1,720,990 research outputs found
Methods and tools for landslide forecasting and risk mitigation, and adaptation strategies
No full textThere is worldwide a mounting interest towards the operational forecasting of landslides, with particular regard to rainfall induced landslides. The main reason for this is the fact that landslides represent a serious hazard in many areas, and cause significant and repeated damage and economic losses to the society, posing substantial risks to people and infrastructure. Starting from these considerations, we recently started a IPL project initiative (IPL‐206) on rainfall induced landslides and their consequences, (i) to review past and existing operational landslide forecasting and warning systems, (ii) to propose recommendations for the design, the implementation, and the validation of operational landslide forecasting and warning systems, and (iii) to identify the best procedure for decision making when information from different source are available. Past and existing operational landslide forecasting and warning systems are being examined with these aims, highlighting their distribution in the different countries/continents, their level of accuracy during past events, the effective adoption of the systems by local authorities and the forensic aspects during the operation phase. Follow this first analysis, recommendations for the design, the implementation, and the validation of operational landslide forecasting and warning systems will be proposed. The project is addressed to all those governmental and administrative bodies in charge of the land management and dealing with civil protection issues. These could use the project outcomes, in direct cooperation with scientific bodies, to design, implement, and validate landslide early warning systems, personalized in function of the main physical and meteorological characters of their own areas of study/interest, aimed at attempting to mitigate the risk related to landslides through the adoption of the most suitable strategies
Automated reconstruction of rainfall events responsible for shallow landslides
Get PDFOver the last 40 years, many contributions have
identified empirical rainfall thresholds (e.g. rainfall intensity
(I ) vs. rainfall duration (D), cumulated rainfall vs. rainfall
duration (ED), cumulated rainfall vs. rainfall intensity (EI))
for the possible initiation of shallow landslides, based on
local and global inventories. Although different methods to
trace the threshold curves have been proposed and discussed
in literature, a systematic study to develop an automated procedure
to select the rainfall event responsible for the landslide
occurrence has only rarely been addressed. Objective
criteria for estimating the rainfall responsible for the landslide
occurrence play a prominent role on the threshold values.
In this paper, two criteria for the identification of the
effective rainfall events are presented. The first criterion is
based on the analysis of the time series of rainfall mean intensity
values over 1 month preceding the landslide occurrence.
The second criterion is based on the analysis of the trend
in the time function of the cumulated mean intensity series
calculated from the rainfall records measured through rain
gauges. The two criteria have been implemented in an automated
procedure that is written in the R language. A sample
of 100 shallow landslides collected in Italy from 2002
to 2012 was used to calibrate the procedure. The cumulated
event rainfall (E) and duration (D) of rainfall events that triggered
the documented landslides are calculated through the
new procedure and are fitted with power law in the D, E diagram.
The results are discussed by comparing the D, E pairs
calculated by the automated procedure and the ones by the
expert method
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
Large rock slides in impact craters on the Moon and Mercury
No full textImpact craters are the most common surface features on the Moon and Mercury. On these two bodies, we recognized and mapped large landslides on the walls of impact craters. Through visual inspection of high-resolution imagery, we compiled an inventory of 60 landslides on the Moon and a second inventory of 58 landslides on Mercury. Adopting categories used to catalog terrestrial mass movements, we classified the landslides on the Moon and Mercury as rock slides. We determined the probability density distribution of their planimetric area, and we compared the distributions with similar distributions for terrestrial and martian landslides using data from the literature. We found that rock slides mapped in impact craters on the Moon are, on average, larger than analogous rock slides on Mercury. The relationship between the area of the individual rock slides and the area of the hosting crater suggests that rock slides on Mercury initiate in smaller craters. We hypothesize that the above findings are an effect of the weaker surface gravity of the Moon compared to that of Mercury and/or an effect of the rock material properties
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
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
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