1,720,979 research outputs found

    Multi-domain human-oriented approach to evaluate human comfort in outdoor environments

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    Human comfort outdoors is widely investigated, but most studies explore the comfort domains singularly. This paper aimed to evaluate human comfort in parks, verifying the importance of using a multi-domain (simultaneously evaluating thermal, visual, acoustic, and air quality) and multi-disciplinary (combining environmental and social fields) approach. A walk through a pre-defined path from one park to another was repeated twice per day on four consecutive days in June, with three participants per walk. The two investigated parks are in central Italy and were chosen because they differ in their design and spatial characteristics. Environmental data were recorded with an innovative wearable device during the whole walk, and surveys were used to assess people’s perceptions of the parks. Despite observed differences in collected physical parameters, the survey’s responses were similar, and different comfort domains showed dependence on each other in the two parks. Logistic regression models were developed for each park, and they revealed that the qualitative information predicted the overall comfort level more accurately than the environmental data. In detail, the models based on environmental data resulted in R(2) equal to 0.126 and 0.111 in Parks 1 and 2, respectively, whereas using the survey answers increased it up to 0.820 (Park 1) and 0.806 (Park 2). This study contributes to addressing the gap in multi-domain comfort studies outdoors and confirms the importance of using multi-disciplinary and multi-domain approaches for a complete comfort analysis, supporting holistic human-biometeorology-oriented models and forecasting opportunities that can promote improvements in urban environmental quality and liveability. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s00484-022-02338-7

    Georeferenced fix and mobile environmental data to assess microclimate change in complex urban areas toward resilient planning

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    This paper focuses on the assessment of urban microclimate and Urban Heat Island (UHI) intensity, which are critical issues in urban areas. The ongoing process of urbanization is exacerbating the problem of urban overheating due to changes in land use and cover, decreased vegetation, and increased anthropogenic activities. This phenomenon negatively impacts the environment, including increased energy consumption in buildings, greater greenhouse gas emissions, worse air quality, thermal discomfort, and higher heat-related mortality and morbidity rates. In this study, the authors evaluate the reliability of a GIS tool that simulates global solar radiation and the effectiveness of mobile monitoring data for validating it. The city center of Florence, Italy, was selected as the case study, and a vehicle-based monitoring system was used, along with microclimatic data continuously recorded through a fixed weather station connected to big data sources. The results showed that the GIS tool produced accurate predictions of solar radiation, and the mobile monitoring data were effective in validating its results. The study highlights the importance of combining different approaches, including field measurements and GIS modeling, for a complete understanding of the urban microclimate connected to the functional organization of architectural and urban places. The innovation lies in the potential extended use of GIS tools in urban microclimate assessments as a valuable resource for municipalities as a lower-cost alternative compared to constructing and maintaining sensor networks

    Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis

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    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

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    “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

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    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

    Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts

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    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
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