1,720,958 research outputs found
Floor Brouwer (ed.) Sustaining Agriculture and the Rural Environment: Governance, Policy and Multifunctionality. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar. 2004 (Reprinted 2016). Xi+360 pages. U.K. £98.10 (Hardback).
Full text linkThe edited book, “Sustaining Agriculture and the Rural
Environment”, is largely a European contribution to the Ecological
Economics. It provides a useful review of ‘multifunctionality’ as the
central attribute of the European Model of Agriculture (EMA) and its
applied value to other developing countries. Brouwer introduces the book
(in Chapter 1) with a premise that jointly with food and fibre, the
European farmers also produce ‘public goods’ such as landscapes and
biodiversity management, cultural heritage, and viable rural
communities. He warms up the reader to digest what follows in the book
with a quick overview of the market for these positive externalities and
strategies for their continuous supply in the European Union’s Common
Agriculture Policy. This paves the way for rest of the book, which is
organised into four parts and seventeen chapters
Fareeha Zafar. Canals, Colonies and Class: British Policy in the Punjab 1880- 1940. Lahore, Pakistan: Lahore School of Economics. 2017. xxii + 317 pages. Price not given.
Full text linkFareeha Zafar’s book Canals, Colonies and Class: British
Policy in the Punjab 1880-1940 is essentially an edited reproduction of
her PhD thesis, The Impact of Canal Construction on the Rural Structures
of the Punjab: The Canal Colony Districts, 1880 To 1940. The thesis was
completed about 35 years ago at the School of Oriental and African
Studies, the University of London (now SOAS, the University of London).
She studies the British colonisation process in the Punjab and its
effect on the local environment, the production patterns, and social
relations, understanding that despite several similar studies on the
region, no serious effort had been made to synthesise these issues the
way she does in this book. However, in the form of a new book, the
synthesis does not add much value as it reiterates the British
colonisers’ well-known strategies, namely irrigation development as a
tool to settle disarmed forces and nomads and, thereby, strengthening a
class of local landed elite to maintain their power in the colonies,
their revenue-seeking policies, indebtedness of the landed class and
alike. Nevertheless, considering the timing of the original
contribution, the book, if read together with the contributions such as
Khuhro (1978/1999) and Cheesman (1997), provides a relatively rich
description of geographers’ analyses of the British policies, their
intentions, and their effects
Emerging Issues in the Implementation of Irrigation and Drainage Sector Reforms in Sindh, Pakistan
Full text linkEver increasing demand for food, electricity and domestic
water use due to rapid growth in population has remained a key challenge
for Pakistan since the 1950s. The country has invested heavily in water
engineering projects to establish the world’s largest gravity-driven
irrigation network on the Indus [Bandaragoda (2006); Bengali (2009)].
Besides fulfilling a significant proportion of the country’s energy
demand from hydro-power installations, the system irrigates about 14
million hectares of farmlands and supports agriculture sector to
contribute about 21 percent of the GDP, 60 percent of the exports and 45
percent of the labour force [Bhutta (2006); Pakistan (2012)]. Amidst its
development, the elaborated irrigation facility has left a deep
footprint on productivity and environment of the basin itself in the
form of the rising levels of water-logging and salinity and the
degradation of deltaic ecology [Briscoe and Qamar (2009); Memon and
Thapa (2011)]. By the 1960s, every year about 40,000 hectares of fertile
farmlands were turning into wastelands because of water-logging and
salinity in the basin [Bhutta (2006); Mulk (2009); Qureshi, et al.
(2008)]. Therefore, the country had no option but to develop a remedial
drainage network of thousands of kilometres of drains and numerous tube
wells parallel to the existing irrigation infrastructure
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
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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