1,725,911 research outputs found
Greening the Building Envelope
No full textFour out of five European citizens live in urban areas and their quality of live is influenced by the environmental conditions. Greening the building envelope provides important ecosystem services, improves microclimatic conditions and reduces the energy demand for air conditioning. The chapter presents research results aimed at identifying benefits and challenges of vertical greening systems. In order to evaluate if alternative low-cost and low-maintenance vertical greening systems can be developed, the case of mosses is presented
Life Cycle Assessment of Vertical Greening Systems
No full textReflections Vertical greening systems can provide several environmental benefits in urban areas, mitigating the urban heat island. Effect, fostering biodiversity, and improving building envelope performances, mainly thanks to plants cooling capacity. The different vertical greening systems, green facades and living wall systems, besides aesthetic characteristics, entail different environmental costs. In this scenario, life cycle assessment methodology can be used to demonstrate if and when a system can be defined as environmentally sustainable. The studies conducted in this field show that the environmental benefits, mainly related to the energy savings for air conditioning at the building scale, can balance the environmental burden depending on the system characteristics. Therefore, in some cases vertical greening systems can be a sustainable option to improve the environmental conditions of dense urban areas
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
Experiencing innovative biomaterials for buildings: Potentialities of mosses
No full textVertical greening systems and green roofs provide ecosystem services in the urban context. Despite the important benefits they provide, economic (initial and maintenance costs) and environmental issues may limit the widespread diffusion of these greening systems. Mosses can be a low-cost and low-maintenance alternative green envelope for large-scale application on existing urban and industrial buildings thanks to their low requirements in terms of growing substrates, low amount of water and nutrients needed, and high desiccation tolerance. The study assesses the’ growing ability of mosses on building materials and low-cost materials, by means of growing tests performed under controlled environmental conditions on horizontal and vertical surfaces. Moss growth depends mainly on the physical characteristics of the materials, although an acidic moss mixture improves species richness. Results show different surface coverage: capillary matting > cement plaster > lime plaster > terracotta brick > slate > quartzite. The water retention capacity and its homogeneous distribution on the growing surface are the limiting factors for moss growth
Sensing transient outdoor comfort: A georeferenced method to monitor and map microclimate
No full textStudies on microclimate of cities have already proved that pedestrian thermal comfort is function of built environment and it is fundamental to understand this phenomena both with numerical techniques and field measurements to achieve comfortable, healthier and more livable urban spaces. There has been wide variety of methods to approach this question that how people react or behave in transient outdoor condition since most of the thermal comfort studies perceive pedestrian thermal comfort as “static” phenomena. The application of thermal comfort monitoring in transient conditions is limited due to complexity of the task and instrumental setup which leads to lack of understanding about how pedestrians compensate heat loads. This study contributes in two directions, first to setup a georeferenced environmental monitoring equipment as a methodology and second to use the toolkit to have better understanding of dynamic thermal comfort and the thresholds for tolerance to thermal discomfort
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