1,720,982 research outputs found
Experimenting growing media through local bio-resources valorisation: A design-oriented approach for living walls
Full text linkIn the context of densely populated urban areas, vertical greenery systems are gaining momentum for their role in reintroducing nature and enhancing buildings sustainability. Despite this trend, the absence of a standardised methodology for designing sustainable vertical greenery systems and guidelines for selecting appropriate growing media for this technology are two crucial gaps in academic research. This study addresses this by testing six alternative growing media derived from local bio-resources (dried M. spicatum, hazelnut shells, coffee grounds, hemp stalks, grinded cork, and raw sheep wool) and comparing them with a standard growing medium. The experiment was conducted over 120 days, monitoring the health and growth of three plant species - C. comosum, S. wallisii, and M. spicata. Innovative tools, such as a multi-criteria matrix and the Mean Leaf Growth Index, were introduced to assess sustainability and plant development. The findings highlight promising outcomes for hazelnut shells-based, hemp stalks-based, and grinded cork-based growing media, showcasing their lightweight and stable attributes compared to standard growing medium and assuring good plants health and growth. In contrast, raw sheep wool-based, M. spicatum-based, and coffee grounds-based growing media present challenges in plant health and growth, despite interesting attributes concerning lightweight and low water demand. This research contributes to shaping a design-by-components strategy for more sustainable vertical greenery systems, emphasizing the crucial role of circular bio-resources in nature-based technological innovations
Outdoor Green Walls: Multi-perspective Methodology for Assessing Urban Sites Based on Socio-environmental Aspects
No full textGreen walls are adopted as technological nature-based solution to
improve citizens’ well-being through the naturalization of the built
environment. The site selection is critical to the success of outdoor green walls
due to their cross-functional application and to the urban grid’s complexity.
This process must consider environmental features, social needs, and citizens’
habits, besides the urban context’s morphology. In this framework, the adoption
of a multi-perspective approach may deal with the design process of outdoor
green walls as complex systems. This contribute presents the definition of a site
selection’s methodology for outdoor green walls based on the integration of
multi-perspectives, from citizens to academic experts, applied on the case study
of Biella municipality (Piedmont Region, Italy). The methodology, here
presented as a “work in progress” tool, was interdisciplinary designed
combining environmental and socio-cultural drivers for decision-making
processes for outdoor green walls’ applications. Preliminary results contribute
to amplify and ease the debate between academic and non-academic
stakeholders concerning the production of tangible and intangible benefits
provided by outdoor green walls
Aggregation models on hypergraphs
No full textFollowing a newly introduced approach by Rasetti and Merelli we investigate the possibility to extract topological information about the space where interacting systems are modelled. From the statistical datum of their observable quantities, like the correlation functions, we show how to reconstruct the activities of their constitutive parts which embed the topological information. The procedure is implemented on a class of polymer models on hypergraphs with hard-core interactions. We show that the model fulfils a set of iterative relations for the partition function that generalise those introduced by Heilmann and Lieb for the monomer–dimer case. After translating those relations into structural identities for the correlation functions we use them to test the precision and the robustness of the inverse problem. Finally the possible presence of a further interaction of peer-to-peer type is considered and a criterion to discover it is identified
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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