1,721,483 research outputs found
Waste management performances beyond the Italian North-South Divide: Spatial Analyses of Geographical, Economic and Institutional Dimensions
No full textMany advanced countries have been experiencing waste crises, namely a failure to properly collect and separate urban waste, difficulties regarding both the management landfill sites close to or beyond their full capacity, and the collocation of landfills and incinerators in the territory. These crises appear to be primarily driven by policy failures that include delays in introducing more economically-oriented instruments and a lack of new and diversified tools in waste management and disposal facilities. Italy has been and is a premier case study, with major crises appearing in its less-developed South. Though the North-South divide is a core part of the history of waste and other ‘convergence failures’ and belongs to a typical economic development analysis – it has received attention within ‘Waste Kuznets curves’ literature - we believe nevertheless that other forces and dynamics play an important role. For instance, the process of policy decentralisation that has characterised many good public provisions, which delegates competencies to regions and provinces, is a key aspect behind waste management performance. Within larger autonomous spaces, different provinces can achieve different performances, either by imitating or differentiating themselves from neighbouring agents.
The main research question is to assess whether it is truly just a North-South divide that largely explains the heterogeneous waste management and disposal performances inside Italy, or whether, as we believe, a different type of geo-clustering becomes apparent, which depends more on the quality of waste policy and idiosyncratic socio-economic factors. On the basis of a 2000-2008 dataset that covers 103 provinces over a wide range of information on waste management, socio-economic, structural and policy features, we aim at identifying ‘economic and institutional waste models’ by grouping the performances of provinces over time and space. The dynamic evolution of clusters allows for an analysis of how the system performance has evolved, as well as what weaknesses and strengths in terms of ‘waste management/policy models’ may exist
Do not miss the opportunity! When to introduce monetary incentives
No full textIn this chapter we use data on 49 of the 95 municipalities analyzed in Bucciol et al. (2011) followed for two additional years (2009-2010) since 1999. In this dataset, 25 municipalities used a DtD collection system in combination with a flat-fee pricing until 2009 when a PAYT program was introduced. Other 24 municipalities immediately paired DtD program with a PAYT program. Our counterfactual analysis shows that the decision not to immediately introduce the PAYT produces a loss of a 10% on the sorted waste ratio. Moreover, we find that the effect of introducing PAYT largely varies with the initial level of the ratio, and is lower when PAYT is implemented under a higher ratio. This finding has an implication on the best timing of implementing a PAYT program: to gain most from the monetary incentive, PAYT should be implemented when the ratio is low
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
- …
