130,855 research outputs found
Policies to clean up toxic industrial contaminated sites of Gela and Priolo: a cost-benefit analysis.
No full textBACKGROUND: Cost-benefit analysis is a transparent tool to inform policy makers about the potential effect of regulatory interventions, nevertheless its use to evaluate clean-up interventions in polluted industrial sites is limited. The two industrial areas of Gela and Priolo in Italy were declared "at high risk of environmental crisis" in 1990. Since then little has been done to clean the polluted sites and reduce the health outcomes attributable to pollution exposure. This study, aims to quantify the monetary benefits resulting from clean-up interventions in the contaminated sites of Gela and Priolo. METHODS: A damage function approach was used to estimate the number of health outcomes attributable to industrial pollution exposure. Extensive one way analyses and probabilistic analyses were conducted to investigate the sensitivity of results to different model assumptions. RESULTS: It has been estimated that, on average, 47 cases of premature death, 281 cases of cancer and 2,702 cases of non-cancer hospital admission could be avoided each year by removing environmental exposure in these two areas. Assuming a 20 year cessation lag and a 4% discount rate we calculate that the potential monetary benefit of removing industrial pollution is €3,592 million in Priolo and €6,639 million in Gela. CONCLUSIONS: Given the annual number of health outcomes attributable to pollution exposure the effective clean-up of Gela and Priolo should be prioritised. This study suggests that clean-up policies costing up to €6,639 million in Gela and €3,592 million in Priolo would be cost beneficial. These two amounts are notably higher than the funds allocated thus far to clean up the two sites, €127.4 million in Gela and €774.5 million in Priolo, implying that further economic investments - even considerable ones - could still prove cost beneficial
Was this Registered Report pilot tested? Examination of Vaidis, Sleegers, Van Leeuwen, DeMarree, ... & Priolo, D. (2024)
No full textVaidis, D. C., Sleegers, W. W., Van Leeuwen, F., DeMarree, K. G., Sætrevik, B., Ross, R. M., ... & Priolo, D. (2024) included 104 authors from 39 research teams attempting to replicate the induced-compliance paradigm in study 1 Croyle and Cooper (1983). The study was preregistered and receives public marks for transparency and rigor. Yet, one thing that is transparently missing is any mention of pilot or pretesting the study to make sure it works before having the 39 labs try to replicate with those materials. This leaves the entire effort open to small problems, since it is also the first time most of the teams were trying a study like this. Thus, we ask what piloting mechanisms if any were employed, and suggest to the community more generally that it makes sense to make sure a protocol is working before sending it out to e.g., 39 places
MeSH term explosion and author rank improve expert recommendations
No full textInformation overload is an often-cited phenomenon that reduces the productivity, efficiency and efficacy of scientists. One challenge for scientists is to find appropriate collaborators in their research. The literature describes various solutions to the problem of expertise location, but most current approaches do not appear to be very suitable for expert recommendations in biomedical research. In this study, we present the development and initial evaluation of a vector space model-based algorithm to calculate researcher similarity using four inputs: 1) MeSH terms of publications; 2) MeSH terms and author rank; 3) exploded MeSH terms; and 4) exploded MeSH terms and author rank. We developed and evaluated the algorithm using a data set of 17,525 authors and their 22,542 papers. On average, our algorithms correctly predicted 2.5 of the top 5/10 coauthors of individual scientists. Exploded MeSH and author rank outperformed all other algorithms in accuracy, followed closely by MeSH and author rank. Our results show that the accuracy of MeSH term-based matching can be enhanced with other metadata such as author rank
Application of carrier-espi for measurement of out-of-plane displacements in unstitched and stitched laminates subjected to compression-after-impact
No full textStatus assessment of the Critically Endangered Azores Bullfinch Pyrrhula murina
No full text'This work was part of the Azores Bullfinch monitoring programme included in the project LIFE NAT/P/000013 “Recovery of Azores Bullfinch’s habitat in the Special Protection Area of Pico da Vara / Ribeira do Guilherme”'The Azores Bullfinch is endemic to the island of São Miguel (Azores, Portugal). Its status was uplisted to Critically Endangered in 2005 on the basis of an extremely small and declining population that was considered to be restricted to a very small mountain range (43 km2), in a single location, within which the spread of invasive plants constituted a threat to habitat quality. Nevertheless, information was mostly inferred, or the product of, non-systematic studies. In order to carry out a complete assessment of the conservation status we analysed: (i) population trend, calculated from annual monitoring 1991–2008, (ii) population size, and (iii) range size, obtaining estimates in a single morning study in 2008 involving the simultaneous participation of 48 observers. Contrary to previous inferences, the population is no longer decreasing, although quality of laurel forest habitat continues to decline due to the persistent threat of invasive species. Population size (mean ± SE) was estimated at 1,064 ± 304 individuals using distance sampling methods, although the estimate was very sensitive to the survey method used. Range size estimates (extent of occurrence and area of occupancy) were 144 km2 and 83 km2 respectively. Given the present information, we propose the downlisting of Azores Bullfinch to Endangered on the IUCN Red List.Peer reviewe
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
No full textThe 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
Misalignment angle correction of borehole seismic sensors: The case study of the Collalto seismic Network
No full textOne of the most critical problems affecting seismological data acquisition is related to possible misorientation of three-component seismic sensors. This generally happens when their orientation cannot be measured directly, as in the case of sensors deployed in boreholes. We describe here the sensor reorientation procedure of the Collalto Seismic Network, a microseismic monitoring network located in northeastern Italy that consists of 10 broadband three-component stations deployed in boreholes. We apply a procedure based on the misfit minimization of a complex trace recorded by a given station with respect to a reference station for which orientation is known. The main advantage of this methodology is that the reorientation of seismic sensors can be viewed as a linear inverse problem in the complex domain, which ensures that the preferred solution corresponds to the global minimum of a misfit function. Furthermore, it is also possible to simultaneously use more than one seismic event to better constrain the solution of the inverse problem. In this article, we further compare the orientation results obtained for a seismometer-seismometer sensor pair with those obtained using an accelerometer-seismometer sensor pair. We finally show the reorientation results for all the stations of the network, obtained using eight teleseismic events that occurred between January 2012 and May 2014
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