How to increase the potential policy impact of environmental science research

This article highlights eight common issues that limit the policy impact of environmental science research. The article also discusses what environmental scientists can do to resolve these issues, including (1) optimising the directness of their study so that it examines similar processes/populations/environments/ecosystems to that of policy interest; (2) using the most powerful study design possible, to increase confidence in the identified causal mechanisms; (3) selecting a sufficient sample size, to reduce the chance of false positives/negatives and increase policy-makers’ confidence in extrapolation of the findings; (4) minimizing the risk of bias through randomization of study units to treatment and control groups (reducing the risk of selection bias), blinding of study units and investigators (reducing the risk of performance and detection bias), following-up study units from enrolment to study completion (reducing the risk of attrition bias) and prospectively registering the study on a publically-available platform (reducing the risk of reporting and publication bias); (5) proving that statistical analyses meet test assumptions by reporting the results of statistical assumption checks, ideally publishing full datasets online in an open-access format; (6) publishing the research whether statistically significant or not, policy-makers are just as interested in the negative or insignificant results as they are in the positive results; (7) making the study easy to find and use, the title and abstract of an article are of high importance in determining whether articles are examined in detail or not and used to inform policy; (8) contributing towards systematic reviews on environmental topics, to provide policy-makers with comprehensive, reproducible and updateable syntheses of all the evidence on a given topic.</p

Harmonic publication and citation counting: sharing authorship credit equitably – not equally, geometrically or arithmetically

Bibliometric counting methods need to be validated against perceived notions of authorship credit allocation, and standardized by rejecting methods with poor fit or questionable ethical implications. Harmonic counting meets these concerns by exhibiting a robust fit to previously published empirical data from medicine, psychology and chemistry, and by complying with three basic ethical criteria for the equitable sharing of authorship credit. Harmonic counting can also incorporate additional byline information about equal contribution, or the elevated status of a corresponding last author. By contrast, several previously proposed counting schemes from the bibliometric literature including arithmetic, geometric and fractional counting, do not fit the empirical data as well and do not consistently meet the ethical criteria. In conclusion, harmonic counting would seem to provide unrivalled accuracy, fairness and flexibility to the long overdue task of standardizing bibliometric allocation of publication and citation credit

Impact of Birth Weight and Early Infant Weight Gain on Insulin Resistance and Associated Cardiovascular Risk Factors in Adolescence

BACKGROUND: Low birth weight followed by accelerated weight gain during early childhood has been associated with adverse metabolic and cardiovascular outcomes later in life. The aim of this study was to examine the impact of early infant weight gain on glucose metabolism and cardiovascular risk factors in adolescence and to study if the effect differed between adolescents born small for gestational age (SGA) vs. appropriate for gestational age (AGA). METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS: Data from 30 SGA and 57 AGA healthy young Danish adolescents were analysed. They had a mean age of 17.6 years and all were born at term. Data on early infant weight gain from birth to three months as well as from birth to one year were available in the majority of subjects. In adolescence, glucose metabolism was assessed by a simplified intravenous glucose tolerance test and body composition was assessed by dual-energy X-ray absorptiometry. Blood pressures as well as plasma concentrations of triglycerides and cholesterol were measured. Early infant weight gain from birth to three months was positively associated with the fasting insulin concentration, HOMA-IR, basal lipid levels and systolic blood pressure at 17 years. There was a differential effect of postnatal weight gain on HOMA-IR in AGA and SGA participants (P for interaction = 0.03). No significant associations were seen between postnatal weight gain and body composition or parameters of glucose metabolism assessed by the simplified intravenous glucose tolerance test. In subgroup analysis, all associations with early infant weight gain were absent in the AGA group, but the associations with basal insulin and HOMA-IR were still present in the SGA group. CONCLUSION: This study suggests that accelerated growth during the first three months of life may confer an increased risk of later metabolic disturbances--particularly of glucose metabolism--in individuals born SGA

Authorship trends in software engineering

This paper aims to examine authorship trends in software engineering, especially those related to the number of authors, of scientific publications. We collected and mined around 70.000 entries from DBLP for 122 conferences and journals, for the period 1971–2012, in order to process several bibliometric indicators. We provide evidence that the number of authors of articles in software engineering is increasing on average around +0.40 authors/decade. The results also indicate that until 1980, the majority of the articles have a sole author, while nowadays articles with 3 or 4 authors represent almost half of the total.Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT

Energy performance contracting (EPC): a suitable mechanism for achieving energy savings in housing cooperatives? Results from a Norwegian pilot project

The barriers to energy savings in institutions and private homes are well known and include people’s lack of interest, awareness, knowledge and human and financial capacity. Experiences made in several countries show that EPC—energy performance contracting—may be used for overcoming many of these barriers. A typical EPC project is delivered by an energy service company (ESCO) and the contract is accompanied with a guarantee for energy savings. EPC is increasingly taken in use in the professional market (firms and the public sector), but is less common in the residential sector market. It has been suggested that there are several barriers for using EPC in the domestic sector such as the uncertainty involved in estimating forthcoming reductions in private consumption. In this paper, we present the results from a pilot project on the use of EPC in a housing cooperative in Oslo. The project was initiated and observed by the researchers. The research followed a transdisciplinary methodology in that it was conducted by both researcher and practitioner (co-authors) in close collaboration with members of the housing cooperative and the ESCOs, who also contributed to the interpretation of results. We document the process in terms of why the Board decided to join the EPC pilot, the call for offers from ESCOs who guaranteed that purchased annual energy would be reduced by one third, the responses to and negotiations of the offer from the ESCO who became contracted in the initial phase and up to the moment when the General Assembly finally decided to not invest in the proposed energy saving measures. We find that the residents not only had limited interest in energy savings but also lacked confidence in the EPC process. This contributed to the outcome. We discuss the findings in relation to the barriers to using EPC among housing cooperatives. We highlight the need for more knowledge about the client side for understanding how barriers may be overcome. Three specific recommendations for how EPC may successfully be employed among housing cooperatives are suggested as follows: (i) include refurbishment and not only energy savings in the EPC, (ii) identify the residents’ needs in an early phase and (iii) communicate the EPC principle to the residents throughout the process

A foundation for runtime monitoring

Runtime Verification is a lightweight technique that complements other verification methods in an effort to ensure software correctness. The technique poses novel questions to software engineers: it is not easy to identify which specifications are amenable to runtime monitor-ing, nor is it clear which monitors effect the required runtime analysis correctly. This exposition targets a foundational understanding of these questions. Particularly, it considers an expressive specification logic (a syntactic variant of the modal μ-calculus) that is agnostic of the verification method used, together with an elemental framework providing an operational semantics for the runtime analysis performed by monitors. The correspondence between the property satisfactions in the logic on the one hand, and the verdicts reached by the monitors performing the analysis on the other, is a central theme of the study. Such a correspondence underpins the concept of monitorability, used to identify the subsets of the logic that can be adequately monitored for by RV. Another theme of the study is that of understanding what should be expected of a monitor in order for the verification process to be correct. We show how the monitor framework considered can constitute a basis whereby various notions of monitor correctness may be defined and investigated.peer-reviewe

Harmonic Allocation of Authorship Credit: Source-Level Correction of Bibliometric Bias Assures Accurate Publication and Citation Analysis

Authorship credit for multi-authored scientific publications is routinely allocated either by issuing full publication credit repeatedly to all coauthors, or by dividing one credit equally among all coauthors. The ensuing inflationary and equalizing biases distort derived bibliometric measures of merit by systematically benefiting secondary authors at the expense of primary authors. Here I show how harmonic counting, which allocates credit according to authorship rank and the number of coauthors, provides simultaneous source-level correction for both biases as well as accommodating further decoding of byline information. I also demonstrate large and erratic effects of counting bias on the original h-index, and show how the harmonic version of the h-index provides unbiased bibliometric ranking of scientific merit while retaining the original's essential simplicity, transparency and intended fairness. Harmonic decoding of byline information resolves the conundrum of authorship credit allocation by providing a simple recipe for source-level correction of inflationary and equalizing bias. Harmonic counting could also offer unrivalled accuracy in automated assessments of scientific productivity, impact and achievement

Cement leakage causes potential thermal injury in vertebroplasty

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Percutaneous vertebroplasty by injecting PMMA bone cement into the fractured vertebrae has been widely accepted in treatment of spinal compression fracture. However, the exothermic polymerization of bone cement may cause osseous or neural tissue injury. This study is thus designed to evaluate the potential risk of thermal damage in percutaneous vertebroplasty.</p> <p>Method</p> <p>Twelve porcine vertebrae were immersed in 37°C saline for the experiment. In the first stage of the study, vertebroplasty without cement leakage (control group, n = 6) was simulated. The anterior cortex, foramen, posterior cortex and the center of the vertebral body were selected for temperature measurement. Parameters including peak temperature and duration above 45°C were recorded. In the second stage, a model (n = 6) simulating bone cement leaking into the spinal canal was designed. The methods for temperature measurement were identical to those used in the first stage.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>In Stage 1 of the study (vertebroplasty of the porcine vertebral body in the absence of cement leakage), the average maximal temperature at the anterior cortex was 42.4 ± 2.2°C; at the neural foramen 39.5 ± 2.1°C; at the posterior cortex 40.0 ± 2.5°C and at the vertebral center, 68.1 ± 3.4°C. The average time interval above 45°C was 0 seconds at the anterior cortex; at the neural foramen, 0 seconds; at the posterior cortex, 0 seconds and at the vertebral center, 223 seconds. Thus, except at the core of the bone cement, temperatures around the vertebral body did not exceed 45°C. In Stage 2 of the study (cement leakage model), the average maximal temperature at the anterior cortex was 42.7 ± 2.4°C; at the neural foramen, 41.1 ± 0.4°C; at the posterior cortex, 59.1 ± 7.6°C and at the vertebral center, 77.3 ± 5.7°C. The average time interval above 45°C at the anterior cortex was 0 seconds; at the neural foramen, 0 seconds; at the posterior cortex, 329.3 seconds and at the vertebral center, 393.2 seconds. Based on these results, temperatures exceeded 45°C at the posterior cortex and at the vertebral center.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>The results indicated that, for bone cement confined within the vertebra, curing temperatures do not directly cause thermal injury to the nearby soft tissue. If bone cement leaks into the spinal canal, the exothermic reaction at the posterior cortex might result in thermal injury to the neural tissue.</p

State-space Manifold and Rotating Black Holes

We study a class of fluctuating higher dimensional black hole configurations obtained in string theory/ $M$-theory compactifications. We explore the intrinsic Riemannian geometric nature of Gaussian fluctuations arising from the Hessian of the coarse graining entropy, defined over an ensemble of brane microstates. It has been shown that the state-space geometry spanned by the set of invariant parameters is non-degenerate, regular and has a negative scalar curvature for the rotating Myers-Perry black holes, Kaluza-Klein black holes, supersymmetric $AdS_5$ black holes, $D_1$-$D_5$ configurations and the associated BMPV black holes. Interestingly, these solutions demonstrate that the principal components of the state-space metric tensor admit a positive definite form, while the off diagonal components do not. Furthermore, the ratio of diagonal components weakens relatively faster than the off diagonal components, and thus they swiftly come into an equilibrium statistical configuration. Novel aspects of the scaling property suggest that the brane-brane statistical pair correlation functions divulge an asymmetric nature, in comparison with the others. This approach indicates that all above configurations are effectively attractive and stable, on an arbitrary hyper-surface of the state-space manifolds. It is nevertheless noticed that there exists an intriguing relationship between non-ideal inter-brane statistical interactions and phase transitions. The ramifications thus described are consistent with the existing picture of the microscopic CFTs. We conclude with an extended discussion of the implications of this work for the physics of black holes in string theory.Comment: 44 pages, Keywords: Rotating Black Holes; State-space Geometry; Statistical Configurations, String Theory, M-Theory. PACS numbers: 04.70.-s Physics of black holes; 04.70.Bw Classical black holes; 04.70.Dy Quantum aspects of black holes, evaporation, thermodynamics; 04.50.Gh Higher-dimensional black holes, black strings, and related objects. Edited the bibliograph