1,721,033 research outputs found
How to monitor people 'smartly' to help reducing energy consumption in buildings?
Full text linkThere is a complex link between building fabric, habitant expectation and behavior, energy consumption and actual internal conditions. Home owners exert total control of their homes and how people actually use buildings is not as how we think they do. Therefore, mapping occupants' behavior, and understanding how it relates to comfort and energy consumption is essential. To address this necessity, the paper reviews techniques and systems used to monitor occupants through time and location. Furthermore, it assesses the complexity, robustness, accuracy and performance of each method. To support this review, monitored data were collected using various methods to monitor people's activities in their home. These could be supported by fix building sensors, or/and wearable sensors. Results from these studies established that systems, using ultra wide band technology and radio-frequency identification hold the highest precision and accuracy, being a non-intrusive method in everyday domestic settings. In conclusion, gathering occupancy data may lead to better and more energy-efficient control system of indoor environment. © 2014 © 2014 Taylor & Francis
THE RESOURCE NEXUS Preface and introduction to the Routledge Handbook
Full text linkDemand for natural resources has grown rapidly for decades, and is expected to continue growing. These trends lead to repercussions, risks, and threats for humans and ecosystems at different scales. The challenges of sustainable resource management and governance are on numerous agendas, ranging from the G7 and G20 summits to UNEP’s International Resource Panel, World Economic Forum, SDG implementation, and a growing community of international scholars. Research highlights the importance of accounting for the interdependencies of resource use and sustainability goals such as eliminating hunger, mitigating climate change, and expanding energy access. There is a need to understand interdependencies and the feasibility of more integrated approaches. Debate is often framed in terms of a “nexus” between water, energy, and food (sometimes including other resources). The main aim of this handbook is to come to grips with what the nexus is about, provide a reference textbook with an overview, and a survey on emerging and cutting-edge research, and application of the concept. This handbook is edited by five dedicated scholars, drawing on different schools of thought from different continents. Assembling a wide group of more than 50 authors across a host of disciplines and interdisciplinary fields, this volume rests on a thorough review of relevant literature and, in emerging with a distinct and original perspective, it conceptualizes the resource nexus as a heuristic for understanding critical interlinkages between uses of different natural resources for systems of provision such as water, energy, and food. The editors organized a symposium which took place in London in March 2015, debating various aspects of the resource nexus and refining the concept and defining the structure of the handbook. All chapters have been reviewed several times
Zero-energy living lab
No full textIn order to reduce the existing gap between design and as-built building performance, experimental data are required, both for single components and for whole building characterization. Real scale buildings, designed and equipped to perform such as living laboratories, may allow testing the effectiveness of different technologies to reduce the energy consumption and/or to increase the indoor environmental quality of the building as a whole. In order to understand to what extent the nearly zero-energy and the Passivhaus concepts could be extended to the Mediterranean climate, a new building (a detached single family house) was designed and constructed in the municipality of Mascalucia (Catania), in the Italian region of Sicily. It has been conceived to perform such as a living laboratory able to provide useful information on the actual performance of the building and its components, such as the Air to Earth Heat Exchanger. The design process was led by an optimization procedure based on extensive energy simulations. It resulted in an optimal energy balance and favourable thermal comfort conditions along the year. The building is equipped with an accurate Building Automation and Control System (BACS), and a number of sensors for a detailed energy and environmental monitoring. The early monitored data, following the commissioning phase, provide a first insight of the energy and comfort performance of the building. Further results including improvements in control algorithms and a comprehensive data analysis are ongoing and their completion is expected in a short time
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe 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
Full text link“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
Zero–Energy Living Lab
No full textIn order to reduce the existing gap between design and as-built building performance, experimental data are required, both for single components and for whole building characterization. Real scale buildings, designed and equipped to perform such as living laboratories, may allow testing the effectiveness of different technologies to reduce the energy consumption and/or to increase the indoor environmental quality of the building as a whole. In order to understand to what extent the nearly zero-energy and the Passivhaus concepts could be extended to the Mediterranean climate, a new building (a detached single family house) was designed and constructed in the municipality of Mascalucia (Catania), in the Italian region of Sicily. It has been conceived to perform such as a living laboratory able to provide useful information on the actual performance of the building and its components, such as the Air to Earth Heat Exchanger. The design process was led by an optimization procedure based on extensive energy simulations. It resulted in an optimal energy balance and favourable thermal comfort conditions along the year. The building is equipped with an accurate Building Automation and Control System (BACS), and a number of sensors for a detailed energy and environmental monitoring. The early monitored data, following the commissioning phase, provide a first insight of the energy and comfort performance of the building. Further results including improvements in control algorithms and a comprehensive data analysis are ongoing and their completion is expected in a short time
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe 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
Full text linkWe 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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