1,720,967 research outputs found
A systemic perspective on racism in football: the experience of the BRISWA project
Full text linkThe objective of this paper is to present the process for the development of a causal loop diagram that captures the relevant aspects of racism in football, through a holistic, top-down approach. To do so, a series of workshops/sessions has been organised with experts in the field and with the purpose of designing a tool that could be used to get better insights into how racism in football emerges and where are the potential areas where policymakers could use as leverage for effective counter-measures. The diagram demonstrated the multi-faceted nature of racism, the phenomena that might give rise to it and the elements that could serve as leverage in potential counter-measures. Some of the most interesting results include the following: the power structures of society and football should adapt to represent the actual demographic make-up of each country. Furthermore, policymakers should involve media more directly in every attempt to fight racism. Finally, racism in football is a mirror of racism in society. Hence, any attempt to combat racism in football should be interlinked with corresponding efforts to fight discrimination in society
Identifying policy options and responses to water management issues through System Dynamics and fsQCA
Full text linkPoor quality and scarcity of water are some of the most relevant problems for policy-makers and private sector, especially in the face of climate change. A systemic perspective is key to studying complex issues like water management and understanding how systems change in response to various inputs over time. This study aims to create a generalized, highly synthetic, and abstract model that can reproduce the key dynamics that emerge from the response to policies in water management. The characteristics of this model make it applicable independent of a specific local context. A literature review of modelling and simulation, System Dynamics (SD), and fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) approaches to water management was performed, and insights were gained to recognize and understand existing gaps. The results were then assessed using fsQCA to investigate the necessary and sufficient conditions that contribute to shaping sustainable water management. A minimum common structure which highlights the common elements and their key interactions in a generic water management system was proposed. Main findings showed that the most negatively influencing dimensions of water management issues were the absence of costs related to water consumption, infrastructure obsolescence, and population growth. Implications for policy-making on sustainable water management were discussed in the conclusion
Identifying policy options and responses to water management issues through System Dynamics and fsQCA
No full textPoor quality and scarcity of water are some of the most relevant problems for policy-makers and private sector, especially in the face of climate change. A systemic perspective is key to studying complex issues like water management and understanding how systems change in response to various inputs over time. This study aims to create a generalized, highly synthetic, and abstract model that can reproduce the key dynamics that emerge from the response to policies in water management. The characteristics of this model make it applicable independent of a specific local context. A literature review of modelling and simulation, System Dynamics (SD), and fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) approaches to water management was performed, and insights were gained to recognize and understand existing gaps. The results were then assessed using fsQCA to investigate the necessary and sufficient conditions that contribute to shaping sustainable water management. A minimum common structure which highlights the common elements and their key interactions in a generic water management system was proposed. Main findings showed that the most negatively influencing dimensions of water management issues were the absence of costs related to water consumption, infrastructure obsolescence, and population growth. Implications for policy-making on sustainable water management were discussed in the conclusion
SUSTAINABILITY LITERACY THROUGH GAME-BASED LEARNING
No full textSustainability and sustainable development have been recognized as the major challenges of the 21st century and to achieve this objective there is the need to think of education not as the traditional, analytic way of transferring knowledge, but as an experience that is centred on the student. Its purpose is to assist them in acquiring the necessary skills to constantly assess the environment, operate and adapt to it through a continuous and iterative process of revision from their frame of reference and finally equip them with the necessary material/tools that will help them comprehend and tackle complexity.
The objective of the current paper is to present an effort in the context of an E+ project on Higher Education to use serious games as a means to teach sustainability. To achieve the objective a board game will be designed and developed that will utilize the principles of Systems Thinking for the game mechanisms and design.
A systems thinking perspective implies the existence of interconnected elements to fulfill a function or a purpose over time. Those elements can be of physical or information composition. Modelling the system under study in this way allows policy-makers to make decisions based on scientific analysis of future scenarios and provide them with a supporting tool that could be used in synergy while planning and defining policies to get economic and socio¬-environmental benefits.
Causal Loop Diagrams (CLD) are qualitative representations of the system under study and illustrate in a clear manner the causal relations among the various elements. Furthermore, they can illustrate the feedback loops and nonlinearities that may be present in the system and give rise to dynamic behavior.
The SUSTAIN CLD is composed by different variables, that represent areas of interest in a general modern urban system. The model, in fact, considers general aspects as GDP and population, as well as environment, transport, urban planning and waste and water management.
As the CLD will be the basis for the future development of the game, the core of the model is represented by the most important parameter for deciding who will win the game, i.e. the Attractiveness of city. This variable is the synthesis of multiple variables that belong to many aspects of urban system, defining the “wellbeing” of the population who lives in it.
The most important effect due to variations in Attractiveness of city is a variation of the number of people who lives in the city; this generates many impacts on different urban levels, triggering as many feedback loops. In fact, the majority of feedback loops we identified passes through the “Population” variable. It's kind of natural that this happens as, in the end, urban systems exist because of its inhabitants, indeed.
The most important feedback loops were identified and then divided in three main groups. The first group is composed by loops belonging to the “core” of the model, that is the relation between population, GDP and Industries and Services. The second group is composed by loops which belong to the “environmental” part of the model. The last loop describes how traffic congestion has effect on usage of public transport and, in turns, effects on pollution.
The next steps of the research include the development of a quantitative model and the translation of the model’s variable to mechanisms and elements of a board game
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
Measuring agricultural sustainability of European countries with a focus on transportation
No full textAgriculture is one of the most important sectors for the development of countries. Furthermore, it can affect and be affected by climate change, especially since agricultural products are increasingly being transported to meet the demands of an increasing and urbanised population. Consequently, the measurement of agricultural sustainability should include transportation elements. The purpose of the current paper is to calculate the agricultural sustainability of European countries using a two-stage data envelopment analysis (DEA). Different variations of the model are used to gain better insights into the overall agricultural performance. The results illustrate that Malta, Italy, the Netherlands and Denmark perform well compared to other European countries in both two-stage DEA variations that were used and the differences that are observed in the variations are attributed to the different number of constraints. Finally, a computational experiment is performed to investigate the phenomenon of rank reversal and a new index is proposed.7430
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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