1,721,017 research outputs found
All just for fun nothing for fun. A bridge contest in Piazza Maggiore, Bologna
No full textThe idea of game is related to the one of contest, competition; in a certain way, architecture and construction follow the rule of architectural competitions, as expression of game for the best design. Quoting Huizinga: “When a prize is offered for the best plan for a town hall, or a stipend for the best student in an art-school, it would seem that the desire to stimulate invention, to detect talent and to obtain the best result, is enough. Nevertheless behind all these practical objectives there always lurks the primordial play function of the contest as such. It is impossible to decide, of course, how far the sense of usefulness has outweighed agonistic passion in certain historical instances, as when the city of Florence, in 1418, organized a competition for the cathedral dome which Brunelleschi won out of fourteen contestants. But we could hardly ascribe this glorious work to functionalism.
The concept of fun related to the one of game. Is there anything serious (controlled, organized) related to the game? The saying “All just for fun nothing for fun” means that the result of a fun game, conducted under decency, lead to a structured social message, a serious one, that is shared by a community of people, living the same experience. From this point of view the sense a place assumes a standard of quality, as a location where this message has the potentiality to be better delivered. In a sense, the stronger is the transferred message and its meaning, the stronger the quality of the place.
This workshop aims to present a case study concerning urban happiness in a public space, that is the organization, an event in the main square of Bologna, Piazza Maggiore. The event, made possible by some of the authors of this paper, consisted in a one day contest for the construction of temporary cardboard bridges in the square
A Weighted POD Method for Elliptic PDEs with Random Inputs
Full text linkIn this work we propose and analyze a weighted proper orthogonal decomposition method to solve elliptic partial differential equations depending on random input data, for stochastic problems that can be transformed into parametric systems. The algorithm is introduced alongside the weighted greedy method. Our proposed method aims to minimize the error in a L2 norm and, in contrast to the weighted greedy approach, it does not require the availability of an error bound. Moreover, we consider sparse discretization of the input space in the construction of the reduced model; for high-dimensional problems, provided the sampling is done accordingly to the parameters distribution, this enables a sensible reduction of computational costs, while keeping a very good accuracy with respect to high fidelity solutions. We provide many numerical tests to assess the performance of the proposed method compared to an equivalent reduced order model without weighting, as well as to the weighted greedy approach, in both low and high dimensional problems. © 2018, Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature
Evaluation of the Performance and Durability of Self-Cleaning Treatments Based on TiO2 Nanoparticles Applied to Cement-Based Renders and Boards
Full text linkPhotocatalytic coatings based on TiO2 nanoparticles have been applied to building materials over the past few decades, following encouraging results obtained by many laboratory studies and a few onsite testing campaigns showing their self-cleaning, antimicrobial and depolluting performance. However, these results clearly point out the need for a deeper understanding of the effectiveness of TiO2-based treatments when applied over different substrates and their durability when exposed to an outdoor environment. The present paper investigates the behavior of a nanodispersion of titania nanoparticles applied to cement-based substrates. Cementitious materials are widely used in building façades, roofs, structures, roads and tunnels; hence, any improvement in their performance and/or the introduction of new and unique functionalities have potentially a very high impact on everyday life. A TiO2 nanodispersion was applied by brushing and spraying on three cement-based substrates (a render, a prefabricated board and a painted prefabricated board), investigating its photocatalytic activity. Then, the samples were subjected to two artificially weathering procedures, involving rain washout and UV light exposure, and the changes in terms of the photocatalytic activity and contact angle were measured. The results suggest that the nature of the substrate plays a key role in the performance of the coating and that weathering has a significant impact too
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
Weighted Reduced Order Methods for Parametrized Partial Differential Equations with Random Inputs
Full text linkIn this manuscript we discuss weighted reduced order methods for stochastic partial differential equations. Random inputs (such as forcing terms, equation coefficients, boundary conditions) are considered as parameters of the equations. We take advantage of the resulting parametrized formulation to propose an efficient reduced order model; we also profit by the underlying stochastic assumption in the definition of suitable weights to drive to reduction process. Two viable strategies are discussed, namely the weighted reduced basis method and the weighted proper orthogonal decomposition method. A numerical example on a parametrized elasticity problem is shown
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