1,721,395 research outputs found
Challenges in the Modeling and Simulation of Green Buildings
Green buildings are environmentally bearable and economically viable buildings that are designed, constructed, and operated in order to minimize their environmental impact on the planet and maximize the quality of human life. Achieving a green building is hence a wide, complex, and ambitious challenge that requires close cooperation of all the stakeholders involved in the life cycle of the building, multidisciplinary competencies and field experience, as well as extensive computational skills. In this last regard, building performance simulation, which is a computer-based and multidisciplinary mathematical model of given aspects of building performance, is emerging as a promising support for designers and consultants. Unfortunately, although building performance simulation is renowned to be a powerful, comprehensive, flexible, and scalable tool, its use is not trivial, and, even today, modelers have to face several challenges for employing it to support the design and operation of green buildings. In this chapter, the main features of green buildings will be, first, mentioned. Next, typical mistakes, errors, and uncertainties that can spoil a building model will be presented. Then, a few modeling and simulation challenges - ranging from the model creation, through modeling under aleatory uncertainty, quality assurance, tool integration, simulation-based optimization, visualization and communication issues, to the selection of an appropriate tool - will be presented. Finally, a few final conclusions and future directions are drawn
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
The 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
“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
We 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
The impact of climate change on the overheating risk in dwellings-A Dutch case study
Overheating in buildings has been identified as an essential cause of several problems ranging from thermal discomfort and productivity reduction to illness and death. Overheating in buildings is expected to increase as global warming continues. The risk of overheating in existing and new buildings can be reduced if policy makers take decisions about adaptation interventions quickly. This paper introduces a methodology for supporting such decisions on a national level. The methodology aims at (i) quantifying the impact of climate change on the overheating risk, (ii) ranking and characterizing the various building types in terms of their overheating risk and sensitivity to climate change, and (iii) assessing the potential of ventilative cooling to mitigate the effects of climate change. In the case study the overheating risk is evaluated in thousands of dwelling cases (i.e., 9216 possible combinations of several design and operation strategies) consistent with the characteristics of the Dutch dwelling stock built between 1964 and 2013. The overheating risk is assessed for four climate scenarios, which represent historical and future scenarios developed by the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute. Computational analyses are carried out using the detailed building performance simulation program IDA-ICE, assisted by a postprocessing calculation model developed in MATLAB (R). The results show that most of the Dutch dwelling types can effectively suppress the effects of global warming. However, poorly ventilated dwellings are vulnerable to overheating and are the most sensitive to climate change, particularly if their Windows are not well protected against direct solar radiation
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
We 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
We 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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