1,721,069 research outputs found
Quantifying health co-benefits: from shifting to more walking and cycling to urban climate action plans
Get PDFClimate change and transportation are both “wicked problems” characterized by their complexity, interconnectedness, and the dynamic nature of how potential solutions are evaluated and compared. They both also have broad, multidisciplinary implications for society, ranging from health to financial to environmental injustice. While multidimensional in nature, solutions to these twin challenges are often not evaluated multidimensionally, with cost-benefit analyses exclusively comparing, for example, environmental impacts to infrastructure costs or transportation travel time savings to project costs, with health implications ignored. Health impact assessments can be an effective way to include quantifiable health implications in cost-benefit analyses or even introduce health impacts into the policy discourse when they might have otherwise been overlooked.
Transportation trips in the United States are dominated by single-occupancy vehicles, with implications for emissions, physical activity, and land use. Transitioning trips to active forms of transport, like walking and cycling, has the potential to reduce Transportation trips in the United States are dominated by single-occupancy vehicles, with implications for emissions, physical activity, and land use. Transitioning trips to active forms of transport, like walking and cycling, has the potential to reduce congestion, improve air quality, reduce greenhouse gas emissions, increase physical activity, open land to alternative uses, and improve health. It also has the potential to increase traffic fatalities, as these modes are more vulnerable than automobiles. However, typically these types of projects are evaluated from a policy perspective solely on the implications for the transportation system (e.g., travel time, congestion, wear and tear on roadways). Urban climate action plans, on the other hand, by their nature focus on mitigating greenhouse gas emissions that cause climate change and adapting urban areas to better manage the effects of a changing climate. However, because the sources of greenhouse gas emissions tend to also be sources of air pollution, these policies and interventions have the potential to affect local air quality and, with it, human health. In both cases – active transport polices and urban climate action plans – health effects are important “co-benefits” even if they are not the primary objective.
In this dissertation, we conduct three health impact assessments to quantify health co-benefits of policy measures not primarily targeting health. Chapter 2 focuses on the physical activity health co-benefits of transportation policy that is primarily focused on reducing greenhouse gas emissions and is implemented at the county-level across the East Coast. We used modeled shifts in total walking and cycling miles traveled to estimate the net mortality impacts of nine cap-and-invest scenarios that might have been implemented across 13 states in the Transportation Climate Initiative. We found that all scenarios modeled would reduce net mortality in all 378 counties included; however, impacts would be concentrated in urban areas along the I-95 corridor. The monetized value of mortality benefits was estimated to exceed the infrastructure costs of walking and cycling improvements for all scenarios.
Chapter 3 focuses on estimating the mortality impacts of shifting to more walking and cycling in the Greater Boston Area under different scenarios implemented at the individual level. We used data from the Massachusetts Travel Survey and the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey to estimate baseline individual total physical activity for ~3 million residents of the Greater Boston Area. We then estimated mortality impacts from three different scenario concepts: 1) all residents meet the Surgeon General’s recommended activity level; 2) all residents increase activity by 15, 30, and 60 minutes more walking and cycling; and, 3) the City of Boston trip mode share shifts to match Amsterdam. We found that all scenarios had likely positive net mortality benefits. We found that scenarios that targeted the least active population had greater health impacts due to the non-linear nature of epidemiological concentration response functions used. We believe this suggests that individual modeling is helpful compared to aggregated population-level modeling when conducting similar studies.
Informed by the challenge of increased traffic fatalities associated with walking and cycling activity in Chapters 2 and 3, Chapter 4 describes the disparities by race/ethnicity in traffic fatalities per mile-traveled for walking, cycling, and driving. We found disparities in fatality rates across all modes, with Black and Hispanic Americans dying at higher rates per mile-traveled than White or Asian Americans. Our findings suggest that disparities are greater than previously reported, including in official federal documents, due to our novel adjustment for differential miles traveled by race/ethnicity. As a policy consideration, we suggest that policymakers consider ways to address both systematic racism and road safety with recently approved federal transportation infrastructure resources.
In the third health impact assessment (Chapter 5), we used air quality modeling to predict how fine particulate matter and ozone concentrations might shift across the region if only Boston eliminated emissions. We also estimated the mortality and morbidity health effects using U.S. EPA’s BenMAP program. We found that fine particulate matter would likely decrease across the region if Boston emissions were eliminated. Ozone concentrations, however, would likely increase in some areas and decrease in others, due to ozone’s more complex relationship with nitrogen dioxide. The net health impacts of eliminating Boston emissions would likely be large, and concentrated in non-Hispanic Black communities due to the environmental injustices present in current air quality.
Overall, this dissertation contributes to the growing evidence base that documents the health co-benefits of transportation and climate action. We believe our findings suggest that policymakers would benefit from requiring consideration of how potential policies and programs affect the public’s health, even when health impacts are ancillary to primary policy or programmatic objectives
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
Extreme heat and air pollution in urban environmental justice communities: a mixed methods analysis
No full textUrban environmental health challenges such as poor air quality and extreme heat disproportionately affect environmental justice communities, necessitating targeted interventions. Researchers have assessed these exposures through in-situ monitoring, statistical modeling, or a combination of both. However, there remains a need for data collection that better characterizes local-level exposures, including community-engaged approaches to ensure processes and interventions are appropriate and sustainable. This dissertation uses mixed-methods approaches to characterize local-level extreme heat and air pollution exposures in the urban environmental justice communities of Chelsea and East Boston, MA. First, we explored perceptions of air quality and heat, data resources, and barriers to information sharing through analysis of semi-structured interviews with community leaders serving Chelsea and East Boston. We found that community leaders face challenges conveying the risks associated with air pollution and extreme heat: information is often compartmentalized and complex, with difficulties in accessing and interpreting data for their community. Proposed solutions involved bolstering community participation, establishing portals for open data, and utilizing innovative approaches in science communication. Recommendations include enhanced collaborative partnerships across educational, governmental, and healthcare organizations. Next, we focus on air pollution through a pilot study assessing the use of portable air cleaners (PACs) to reduce indoor PM. We found that PACs were effective in reducing particulate matter when in use, though households varied in their use of the cleaners. Higher filtration levels correlated with more substantial PM reductions, though not uniformly across all homes. While this study suggested PAC efficacy, it also suggested the need for further exploration to reducing PAC implementation challenges in the homes. Finally, we describe an assessment of fine-scale ambient temperature variation within the City of Chelsea, MA, focusing on spatial disparities in heat exposure and implications for local climate planning and policy. Leveraging approximately 80 on-the-ground local temperature sensors, we found local sensors were significantly higher than National Weather Service readings. Through regression analyses and spatial mapping, we identified hot spots within Chelsea facing especially high temperatures during hotter weeks and heat waves. Broadly, this dissertation presents novel, local-level analyses on two important urban environmental exposures with a multitude of associated negative health impacts in the EJ communities of Chelsea and East Boston, MA. We provide evidence towards integrating mixed-methods, community-engaged approaches for strong, action-oriented outcomes.2026-05-10T00:00:00
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
Author-wise bibliometric analysis based on entropy.
No full textAuthor-wise bibliometric analysis based on entropy.</p
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