In this contribution the principles behind Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) are presented. SEM is used for assessing the quality of models that are proposed on the basis of theory and experience. ...This contribution has an introductory level.
Cities are major drivers of energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions--the sources of anthropocentric climate change, whilst also concentrating people, buildings, and infrastructures and ...therefore potential risk and impacts of the latter. As a consequence, planning for climate change in urban areas does not only provide the opportunity but should necessitate considering interactions between mitigation and adaptation actions. However, existing research found that only a minority of urban areas consider both mitigation and adaptation in their climate action plans, i.e. 147 Climate Change Action Plans (CCAPs) were identified among a representative sample of 885 European cities. We investigate these 147 CCAPs to understand the degree of integration of adaptation and mitigation and draw implications for the maximization of synergies and co-benefits of such a combined approach. Using the developed scoring framework to evaluate the level of integration of CCAPs, the research finds that most of the plans reveal a ‘moderate’ level of integration. Moderate integration characterizes a plan that identifies sources of emissions and vulnerabilities to climate change, as well as some qualitative consideration of the synergies, but one that lacks a systematic consideration of potential integration opportunities. Furthermore, the analysis reveals that one of the main gaps of the evaluation and implementation of more integrated climate change actions in cities is the insufficient quantitative evaluation of the costs and funding schemes for adaptation and mitigation action implementation.
•Review and assessment of the level of integration of adaptation and mitigation in 147 EU urban climate change action plans.•Development and application of the Urban Climate Change Integration Index (UCCII).•Review and analysis of synergies and co-benefits of climate mitigation and adaptation actions.•Mitigation objectives are still more prominent than adaptation objectives in integrated urban climate change plans.•Discussion on capacity gaps and needs of local governments to understand, plan and implement integrated approaches.
The environmental impacts of artificial light at night have been a rapidly growing field of global change science in recent years. Yet, light pollution has not achieved parity with other global ...change phenomena in the level of concern and interest it receives from the scientific community, government and nongovernmental organizations. This is despite the globally widespread, expanding and changing nature of night‐time lighting and the immediacy, severity and phylogenetic breath of its impacts. In this opinion piece, we evidence 10 reasons why artificial light at night should be a focus for global change research in the 21st century. Our reasons extend beyond those concerned principally with the environment, to also include impacts on human health, culture and biodiversity conservation more generally. We conclude that the growing use of night‐time lighting will continue to raise numerous ecological, human health and cultural issues, but that opportunities exist to mitigate its impacts by combining novel technologies with sound scientific evidence. The potential gains from appropriate management extend far beyond those for the environment, indeed it may play a key role in transitioning towards a more sustainable society.
The trend in research outputs associated with light pollution and climate change since the year 2000. Bar heights represent the cumulative number of articles expressed as a percentage of the total number of articles published by the end of 2016; numbers are the cumulative number of articles published by the end of each year. Note that the total number of articles does not reflect the total number published in the research area, only the number returned from the search. The data were collected from a Web of Science search for phrases in article titles. The search phrases used for light pollution research outputs were “Light pollution” OR “Artificial Light at Night” OR “Nighttime lighting” OR “Night‐time lighting” OR “Night time lighting” OR “Street Lighting” OR “LED lighting” OR “Light‐emitting diode lighting.” The search phrase for climate change was “Climate change” and results were not refined by research area. The search for articles on light pollution was refined by research areas: (Plant Sciences or Ornithology or Psychology Multidisciplinary or Environmental Sciences or Evolutionary Biology or Physics Applied or Entomology or Engineering Environmental or Ecology or Urban Studies or Fisheries or Biodiversity Conservation or Biology or Physics Multidisciplinary or Zoology or Oceanography or Geography Physical or Geography or Remote Sensing or Physiology or Marine Freshwater Biology or Public Environmental Occupational Health).
Human action recognition is still an uncertain computer vision problem, which could be solved by a robust action descriptor. As a solution, we proposed an action recognition descriptor using only the ...3D skeleton joint’s points to perform this unsettle task. Joint’s point interrelationships and frame-frame interrelationships are presented, which is a solution backbone to achieve human action recognition. Here, many joints are related to each other, and frames depend on different frames while performing any action sequence. Joints point spatial information calculates using angle, joint’s sine relation, and distance features, whereas joints point temporal information estimates from frame-frame relations. Experiments are performed over four publicly available databases, i.e., MSR Daily Activity 3D Dataset, UTD Multimodal Human Action Dataset, KARD- Kinect Activity Recognition Dataset, and SBU Kinect Interaction Dataset, and proved that proposed descriptor outperforms as a comparison to state-of-the-art approaches on entire four datasets. Angle, Sine relation, and Distance features are extracted using interrelationships of joints and frames (ASD-R). It is all achieved due to accurately detecting spatial and temporal information of the Joint’s points. Moreover, the Support Vector Machine classifier supports the proposed descriptor to identify the right classification precisely.
Climate change impacts on diverse cultural heritage is gaining scholarly and policy attention, yet little research has been conducted on how can diverse cultural heritage inform decisionmakers and ...policymakers in achieving climate change actions (i.e., climate change adaptation and mitigation). For this study, we conducted semi-structured interviews with Dutch cultural heritage and environmental or climate change experts (n = 52) and participant observations across the Netherlands to explore the importance of cultural heritage benefits and their relation to climate change actions. We also explored the perceptions of cultural heritage management over time, including the influence of climate policy on heritage practice in the Netherlands. Our findings show that experts perceived a multiplicity of heritage benefits as important in supporting and informing present and future climate change actions. The most salient benefits were informational benefits where diverse cultural heritage is perceived as an important source of knowledge about past societal, economic and environmental developments and changes. Further, heritage management was perceived as constantly changing over time, reflecting the transformative nature of diverse heritage types. Experts agreed that climate policy has already influenced cultural heritage practice in the Netherlands. Lastly, the interrelationships between heritage benefits and management were identified and characterised. This study informs both cultural heritage and climate change research agendas and helps leverage diverse cultural heritage into climate change adaptation and mitigation policies.
•Cultural heritage can support climate change actions in the Netherlands.•The most salient benefits are informational benefits, followed by social benefits.•Cultural heritage management has been changing and continuously evolving.•Heritage practice has changed and may further change due to climate policy.•Interrelationships between heritage benefits and management are identified.
The integration of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in business settings is rapidly increasing, yet significant limitations hinder its effective use and adoption. Understanding these limitations and ...their interrelationships is crucial for enhancing AI implementation. Despite growing research, there is a lack of a comprehensive model that systematically identifies and elucidates the factors influencing AI limitations in business environments. This study employs Interpretive Structural Modeling (ISM), combined with MICMAC analysis and an extensive literature review, to develop such a model. We identified 15 key factors and analyzed their driving and dependence powers to understand their interrelationships. Most factors, such as contextual understanding, transparency, intuition, emotional intelligence, ethics, bias, tacit knowledge, creativity, credibility, and reliability, were found to be autonomous. Accountability and privacy emerged as the strongest driving forces, while trust and adaptability exhibited the highest dependence and lowest driving power. This research offers a comprehensive understanding of AI limitations and their interrelationships, providing valuable insights for managers and businesses. The findings can aid in making more informed decisions about AI implementation and in developing strategies to mitigate these limitations. Furthermore, the study emphasizes the importance of combining AI with human insight to overcome these challenges. However, using the ISM technique could involve subjective judgment from the experts.
Sil S, De KK, Ghosh A. 2021. Phylogenetic analysis of six different species of Saraca L. (Fabaceae, Caesalpinioideae) based on chloroplast matK gene. Biodiversitas 22: 3880-3889. Saraca L. is one of ...the most important genera, with several horticultural and therapeutic values. Specific taxonomic and phylogenetic knowledge of Saraca through molecular data is essential for accessing its true medicinal benefits. Nineteen different Partial matK gene sequences of the chloroplast genome of six different species of Saraca, including four amplified and 15 retrieved from the NCBI gene bank, were place in a sequence alignment. The resulting data were examined to determine their phylogenetic and evolutionary interrelationships. The comparative analysis of different sequences of each of the species revealed intra-specific molecular diversity, and the comparison of the matK sequences of six different species defined their inter-specific molecular diversity. The analysis of partial matK sequences revealed the presence of 87 variable sites, 14 parsimony informative sites, 54 singleton sites, and 237 quadri-fold degenerate sites. The approximate nucleotide composition was A-31.02%, T-37.46%, C-16.06%, and G-15.46%. The value of transition/transversion bias was 0.90. About 522 codons were analyzed and the presence of 34 variable sites, 8 parsimony informative sites, and 25 singleton sites was observed within their respective amino acid sequences. The average pair-wise distance was 0.0444, and 189 segregating sites and 0.018809 nucleotide diversity were observed. The evolution of different species of Saraca and their phylogenetic interrelationships were observed by analyzing their matK sequences. The relative homogeneity of S. indica is quite low. S. dives had the earliest evolutionary trends while S. declinata had the most recent. S. asoca and S. indica are quite similar on the molecular level but can be treated as different species while the difference between S. declinata and one of its synonyms, S. palembanica, indicates the possibility of separating them into different species.
This commentary discusses the limitations that Sustainable Development Goal 4 (SDG4) has encountered as a result of power struggles between UNESCO and the OECD in the monitoring and making of global ...learning metrics for SDG4. The IOs strive to maintain or extend their authority and autonomy by claiming and controlling technical expertise, data and information. Both UNECO and the OECD seek to claim their legitimacy by fixing and spreading what learning means and counts in the SDG4 context, whilst efforts to monitor and measure SDG4 take second place and become fragmented.
•Struggles between IOs hinder the achievement of SDG4.•IOs exercise power by developing learning metrics and monitoring SDG4.•IOs collaborate at policy talk level but resist in practice.•IO decoupling between policy and practice stems from fundamental differences between the IOs, which, which act as barriers.•Global education agendas become more realistic when IO power struggles are taken into account.
This paper provides a management perspective of organisational factors that contributes to the reduction of food waste through the application of design science principles to explore causal ...relationships between food distribution (organisational) and consumption (societal) factors. Qualitative data were collected with an organisational perspective from commercial food consumers along with large-scale food importers, distributors, and retailers. Cause-effect models are built and “what-if” simulations are conducted through the development and application of a Fuzzy Cognitive Map (FCM) approaches to elucidate dynamic interrelationships. The simulation models developed provide a practical insight into existing and emergent food losses scenarios, suggesting the need for big data sets to allow for generalizable findings to be extrapolated from a more detailed quantitative exercise. This research offers itself as evidence to support policy makers in the development of policies that facilitate interventions to reduce food losses. It also contributes to the literature through sustaining, impacting and potentially improving levels of food security, underpinned by empirically constructed policy models that identify potential behavioural changes. It is the extension of these simulation models set against a backdrop of a proposed big data framework for food security, where this study sets avenues for future research for others to design and construct big data research in food supply chains. This research has therefore sought to provide policymakers with a means to evaluate new and existing policies, whilst also offering a practical basis through which food chains can be made more resilient through the consideration of management practices and policy decisions.
The creation of an object by selective laser melting (SLM) occurs by melting contiguous areas of a powder bed according to a corresponding digital model. It is therefore clear that the success of ...this metal Additive Manufacturing (AM) technology relies on the comprehension of the events that take place during the melting and solidification of the powder bed. This study was designed to understand the generation of the laser spatter that is commonly observed during SLM and the potential effects that the spatter has on the processing of 316L stainless steel, Al-Si10-Mg, and Ti-6Al-4V. With the exception of Ti-6Al-4V, the characterization of the laser spatter revealed the presence of surface oxides enriched in the most volatile alloying elements of the materials. The study will discuss the implication of this finding on the material quality of the built parts.
PDF
