1,720,965 research outputs found
Thinking with Termites about Fractious Futures for Fecal Microbiota Transplantation in the United States
No full textFecal microbiota transplantation (FMT) involves transferring fecal material from a donor to a recipient. To think about more expansive and inclusive possible futures for FMT, in particular for people in the United States, it may be helpful to think with termites—their communities, the communities within them, and the community they may inadvertently provide to humans. This essay thinks with termites to explore several frictions in FMT in the US that shape its possible futures. The first friction explored is that FMT is human and (has always been) more than human, discussing both termites as ambivalent kin and the struggles of the regulation to understand FMT as transplantation. The second friction is that the curative imagination for FMT is discordant; examining medical researcher and practitioner discussion of potential FMT donor criteria and potential recipients illuminates the inconsistent insistence that people and guts are both malleable and fixed. FMT renders some donors and microbe communities as good or bad, healthy or sick, donor or recipient, but it’s much more complicated. The third friction is that FMT may be over, with recent US Food and Drug Administration approvals of pharmaceuticals that claim to supplant FMT. Thinking with other life forms that use and perform their own kinds of FMT, such as termites, may help inspire alternative, more inclusive futures for FMT
Ladybugs: The (Natural) Enemy of My Enemy Is My Friend? Enlisting Ladybugs into the War on Insect Pests
No full textGardeners around the United States often call in reinforcements for pest control—ladybugs. Ladybug sellers claim that in contrast to chemical pesticides, ladybugs are natural, but the reality is more complicated. Conscripting ladybugs into the war on insect pests at home in the garden is a continuation, not a departure, from the long history of militarized pest control in the US. This trajectory was not inevitable. The divergent discussions and management of the convergent ladybug and the harlequin ladybug reveal a tension. Similar to the other lifeforms that traveled from Asia to the US, the harlequin ladybug is not merely unacknowledged as an effective garden predator but is instead blamed for a wide range of ills. And the longer the harlequin ladybug is around, the less clear it is who the enemy really was, as in modern war. Militarized pest control practices and imaginations have framed insects as both enemy and soldier in the garden, but there are other possibilities beyond seeing ladybugs as good and bad, natural enemy or just enemy.
This essay is a part of the Roundtable called “The Housewife’s Secret Arsenal” (henceforth HSA); a collection of eight object-oriented engagements focusing on particular material instantiations of domesticated war. The title of this roundtable is deliberately tongue-in-cheek reminding readers of the many ways that militarisms can be invisible to their users yet persistent in the form of mundane household items that aid in the labor of homemaking. Juxtaposing the deliberately stereotyped “housewife” with the theater of war raises questions about the quiet migration of these objects and technologies from battlefield to kitchen, or bathroom, or garden. Gathered together as an “arsenal,” their uncanny proximity to one another becomes a key critical tool in asking how war comes to find itself at home in our lives
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
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
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
Author-wise bibliometric analysis based on entropy.
No full textAuthor-wise bibliometric analysis based on entropy.</p
- …
