1,720,968 research outputs found
The waste hierarchy: A strategic, tactical and operational approach for developing countries. the case study of Mozambique
Get PDFWaste management in Europe is shaped by the waste hierarchy, which guides the legislation and policy of the Member States. This hierarchy applies the following order of priority: (1) prevention; (2) preparing for reuse; (3) recycling; (4) other recovery; (5) disposal. The wide acceptance of this principle in Europe comes from a yearly developed pathway that should not be exported to other countries without consideration of the local framework. Poverty is widespread in most African countries, with the majority of the population surviving on less than 2 US dollars a day and the average waste production per capita being about half the quantity produced in Europe. However, municipal solid waste management is still inadequate throughout the region, with open waste burning and dumping being the only method of disposal in enormous cities. These in turn arise without any planning or basic infrastructure such as roads, sewers or waste landfills. We used the case study of Mozambique to define a strategic, tactical and operational approach for the implementation of the waste hierarchy and to customize it to the local situation. Like other African countries, the major weaknesses in the performance of waste management are the poor legal framework, the lack of institutional structures and the ineffective and poorly coordinated initiatives of the international stakeholders. We propose an interpretation of the waste hierarchy in order to compensate for local deficiencies and to define a local framework for the policy makers whereby prevention is no longer a priority in the short term, in order to stress the awareness and the collection. These are consolidated steps of waste management in industrialized countries but which still pose a challenge in developing nations
An international partnership for the sustainable development of municipal solid waste management in Guinea-Bissau, West Africa
No full textMost of the developing countries are facing great challenges to manage the increasing quantity of waste produced in the urban areas, that are growing at a very high rate. This paper presents the preliminary results of a technical study aiming at designing the first municipal master plan for the management of urban solid waste in the capital city of Guinea-Bissau, through a sustainable development international partnership. The project is led by the municipality of Bissau. It involves an Italian private enterprise, responsible for the technical transfer of knowledge and experience and count with the support of an international association, which plays the role of cultural bridge to guarantee the translation of innovative knowledge in local and feasible solutions for the African country. The final product of this international partnership should be a master plan, capable to design the waste management strategy for Bissau for the next 10 years, based on accurate data collected about the production and composition of waste in Bissau. The plan would be able to support the local policy makers to create an integrated waste management system, proper for the local characteristics and challenges. Irregular collection service, due to the lack of financial resources, together with a week awareness of the local population about the health and environmental risks related with the current practice of open dumping and burning are the major constrains. The identification of a proper location for a sanitary landfill to substitute the open dumpsite actually used to dispose the unsorted waste, the implementation of an efficient and economically feasible collection system are the current priorities. Future efforts should envisage how to improve and formalize the recycling and reusing activities, that have been realized nowadays informally by waste pickers in armful conditions
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
Key strategic actions to improve the challenge of hazardous waste management in Mozambique
Get PDFWaste management is an international issue with a global impact. Industrialised and emerging countries increasingly need raw materials to feed their industries: natural gas, oil, coal, precious minerals and metals. Most African countries are rich in raw materials, which they are powerless to trade on but eager to negotiate with. However, they have difficulty managing the negative effect that these trades produce, due to poor environmental regulations, inadequate waste disposal infrastructures, lack of technology and public bodies with little experience and resources. This situation makes it challenging for some African governments to manage the increasing quantity and types of waste, resulting from the extracting industries and growing urbanization. Furthermore, the benefits are not fairly distributed, whilst the negative impacts, both environmental and socio-economic, of a failing waste management system are widespread and global. We have studied the situation of hazardous waste management in Mozambique as a case study. Mozambique is one of the poorest countries in the world, but is rich in natural resources, which are being exploited by several global companies in recent years, and with insufficient waste management infrastructure. After the analysis of the local condition, this paper aims to trace guidelines to support different stakeholders to make the first coordinated steps towards a better management of hazardous waste
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
koamabayili/VECTRON-author-checklist: VECTRON author checklist
No full textWe 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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