1,721,194 research outputs found
From the ashes
No full textWith another summer approaching, Tom Griffiths looks at two fine accounts of Black Saturday and its aftermath in Inside Story
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IT IS three winters now since the Black Saturday bushfire brought its terror. In the past year, soaking rains have inspired grass and forest growth that is both heartening and frightening. New houses have sprouted like lignotubers where their predecessors were gutted. Other homes – razed, flattened and cleared – are haunting absences. The royal commission, which cranked on through 155 days of evidence, has finished and reported, and already its recommendations have dust on them. After last summer’s disasters – floods, cyclones and earthquakes – bushfire survivors are sharing their experience with new victims of nature’s wilfulness. And from the ashes, from the regrowth and renewal, from the pain and the horror, there now comes some wisdom…
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Photo: Elizabeth Donoghue/ Flick
Black Saturday's pre-history (Inside Story)
No full textBlack Saturday seared itself into the history books and the memories of many on 7 February 2009. The grieving, the slow recovery and the debates continue. Over missions of years, the world's tallest flowering plants, the great Mountain Ash eucalypts of the forests of Victoria, have evolved as "fire weeds" ensuring their survival by spreading their seeds in ash beds open to the light previously shadowed by their towering canopies. They die to survive. Their cycles are much longer than ours. But their special relationship to the inevitability of devastating fires withing the "fire flume" of the Victorian bush offers a tough but essential lesson for the local communities and policy makers at both state and federal levels, as historian Tom Griffiths (Australian National University) tells Peter Clarke
A miracle of politics and science
No full textAs the world talks about climate change, the Antarctic Treaty shows how politics and science can work together, writes Tom Griffiths in Inside Story
FIFTY YEARS AGO this week a remarkable agreement, the Antarctic Treaty, was signed in Washington. It was created not only by strategic national politics but also by genuine idealism and – of special relevance to Australian politicians coming to terms with climate change – by a bipartisan respect for the integrity of good, international science. As we count down to the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, it is worth reflecting on the negotiations that led to this enduring political document.
Forged in the Cold War era, the treaty has proven to be a resilient and evolving instrument for international cooperation. Its main object is to promote the peaceful use of Antarctica and to facilitate scientific research south of 60º latitude. The key provision of the treaty (Article IV) neither recognises nor denies any existing territorial claims to Antarctica. In polar parlance, such claims are “frozen.” This political compromise emerged from a period of escalating national rivalry over Antarctic sovereignty...
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Photo: Tom Griffith
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
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