Search results for " Applications"
showing 10 items of 4541 documents
Chapter 4</br>Will our children have the chance to do research on today’s digital books?
2016
In this chapter, I will first position my considerations about the sustainability of ebooks for future research in the context of book history; moreover, I will introduce basic concepts of (migration and emulation) as well as challenges to the long-term preservation of digital data in greater generality. After that and taking current research on past (printed) books as an analogy, I shall try to outline which kinds of (digital) material will be indispensable in the future to do research on today's digital book production: published digital materials and unique (digital) artefacts. Finally, I shall present the results of my exemplary studies to find out which precautions for the future avail…
Life cycle assessment of roads: Material and process related energy savings
2018
The need for climate change mitigation calls for significant actions to match the sustainable development goals and, in this context, road construction and management play a relevant role (cf. EU Green Public Procurement Criteria for Road Design, Construction and Maintenance and Environmental Product Declarations - EPD). In such a context, the role of the Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) methodology is broadly recognized as a tool to quantify sustainability of processes and systems. This study aims at calculating the life-cycle energy and carbon footprint of a typical Italian urban road, including materials production, transportation, construction, maintenance, and rehabilitation. The LCA approa…
A European Multi Lake Survey dataset of environmental variables, phytoplankton pigments and cyanotoxins
2018
Under ongoing climate change and increasing anthropogenic activity, which continuously challenge ecosystem resilience, an in-depth understanding of ecological processes is urgently needed. Lakes, as providers of numerous ecosystem services, face multiple stressors that threaten their functioning. Harmful cyanobacterial blooms are a persistent problem resulting from nutrient pollution and climate-change induced stressors, like poor transparency, increased water temperature and enhanced stratification. Consistency in data collection and analysis methods is necessary to achieve fully comparable datasets and for statistical validity, avoiding issues linked to disparate data sources. The Europea…
Ocean acidification through the lens of ecological theory
2015
© 2015 by the Ecological Society of America. Ocean acidification, chemical changes to the carbonate system of seawater, is emerging as a key environmental challenge accompanying global warming and other humaninduced perturbations. Considerable research seeks to define the scope and character of potential outcomes from this phenomenon, but a crucial impediment persists. Ecological theory, despite its power and utility, has been only peripherally applied to the problem. Here we sketch in broad strokes several areas where fundamental principles of ecology have the capacity to generate insight into ocean acidification's consequences. We focus on conceptual models that, when considered in the co…
Sustainable tourist development in Italian holiday destinations
2008
This paper argues that tourism, will become a major activity in a modern welfare state, which will have serious consequences for environmental sustainability. This issue calls for an assessment of the pros and cons of the ecological efficiency of tourism. We propose an overall efficiency indicator that comprises both a sustainable tourism index and an economic efficiency index. Based on a data set for Italian provinces and using Activity Analysis, a quantitative assessment of the relative position of Italian tourist destination areas is made from the perspective of sustainable tourism. Copyright © 2008 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd.
Is ICT the Key to Development?
2010
Using panel data for 52 developed and developing countries over the period 1998-2006, this article examines the links between information and communication technology diffusion and human development. We conducted a panel regression analysis of the investments per capita in healthcare, education and information and communication technology against human development index scores. Using a quantile regression approach, our findings suggest that changes in healthcare, education and information and communication technology provision have a stronger impact on human development index scores for less developed than for highly developed countries. Furthermore, at lower levels of development education…
Job satisfaction as a unified mechanism for agent behaviour in a labour market with referral hiring
2016
This paper proposes to use job satisfaction (JS) as a unified mechanism for guiding agents' behaviour in the labour market. In the labour-market model presented here, JS affects agents' decisions on which vacancies to apply for, which of them to select in case of receiving several acknowledgements from firms and whether to quit the current job. The performance of the model depending on the structure of JS is studied. The model where JS depends on monetary (relative wages), social (relative number of friends), content and career components is compared with models where JS has only the first or the first two of these. It creates a more realistic firm size distribution and smaller duration of …
Automatic Segmentation and Enhancement of Pavement Cracks Based on 3D Pavement Images
2019
Pavement cracking is a significant symptom of pavement deterioration and deficiency. Conventional manual inspections of road condition are gradually replaced by novel automated inspection systems. As a result, a great amount of pavement surface information is digitized by these systems with a high resolution. With pavement surface data, pavement cracks can be detected using crack detection algorithms. In this paper, a fully automated algorithm for segmenting and enhancing pavement crack is proposed, which consists of four major procedures. First, a preprocessing procedure is employed to remove spurious noise and rectify the original 3D pavement data. Second, crack saliency maps are segmente…
Relationship between students' perception of a rubric for oral presentations and their academic characteristics
2022
The use of rubrics in the evaluation of oral presentations has been associated with several benefits for students. However, it is unknown whether students with better academic marks and greater self-regulation find the use of rubrics more useful or not. This paper aims to assess the relationship between how students perceive the use of a rubric and their academic characteristics, and to analyze the congruence between the professor’s and students’ evaluations when using the rubric. Eighty-five students studying for a Degree in Sport Sciences participated in this study. A rubric for oral presentations was used to assess the students’ performance. The students then filled out…
Reconsidering off-task: a comparative study of PDA-mediated activities in four classrooms
2010
Mobile technology is ubiquitous and diverse and permeates many aspects of daily life at home, during leisure activities, and in public spaces. The study presented here is of two sixth grade classes in Michigan, USA and two seventh grade classes in Norway. The students and the teachers in these four classrooms were equipped with mobile technologies (PDAs). We found that the students’ PDA-mediated actions in the classroom were not exclusively used for the tasks and activities set by the teacher, but that the students also used the PDAs on their own initiative – so-called ‘off-task’ activities. We analyze the findings by reconsidering off-task activities from a sociocultural perspective.