1,721,445 research outputs found
The Zero Waste utopia and the role of waste-to-energy
Get PDFWhile there is no doubt that the prevention of municipal solid
waste (MSW) generation should sit at the top of any public
policy, industrial strategy and individual behaviour, just like
reducing the consumption of energy, this proposition might
mislead the public into thinking that waste can suddenly disappear if only we had the will to make it happen. Despite these
unattainable expectations, the ‘Zero Waste’ concept has become
a viral and omnipresent phrase in recent years. A Google search
of this term shows around half a million hits, as of March 2020,
and countless government and non-governmental organisation
initiatives worldwide. Zero Waste seems to be the only acceptable aim for today’s politicians who embrace an environmentally friendly platform. As a result, countries and municipalities
all over the globe have committed themselves to achieving the
goal of Zero Waste. So far, however, nobody has managed it,
and given the many scientific and practical roadblocks, no one
ever will.
In many respects, the Zero Waste concept in the waste management realm seems akin to those seeking to create a perpetual
motion machine, and to sell the idea to uninformed citizens.
People are fascinated by the idea because it envisages the inspiration of consuming with a good conscience, leaving no garbage behind. Several hundred years ago, they were similarly
captured by the idea of producing energy from nothing, using a
perpetual motion machine. While the possibility of the latter
has often been debunked, the potential to attain a Zero Waste
state is still too broadly accepted by citizens and their government officials. Against this background, this editorial addresses the idea of Zero
Waste and the impossibility of its realisation, as well as the essential
necessity of (a certain amount of) waste generation as a consequence
of economic activity and consumption, due to its function as a sink
for non-recoverable toxic and harmful substances.
First, an introduction to modern waste management is given,
to clearly show that even the most sophisticated and well-developed programmes for waste reduction, collection, recycling, and
treatment systems for waste cannot prevent the formation of at
least a moderate, if not significant, residual waste stream.
Since the Zero Waste philosophy is often grounded in ideological environmental prejudices and opposition to proven and
cost-effective elements of waste management – naturally, landfills and waste-to-energy (WtE) facilities – the (mostly unsubstantiated and often willingly wrong) related arguments are
reflected on in the second part.
Well-performing waste management systems rest upon three
main technical pillars:
• Recycling, including composting;
• Energy recovery;
• Landfilling.
All these elements are inevitable for the effective and efficient
function of the entire MSW management system, but their relative ratio can change to a very wide extent. Waste reduction and
material recycling are the main targets, aimed at retaining as
many resources as possible in the loop. Only those residual waste
fractions which are no longer available for material utilisation
should be treated in WtE plants, especially if they are harmful or
hazardous. For inert and mineral waste and hazardous concentrates from other waste treatment processes, specific landfills are
needed as final sinks
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
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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