1,720,964 research outputs found
Start-up of a Pilot-Scale Membrane Bioreactor to treat Municipal Wastewater
No full textThe start-up of a pilot-scale membrane bioreactor equipped with submerged ultrafiltration membranes to treat municipal wastewater has been studied. Attention has been paid to determine membrane separation effects on biomass development in a reactor operated without inoculation. Moreover, the activated sludge model no. 1 has been applied to model biological removal processes. Filtration alone (without biodegradation) removed more than 70% of the influent total COD due to the high particulate COD fraction typically present in municipal wastewaters. Filtration action, retaining bacteria, allowed a rapid increase of the heterotrophic activity permitting to reach efficiencies in COD removal greater than 90% in one to two days. On the other hand, nitrogen removal process needs a few days (five to twenty depending on operational conditions) to develop and stabilise in the reactors because of the required development of the nitrifying biomass. Biomass development was confirmed using respirometric techniques. The activated sludge model no. 1 with minor modification was capable of simulating reasonably well the biological processes development in the MBR
A systematic literature review exploring the nexus between circular economy and communities
No full textCircular Economy (CE) studies often focus primarily on technical and economic aspects of the transition process. Recently, some authors have started to enquire the social processes connected to of the CE, often referring to communities. This article provides a Systematic Literature Review on the nexus between CE and community to investigate its features according to the experiences reported in the collected documents. The retrieved corpus has been analyzed recurring to consolidated frameworks, as the R hierarchy, the societal areas challenges identified by the Strategic Research and Innovation Agenda developed by the EU project CICERONE, and to the spectrum of participation provided by the International Association for Public Participation. The participative dynamics found in the corpus are analyzed also considering the type of communities, tools, methodologies and goals reported in the retrieved documents. Besides descriptive statistics about the mentioned aspects, the article includes a discussion on some CE social aspects, problematizing and questioning the retrieved stakeholders engagement practices, recurring to a qualitatively selected literature. Conclusions address the main findings related to the most commonly found R strategy, community type, societal challenge areas and type of participative dynamics according to the analytical components chosen in the methodology. Research implications are illustrated, suggesting possible directions for future research to widen the analysis on the nexus between CE and communities
Digital Innovation Ecosystems for Circular Economy: The Case of ICESP, the Italian Circular Economy Stakeholder Platform
No full textAn important but unexplored research issue is understanding how digital innovation ecosystem and a quintuple helix model can support the promotion of Circular Economy. Circular Economy, however, is intrinsically linked to the innovation issue. It can occur in a productive and consumption system under the form of a new product, process, organizational or marketing model. In the meantime, the digital innovation ecosystem debate was enriched by the social and environmental sustainability perspectives that are the pillars of the Circular Economy theory. Despite this, the research has failed to achieve full comprehension of digital innovation ecosystems' dynamics and processes for the Circular Economy, by highlighting the need for deeper understanding. Under the above assumptions, this paper presents the evidence of a single and extreme case study related to the Italian Circular Economy Stakeholder Platform (ICESP). This is shown as good practice of a digital platform for stakeholders' engagement, supporting the creation of a digital innovation ecosystem focused on the Circular Economy. We conclude by deriving implications for researchers and policy makers' agendas
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
Investigating circular economy urban practices in Centocelle, Rome district
No full textThe embedment of circular economy principles in cities is an opportunity to reduce the urban waste production and resource consumption towards closed-loop systems. In particular, the adoption of circular economy strategies as regeneration, optimization, sharing and loops can overcome waste and inefficiencies of linear economy. This paper presents some circular economy practices bringing an integration of circular strategies at urban scale. This work was funded by the Research into Electrical Systems Italian National Programme aimed at implementing a Smart District Models. The research project has been carried out in an Italian demonstrator quarter: Centocelle located in the city of Rome. Thanks to the smart solutions employment, a collaborative process has been established involving citizen. As a result, several circular economy urban practices have been identified supporting the smart community growth. The combination of smart community experience and circular economy principles application has resulted in several mutual advantages. In particular, the identified circular practices, as community gardens, co-workings, local and km0 production systems, recycling centres and other experiences of waste management, have achieved an urban transformation in terms of regeneration, sharing economy experiences, resource optimization, closed-loop systems. Therefore, circular economy practices have positively and actively influenced the urban community supporting the transition towards circular economy models
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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