban infrastructures and to preserve a high-quality indoor environment of buildings. The main scope of this paper is to compare selected tools that evaluate the urban and building resilience and to assess their suitability, based on an analysis of natural and human-induced hazards in the European countries. The results represent a contribution to urban and architectural planning practice, and to the consistent implementation of measures to improve the resilience of the built environment by providing guidance as to which assessment tool is most suitable for each country
Embodied Energy and Global Warming Potential of Radon Preventive Measures Applied in New Family Houses
No full textRadon inside buildings represents the primary source of human exposure to ionising radiation in the world. Studies in many countries have shown that high indoor radon levels are the second most frequent cause of lung cancer. This gas can enter a building through cracks, fractures, or other leaky places in structures that are in contact with the soil, incrementing the radon concentration indoors. The radon protective measures on buildings represent embodied and operational environmental impacts, which were more or less neglected so far. Nevertheless, as buildings have become more energy-efficient, the radon preventive measures impacts are recognised as being more and more significant and shall be thoroughly investigated. This paper performs a comparative analysis of embodied primary renewable and non-renewable energy and global warming potential (GWP) for alternative preventive measures. On this basis, the paper aims to assess the additional contribution of embodied impacts of three types of radon preventive measures for a single-family house located in a potential radon prone area. The embodied impacts are calculated for the A1-A3 LCA stages associated with the radon preventive measures and compared them against each other to find the additional embodied impacts compared to a family house without radon protection. The results indicate that the embodied energy and the GWP increase as more protective elements the measure contains, also considering the impacts of soil excavation
Environmental, Social and Economic Resilience in Multi-Residential Buildings: Assessing SBToolCZ Rating System
No full textSustainable Building Tool for the Czech Republic (SBToolCZ) is the Czech national green building rating system that encourages the design of sustainable buildings by incentivising reductions in energy, water, and building materials consumption, as well as improving occupant health and community connections. In addition to reducing the overall environmental impacts, certified green buildings must also be resilient enough to withstand external stressors, most frequently the symptoms of climatic change that may arise throughout the building's lifetime. Therefore, a resilient building should be capable of adapting and remaining functional under the pressure of more frequent and severe challenges. The purpose of this study is to examine where the SBToolCZ certification system has inherent overlaps with the topics of resilience, considering the environmental, social and economic factors relevant to Central European contexts. This is accomplished by comparing the criteria of this certification system with the most accepted principles of resilient design that have emerged from the international resilience rating systems or guidelines. A number of synergistic opportunities, as well as improvements for better integrating resilient design into the SBToolCZ framework and, therefore, into green construction, are discussed to implement existing criteria or propose supplementary ones. A key component of implementing resilience for multi-residential buildings is the SBToolCZ Site category, which is key to addressing the unique regional needs of each project and should be integrated with resilience-enhancement indicators. Finally, climate projections should be used instead of historical climate data at an early design stage to improve the resilience of the building
Sustainability assessment of waterproof membranes for radon mitigation in buildings
Get PDFGas radon is the main source of ionising radiation for humans and the second cause of lung cancer, just after smoking. Radon is present in the ground, and its concentration differs soil by soil according to the permeability and the mineral composition. Since radon mainly penetrates a building through cracks and fractures at the foundation level, it is necessary to focus on that area. The problem of high radon indoors concentration is present largely in Europe and in those countries where the heating indoors is privileged since there is a high-temperature difference between outdoors and indoors in winter. The waterproof membranes placed continuously in the structures that are in contact with the soil are one of the cheapest and easy-to-install radon mitigation solutions. Membrane-based measures, like all remedial measures, represent operational and embodied environmental impacts; the lasts were more or less ignored so far. Still, as buildings are becoming energy-efficient and should ensure a high level of indoor comfort, the environmental impacts of these membranes are recognised as being noteworthy and shall be methodically examined. The paper aims to assess the contribution of embodied impacts of five macro-categories of membranes that could be installed to protect buildings against radon. The embodied impacts are calculated for the A1-A3 LCA stages and compared against each other in relation to one square meter and the radon resistance
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
- …
