1,720,965 research outputs found
Working knowledge for collaborative water planning in Australia’s Wet Tropics region
No full textCooperation between multiple environmental decision-makers and activities is necessary to address the impacts of diffuse sources of agricultural pollution on the water quality entering Australia’s Great Barrier Reef (GBR). Water planning efforts requires available knowledge to inform this co-operative water program implementation and reform. This paper uses knowledge sharing, translation and feedback features of collaboration as a way to assess knowledge work practices during key phases of the water planning process. This enabled a systematic review of knowledge work practices in partnership with collaborative water planning groups established to inform water quality program investment decisions in the GBR’s Wet Tropics region. This research builds on the growing academic and policy interest in the conditions required to enable different types of knowledge to be successfully used for policy-making by focusing on when, how and why knowledge work to meet these conditions is required
Public health and moral panic sociological perspectives on the 'epidemic of obesity' /
No full textIn 2007, the number of people worldwide who were chronically underfed reached 923 million, some 75 million more than in 2003-2005 (FAO, 2008). By contrast, in 1999, over 1 billion adults and approximately 18 million children were overweight or obese (WHO, 2000). Neither rising food prices, nor rising food insecurity among the world's poor - especially landless and female-headed households (FAO, 2008) - appear to be slowing the spread of weight gain and obesity, a trend that has been associated, in particular, with populations undergoing socio-economic transformations associated with urbanization, modernization and globalization (WHO, 2000)
Civic environmental pragmatism: a dialogical framework for strategic environmental assessment
Get PDFQuestions of uncertainty and value conflict are increasingly pervasive challenges confronting policy makers seeking to address the range of environmental problems generated by contemporary technological systems. Yet these questions are ultimately political and moral in nature, and require a framework of strategic environmental assessment (SEA) that is marked by informed and democratic civic governance. Reflecting this, the original, civic purposes of environmental assessment (EA) embraced science and public participation as interdependent elements in the creation of more sustaining forms of human-nature interaction.
However, formal models of EA have forsaken meaningful democratic engagement to technique. Based on the instrumentalist assumption that better science automatically leads to better policy, EA has externalised the civic source of political energy that underpins its environmental expertise. Moreover, debates become polarised when science is uncritically imported into the adversarial forums of interest-based politics, so that environmental science is increasingly unable to support political action. I shall argue that the revolutionary potential of SEA to transform the policy process rests upon a recovery of its original, civic purposes.
My thesis is that a deeper understanding of the relationship between scientific knowledge and political action is required if SEA is to be rigorous, and also relevant to public concerns. Philosophical pragmatism contributes epistemological resources vital to this task. By situating knowledge in the context of practice, and by recognising the dialogical, judgmental nature of rationality, the practical philosophy of pragmatism reclaims the contextually embedded nature of inquiry. When science is embedded in a wider ethical context, the meaning and purposes of environmental knowledge become central questions of policy.
The procedural ethics of both liberal and Habermasian politics cannot address these questions, however, because they relegate questions of the public good to the realm of individual choice. Instead, I argue that public dialogue, guided by a praxisoriented virtue ethics, is required to recover objective environmental goods in the policy process. I also argue that Aristotlean rhetoric, with its focus on the credibility of expertise, is the mode of persuasive argument most appropriate for dialogical public forums. The public philosophy of civic environmental pragmatism is therefore presented as a richer theoretical framework for understanding the contribution of both experts and citizens in the development of environmental knowledge for policy. As a dialogical framework for SEA, civic environmental pragmatism constructively combines the critical/normative and instrumental/descriptive aspects of policy inquiry, both of which are required in the development of socially robust knowledge and politically feasible policy decisions
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe 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
Get PDF“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
Get PDFWe 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
Get PDFWe 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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