1,720,959 research outputs found
Modelling the diffusion and control of Aedes albopictus borne epidemics: a proposed case study in the city of Rome
No full textModelling human travel patterns to evaluate intervention strategies for mosquito-borne disease
No full textThe aim of this paper is to evaluate the effectiveness of control strategies for diseases transmitted by the Aedes albopictus mosquito (the “Asian tiger”) and spread by human travel. This mosquito, which has become established in southern Europe in recent years, is a vector for many diseases. For example, an outbreak of chikungunya, hitherto regarded as a tropical disease, occurred in Italy in 2007. The initial case was a person who had acquired the disease overseas. Mosquito-borne infections can only be spread over large distances by human travel, as the flight range of mosquitos is very limited. A system dynamics model has been developed which describes the mosquito life-cycle, the natural history of mosquito-borne disease in humans and mosquitos, and human behaviour including travel. Potential disease control strategies include chemical treatments to destroy either larvae or adult mosquitos, campaigns to influence human behaviour, or quarantine of infectious people. In this paper, which is based on the Italian chikungunya outbreak, this model is used to study and compare the effect of different control strategies, where the various actions are combined in different ways and implemented for different time period
System dynamics models to assess the risk of mosquito-borne diseases and to evaluate control policies
No full textThis paper describes the development of a System Dynamics model to study the
diffusion and control of disease transmitted by the mosquito Aedes albopictus in Italy. This insect
is one of the world’s most invasive species, due to the global trade in used tyres, an efficient
means of transport of mosquito eggs because they frequently contain small deposits of water. Ae.
albopictus is very adaptable to climate change and is spreading rapidly into temperate zones. An
outbreak of the “tropical” disease Chikungunya in Italy in 2007 proved that Europe is definitely at
risk for Aedes-borne diseases. Although the work described in this paper concerns an application
in Italy, it can be adapted to tackle other mosquito-borne diseases in other European countrie
Equilibrium in a two-agent assignment problem
Get PDFIn this paper we address a particular generalisation of the Assignment Problem (AP) in a Multi-Agent setting, where distributed agents share common resources. We consider the problem of determining Pareto-optimal solutions that satisfy a fairness criterion (equilibrium). We show that the solution obtained is equivalent to a Kalai Smorodinsky solution of a suitably defined bargaining problem and characterise the computational complexity of finding such an equilibrium. Additionally, we propose an exact solution algorithm based on a branch-and-bound scheme that exploits bounds obtained by suitably rounding the solutions of the corresponding linear relaxation, and give the results of extensive computational experiments. Copyright © 2009, Inderscience Publishers
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
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