1,721,006 research outputs found
Sustainability assessment of two digestate treatments: A comparative life cycle assessment
No full textDigestate derived from the anaerobic digestion of biowaste is a nutrient-rich substance whose direct use on land is not permitted by the Italian Legislation. The possibility of recovering its nutrients can be given by the processes of stabilisation and sanitation required by the Italian Legislation. Among these processes, composting and calcium hydrolysis with neutralization (CHN) permit to obtain useful soil improvers like compost and defecation gypsum (DG). In this paper a gate-to-gate Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) of these two processes is performed to evaluate their relative environmental sustainability, by using the ReCiPe H midpoint and endpoint impact assessment methods. The functional units (FUs) used in this analysis are one tonne of digestate treated by each process, and the amount of compost and DG necessary to amend one hectare of maize cultivation. Data used in the assessment were collected from plants located in Northern Italy and were referred to one year of operation. The processes of transport and spreading on land of the final products were not considered. The results of both the analyses show that CHN is the process with the largest environmental impacts, mainly due to the use of chemicals (i.e., sulfuric acid and calcium oxide). For both processes and FUs, the most impacted midpoint categories are Natural land transformation, Marine ecotoxicity and Freshwater ecotoxicity. Among the endpoint categories Resources is the most impacted one (followed by Human Health and Ecosystems), for both FUs, although showing larger differences for the agronomic use
Risk-based prioritization methodology for the classification of groundwater pollution sources
Full text linkWater management is one of the EU environmental priorities and it is one of the most serious challenges that today's major cities are facing. The main European regulation for the protection of water resources is represented by the Water Framework Directive (WFD) and the Groundwater Directive (2006/118/EC) which require the identification, risk-based ranking and management of sources of pollution and the identification of those contamination sources that threaten the achievement of groundwater's good quality status. The aim of this paper is to present a new risk-based prioritization methodology to support the determination of a management strategy for the achievement of the good quality status of groundwater. The proposed methodology encompasses the following steps: 1) hazard analysis, 2) pathway analysis, 3) receptor vulnerability analysis and 4) relative risk estimation. Moreover, by integrating GIS functionalities and Multi Criteria Decision Analysis (MCDA) techniques, it allows to: i) deal with several sources and multiple impacted receptors within the area of concern; ii) identify different receptors' vulnerability levels according to specific groundwater uses; iii) assess the risks posed by all contamination sources in the area; and iv) provide a risk-based ranking of the contamination sources that can threaten the achievement of the groundwater good quality status. The application of the proposed framework to a well-known industrialized area located in the surroundings of Milan (Italy) is illustrated in order to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework in supporting the identification of intervention priorities. Among the 32 sources analyzed in the case study, three sources received the highest relevance score, due to the medium-high relative risks estimated for Chromium (VI) and Perchloroethylene. The case study application showed that the developed methodology is flexible and easy to adapt to different contexts, thanks to the possibility to introduce specific relevant parameters identified according to expert judgment and data availability
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
Author-wise bibliometric analysis based on entropy.
No full textAuthor-wise bibliometric analysis based on entropy.</p
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