1,720,955 research outputs found
Design for All: Strategy to support Designers and Policy makers to achieve inclusive and healthier places
No full textIssue/problem:
Health refers to an individual and collective status, strongly influenced by the environmental context. Different factors as the aging of the population and its multi-ethnic composition are prompting to the design of cities, public spaces, work places, public transport, services, which allow people to live a longer, more flexible and a more satisfying life. As builders of the urban environment, designers are challenged to bridge these gaps of complexity. How is therefore possible creating spaces that all people can use independently where society diversity becomes the driver for inclusion and health?
Description of the problem:
In line with this, Design for All (DfA) is considered a fundamental and innovative strategy for designing inclusive spaces for a diversity of people’s needs and wishes. DfA has been defined as design for human diversity, social inclusion and equality, which aims at usability and comfort for as many people as possible, regardless of age, ability or circumstance.
The theoretical principles of DfA have been successfully developed in the scientific community. However, they do not yet correspond to a practical application in the built environment for improving people’s health and quality of life.Results:
Support tools and strategies to inspire stakeholders in the application of DfA strategies into practice will be discussed.
Information will be provided by following a descriptive and performance based approach. This means allowing architects to understand and reflect on the users’ needs, problems and wishes in specific circumstance for the development of creative and efficient solutions in their project. The context of investigation will include both the urban space and the indoor space of public buildings, especially in situations where a plurality of users’ needs are involved.
Lessons:
Improving quality and comfort of spaces addressed to a wide diversity of users will represent a fundamental value for inclusive projects’ development
Can hospitals impact users’ experience? Application of an evaluation tool to enhance Design for All
Full text linkBackground. Design for All (DfA) strategy addressing human diversity, social inclusion and equality, can have an impact on users' well-being in healthcare facilities. However, evaluation tools are needed to identify the extent to which DfA influences users' experience and service quality. This study explores the application of the Design for All A.U.D.I.T. (Assessment Usability Design & Inclusion Tool).
Methods. The tool's structure is based on a multicriteria framework that evaluate hospital areas through a rating system. The hierarchical framework includes three Categories of DfA outcomes (Physical-spatial quality; Sensorial-cognitive quality and Social quality) with related criteria, indicators and requirements. The tool has been applied in the evaluation of two private hospitals, one in Buffalo (US) and one in Milan (Italy).
Results. The analysis of findings addressed both spatial and DfA qualities. For spaces, Horizontal circulation had the best scores in both hospitals (76% Italy, 88% US). The Italian hospital Vertical circulation had the lowest score (46%), while in the Buffalo facility Outdoor spaces had the lowest scores. Regarding DfA qualities, the Italian hospital obtained the highest score in Environmental Factors (84%), due to a sustainable design approach, while Social Inclusion got the lowest score (54%). The Buffalo facility scored higher on Social Inclusion (87%) because it provides diverse services for users. Both the hospitals had problems with Wayfinding due to layout and signs, scoring low on this criterion (59% Italy, 39% US).
Conclusions. The analysis of the hospitals demonstrated that the tool can evaluate spaces and DfA outcomes along dimensions of health and well-being. The system can be used to identify critical aspects and suggest design strategies, defining priorities for interventions. Further research directions will consider applications in different hospitals to ensure the tool scalability and application to new building projects
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
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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