1,721,136 research outputs found
Interface: Applying the Resilience Perspective to Planning: Critical Thoughts from Theory and Practice - “Reframing” Resilience: Challenges for Planning Theory and Practice
An affective approach to climate change adaptation
At the end of November 2011, Australian news media reported that the year was shaping up to be the eleventh hottest on record globally and the hottest in which the La Nina effect was known to be cooling water temperatures in eastern and central parts of the Pacific Ocean. This rather alarming piece of information dropped out of the news cycle in less than a day with little or no comment. What does this mean? Have we become immune to such alarming news about global warming? Have we become more cynical about what scientists are telling us, especially at a time when we had experienced wet and cool Spring weather in south-eastern Australia? Do we simply hope that the scientists might still be wrong about climate change? Have we concluded that Australia is rather impotent when it comes to climate change action? Is the very idea of global climate change so overwhelming that we would rather bury our heads in the sand, maybe on a beach during blissfully lazy summer holidays? Or have Australian media outlets reached the conclusion that scientific predictions about the onset of climate change are no longer very ‘newsworthy’?No doubt the muted response to the alarming news reflects a mix of these possibilities. The relative failure of global gatherings intended to negotiate new global agreements on climate change responses—from Copenhagen onwards—has increased our pessimism. The cynical and divisive political debate on the Gillard government’s efforts to ‘put a price on carbon’ has dampened our enthusiasm for what Australia might be able to do. Australian ‘news’ media outlets seem to be more interested in the theatrics of politics than the content of political debate and this is making people more cynical about politics in general. Those who are pushing s trongly for more adequate Australian policies on global climate change seem to be preoccupied with the formulation of public policy at a national level and the ongoing debate continues be dominated by the science of climate change.In Australia we have not yet taken on board key ideas from the important book by UK-based climate change researcher Mike Hulme, especially when he points out that it is a misunderstanding of science to think that it can give us an ‘answer’ and that it is time to shift from thinking of climate change as ‘problem to solve’ in order to see it as a ‘condition in which we are enmeshed’. While this might seem like a pessimistic approach, Hulme argues that it can enable us to see climate change as being an ‘imaginative resource’ that can enable us to think much more deeply about our history, culture and ways of living. Hulme’s book offers us a way to get beyond the big problem of denial—whether it takes the form of scepticism or avoidance. But it is only an invitation to take a different approach to the climate change challenge; the hard work on this is yet to be done.Hulme is certainly not alone in suggesting that we must turn our attention to the ‘affective dimensions’ of climate change adaptation.Read the full article >Photo Credit: jenny downing via Compfight c
Ecosystem services linked to livelihoods and well-being in the Ganges-Brahmaputra-Meghna delta
Deltas are dynamic and the relationships between ecosystem services, livelihoods and well-being within them are multi-scalar and often non-linear. Social mechanisms of access and management vary between different bundles of ecosystem services: a social-ecological system approach therefore identifies the trade-offs and interactions which occur across diverse temporal and spatial scales and communities. Although Bangladesh is moving towards a more urbanised future, access to ecosystem services continues to be critical to the well-being of populations in rural areas. However, rights to those services are available to a diminishing few. Current winners and losers from development processes are persistent, and ecosystem services are unlikely to lift the rural poor out of poverty without a complete restructuring of social and economic relations in rural areas
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
The 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
“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
We 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
Integrative analysis for the Ganges-Brahmaputra-Meghna delta, Bangladesh
The Ganges-Brahmaputra-Meghna delta in Bangladesh is one of the world’s most dynamic deltas and supports high population densities based on large provisioning ecosystem services. Analysing the future of these ecosystem services and associated human livelihoods represents a complex multi-scale, multi-disciplinary problem. A conceptual framework aims to identify mechanisms that link physical processes (including climate change) with ecosystem services and social outcomes providing a shared basis for other analysis, including the design of an integrated model. This also allows the characteristics of co-production of ecosystem services at the landscape scale and significant trade-offs between types of ecosystem services to be incorporated. Adopting a systems-based approach of this scale is challenging but essential to support the effective management of coastal Bangladesh
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
We 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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