bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
The EJAtlas: An Unexpected Pedagogical Tool to Teach and Learn About Environmental Social Sciences
Authors: Walter Mariana , Weber Lena , Temper Leah 
Published: March 2023

AbstractThis chapter examines how the Environmental Justice Atlas (EJAtlas), an online platform that was initially developed by ICTA-UAB—during the EJOLT international project—to make visible and systematize contemporary struggles against environmental injustice worldwide is becoming an attractive interactive tool to teach and learn about Environmental Social Sciences such as Political Ecology, Ecological Economics, Environmental Sociology, Human Geography, Critical Cartography; as well as Environmental Humanities, in Peace and Conflict studies. In this vein, the EJAtlas has unexpectedly become a tool for teaching at undergraduate and graduate levels that is already being used in diverse countries like Argentina, Bolivia, Canada, China, Mexico, Spain, Turkey, the UK, or the USA. This chapter examines why and how the EJAtlas is used for teaching/learning Environmental Social Science–related contents. We analyze the main challenges and lessons around what is taught, to whom, and why. We discuss how The EJatlas has the potential to not only raise awareness on environmental sustainability but also to address some key concerns regarding the demotivating ‘remoteness’ students might feel due to distance from on-the-ground issues and activism, and the lack of diverse voices present in course material (particularly voices from the frontlines of environmental injustices and resistance movements), along with the difficult balance to strike between theory and practice. The Atlas offers a platform that students and educators can use to help bridge these gaps- by providing a way for students to tangibly engage with important environmental resistance movements, visibilizing diverse, frontline voices and experiences, and connecting the theoretical to the practical via a range of opportunities for promoting environmental justice work outside of the classroom including advocacy, documentation, networking, and solidarity-building.
Commons Regimes at the Crossroads: Environmental Justice Movements and Commoning
Authors: Villamayor-Tomas Sergio , García-López Gustavo , D’Alisa Giacomo 
Published: March 2023

AbstractIn this chapter, we offer an overview of the scholarship at the interface of commons regimes and social movements and unveil the agenda of the Barcelona School around this topic. The frontiers of theory and research on the governance of commons have notably evolved in the last decade. At the forefront of such evolution is the study of environmental conflicts around the use and management of common resources. Social movements are one means through which such conflicts manifest in relation to the discourse and practice of commons governance. As we claim here, key in this evolution has been the contributions of Joan Martínez Alier and others around the environmentalism of the poor, environmental justice movements, and alternatives to “growth”. Important research programs within the new scholarship, and scholars within the School in particular (See Sect. 19.3 where we identify the initiatives and scholars associated to this), include the study of interactions between mobilization and community-based natural resource management regimes in rural contexts; the emergence and consolidation of new urban commons; the study of processes of commoning and becoming a commoner; and the connections between commons and the degrowth scholarship.
Activism Mobilizing Science Revisited
Authors: Conde Marta , Orta-Martínez Martí 
Published: March 2023

AbstractMinority groups and marginalized communities affected by extractive industries are increasingly allying with scientists to coproduce new alternative knowledge in order to challenge the data and narratives produced by the company or some state departments. Under the counter-expertise umbrella this process understood as Activism Mobilizing Science (AMS) is characterized by being driven by activists or local grassroots groups, where local and scientific knowledge are merged to coproduce new scientific knowledge. As we show through three case studies – two of uranium mines in Africa and an oil extraction case in the Peruvian Amazon – the main objective of these groups is to understand what are the negative impacts of extractive industry activities, to challenge the company’s or state’s discourse or data, and to gain legitimacy and visibility. We pose that the empowerment of these groups is as much a result of the newly coproduced knowledge as the dynamics of the AMS process itself.
Conventional Climate Change Economics: A Way to Define the Optimal Policy?
Authors: Roca Jordi , Padilla Emilio 
Published: March 2023

AbstractThe application of cost–benefit logic to climate change has been popularized as “the economics of climate change.” The Dynamic Integrated Climate-Economy (DICE) model of William Nordhaus, which models the interrelations between the economy and climate change and indicates the “optimal” path of emission mitigation, recommends moderate action to limit warming to 3.5 °C. This is in contrast to a recent report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which urges to limit it to 1.5 °C. The analyses à la Nordhaus contain several questionable assumptions, choices of methods, and parameters that are based on the value judgments of the authors, and these determine their results. The economic analysis of climate change policies should incorporate the precautionary principle and a concern for sustainability and environmental justice.
The Barcelona School of Ecological Economics and Political Ecology: Building Bridges Between Moving Shores
Authors: Villamayor-Tomas Sergio , Roy Brototi , Muradian Roldan 
Published: March 2023

AbstractThis chapter aims to give an overarching vision of the plural epistemological basis of the Barcelona school of ecological economics and political ecology, as well as to provide examples of the cross-fertilization between disciplines, methods and approaches that we think constitute one of the main contributions of the School. The chapter identifies the main bonding elements of the scholars that belong to the School, briefly explains the diverse core concepts and methods on which the School relies, and elaborates on how the interaction between them have resulted in an original and relevant research program during the past 30 years.
Reconciling Waste Management and Ecological Economics
Authors: Puig Ventosa Ignasi 
Published: March 2023

AbstractThis chapter provides a discussion of the concept of “circular economy” and how it conflicts with some of the systemic views coming from ecological economics: material and energy flows, thermodynamics and so on. The policy context in relation to waste management is presented, with focus on the European Union and on municipal solid waste. The chapter highlights the importance of separate collection, pointing to high-efficiency source separation models (such as door-to-door collection or pay-as-you-throw), as well as the importance of quality when dealing with biowaste to obtain high-quality compost, and with recyclables, to prevent downcycling. The chapter specially focuses on the relevance of aligning the environmental and the economic costs of the different waste management options. In this sense, it discusses several instruments such as landfill and incineration taxes, environmental taxes on certain products, extended producer responsibility, deposit-refund schemes, or fee-rebate schemes. The chapter concludes by identifying some areas in which ecological economics can help to understand how and why waste is generated, as well as informing the design of waste management policies.
Collective Action in Ecuadorian Amazonia
Authors: Falconí Fander , Oleas Julio 
Published: March 2023

AbstractThe Amazon region is an extraordinary place to study local and international power relations, social and environmental dispossession, conflicts of values and interests surrounding the environment, and the definition of public policies, study areas, and praxis of ecological economics. This interdisciplinary field has promoted the study of ecological-distributive conflicts, ecological debt, environmental justice, and poverty and its relationship with the deterioration of ecological systems. Joan Martínez Allier’s contributions to the study of these conflicts, the promotion of public policies for the benefit of Amazonian cultures, and the sustainability of this biodiverse region have been outstanding.
Languages of Valuation
Authors: Zografos Christos 
Published: March 2023

AbstractIn this essay-style chapter, I focus on the analytical concept of languages of valuation and look at the work of the Barcelona School of Social Environmental Science in using it to study environmental conflicts and other issues related to environmental governance. The genealogy of the concept goes back to the claim advanced by Joan Martínez-Alier that many environmental conflicts are conflicts over different languages used to place a value on the environment, which are regularly expressed in the context of unequal distributions of costs and benefits from environmental transformation. I follow the concept as it passes through the Barcelona School in the roughly 30-year period to 2020. I trace this trajectory in the published work of researchers connected with the School and their collaborations with scholars outside it. The starting point of that work is the ecological economics criticism of monetary valuation of the environment for its reductionism and exclusion of certain sets of environmental values, and its espousal of value diversity, incommensurability and plurality in environmental decision-making. I look at how Barcelona School contributions have advanced understanding of environmental conflicts, justice and movements, as well as environmental policy and politics, and deliberative decision-making. I conclude by taking stock of that literature’s contributions and present my reflections concerning promising research avenues. I suggest that future research should expand links between languages of valuation and the pluriverse project in an effort to both advance knowledge about decoloniality and contribute to much-needed radical socio-ecological transformations in the face of the climate crisis.
Post-development: From the Critique of Development to a Pluriverse of Alternatives
Authors: Demaria Federico , Kothari Ashish , Salleh Ariel , Escobar Arturo , Acosta Alberto 
Published: March 2023

AbstractThis chapter lays out both the critique of the oxymoron sustainable development as well as the potential and nuances of a post-development agenda. Post-development is generally meant as an era or approach in which development would no longer be the central organizing principle of social life.We highlight the contribution by Joan Martinez Alier with an ecological critique to development and his work on the global movement for environmental justice to show that activists should be considered as theory and knowledge producers in their own right. We then propose to deepen and widen a research, dialogue and action agenda for activists, policy makers and scholars on a variety of worldviews and practices relating to our collective search for an ecologically wise and socially just world. This could be one base in the search for alternatives to United Nations’ 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, in an attempt to truly ‘transforming the world’. In fact, it is an agenda towards the pluriverse: ‘a world where many worlds fit’, as the Zapatista say.
Indigenous and Local Knowledge Contributions to Social-Ecological Systems’ Management
Authors: Reyes-García Victoria 
Published: March 2023

AbstractSocial-ecological systems are complex and adaptive, for which their governance requires holistic understanding of the different components of the system and their relations, capacity to respond to change and uncertainty, and well-functioning institutional frameworks. Probably because Indigenous and local knowledge systems often entail these characteristics, lands and waters managed by Indigenous peoples and local communities experience a less rapid decline of biodiversity and continue to maintain their functions than other land and seascapes. In this chapter, I draw on published research to summarize how Indigenous and local knowledge systems (1) draw on conceptualizations of nature that contribute to the long-term maintenance of functioning social-ecological systems, (2) enhance our understanding of complex social-ecological systems, and (3) articulate resistance to social-ecological systems degradation. The chapter discusses why, although Indigenous peoples’ and local communities’ contributions to complex social-ecological system management are growingly recognized, such contributions will not be fully realized unless Indigenous peoples and local communities are fully acknowledged as equal partners at different levels of environmental governance. The chapter concludes by suggesting that the post-normal science approach proposed by the Barcelona School offers principles to do so.
Degrowth and the Barcelona School
Authors: Kallis Giorgos 
Published: March 2023

AbstractThis chapter explains how the work of Joan Martinez-Alier and the Barcelona School of Ecological Economics and Political ecology (thereinafter the Barcelona school) shaped contemporary debates around ‘degrowth’ and changed along the way ecological economics. I share a personal recollection of how the Barcelona school kick-started the development of an international, English-speaking research and activist community on degrowth; how core concepts from the work of Joan Martinez-Alier have been central to the case for degrowth; and how our work in Barcelona on degrowth pushes ecological economics to a direction distinct from that of older limits to growth debates.
Agrarian Metabolism and Socio-ecological Transitions to Agroecology Landscapes
Authors: Tello Enric , González de Molina Manuel 
Published: March 2023

AbstractJoan Martínez Alier has made relevant contributions to the agrarian question by treating the southwestern Spanish latifundio and Latin American hacienda systems as capitalist ways of exploiting land and labour, not as backward feudal remnants. He has also invoked the resistance of Latin American tenant-labourers and other smallholder peasants as an explanation for the limited extent of wage labour. To that end, he helped rescue Alexander Chayanov and the former Narodnik movement from oblivion. With José Manuel Naredo, he paid tribute to Sergei Podolinsky, another member of this peasant neo-populist current, for pioneering the first calculation of energy balances and returns from agricultural systems. As agricultural and environmental historians, we have followed both paths to develop new proposals for a form of agrarian metabolism that, while contributing to ecological economics, is also aligned with agroecology. We summarize our contributions to these topics, developed together with Eduardo Sevilla Guzmán, Victor Toledo and Gloria Guzmán, as well as some of the researchers at the Institute of Social Ecology in Vienna and many other participants in the international project on Sustainable Farm Systems (SFS). Our teams have also started using these socio-metabolic accounts to take up the agrarian question of labour and gender exploitation through the unequal appropriation of natural resources from a historical point of view, as well as contribute to the next agroecology transition to a fairer food regime within planetary boundaries.
Holography in $$ \hat{\textrm{CGHS}} $$ supergravity
Authors: Aghamir Narges , Afshar Hamid 
Published: March 2023

Abstract
We study holographic aspects of 2D dilaton-supergravity in flat space-time using gauge theoretic BF formulation. The asymptotic symmetries in Bondi gauge and at finite temperature span a supersymmetric extension of the warped Virasoro algebra at level zero. The boundary action is determined such that the bulk variational principle is ensured and turns out to be a super-warped Schwarzian theory at the vanishing level. We also study the thermodynamics of the black hole saddle in this model.
Recent updates on thienopyrimidine derivatives as anticancer agents
Authors: Sayed Menna Tallah M. , Hassan Rasha A. , Halim Peter A. , El-Ansary Afaf K. 
Published: March 2023

AbstractThienopyrimidine derivatives hold a unique place between fused pyrimidine compounds. They are important and widely represented in medicinal chemistry as they are structural analogs of purines. Thienopyrimidine derivatives have various biological activities. The current review discusses different synthetic methods for the preparation of heterocyclic thienopyrimidine derivatives. It also highlights the most recent research on the anticancer effects of thienopyrimidines through the inhibition of various enzymes and pathways, which was published within the last 9 years.
Graphical Abstract
PM-MVS: PatchMatch multi-view stereo
Authors: Ito Koichi , Ito Takafumi , Aoki Takafumi 
Published: March 2023

AbstractPatchMatch Stereo is a method for generating a depth map from stereo images by repeating spatial propagation and view propagation. The concept of PatchMatch Stereo can be easily extended to Multi-View Stereo (MVS). In this paper, we present PatchMatch Multi-View Stereo (PM-MVS), which is a highly accurate 3D reconstruction method that can be used in various environments. Three techniques are introduced to PM-MVS: (i) matching score evaluation, (ii) viewpoint selection, and (iii) outlier filtering. The combination of normalized cross-correlation with bilateral weights and geometric consistency between viewpoints is used to improve the estimation accuracy of depth and normal maps at object boundaries and poor-texture regions. For each pixel, viewpoints used for stereo matching are carefully selected in order to improve robustness against disturbances such as occlusion, noise, blur, and distortion. Outliers are removed from reconstructed 3D point clouds by a weighted median filter and consistency-based filters assuming multi-view geometry. Through a set of experiments using public multi-view image datasets, we demonstrate that the proposed method exhibits efficient performance compared with conventional methods.
Human-Informed Topology Optimization: interactive application of feature size controls
Authors: Ha Dat Quoc , Carstensen Josephine V. 
Published: March 2023

AbstractThis paper presents a new topology optimization framework in which the design decisions are made by humans and machines in collaboration. The new Human-Informed Topology Optimization approach eases the accessibility of topology optimization tools and enables improved design identification for the so-called ‘everyday’ and ‘in-the-field’ design situations. The new framework is based on standard density-based compliance minimization. However, the design engineer is enabled to actively use their experience and expertise to locally alter the minimum feature size requirements. This is done by conducting a short initial solution and prompting the design engineer to evaluate the quality. The user can identify potential areas of concern based on the initial material distribution. In these areas, the minimum feature size requirement can be altered as deemed necessary by the user. The algorithm rigorously resolves the compliance problem using the updated filtering map, resulting in solutions that eliminate, merge, or thicken topological members of concern. The new framework is demonstrated on 2D benchmark examples and the extension to 3D is shown. Its ability to achieve performance improvement with few computational resources are demonstrated on buckling and stress concentration examples.
Exploring the Use of a Fit‐for‐Purpose Surgical Headlight in Sub‐Saharan Africa: Mixed Methods Study
Authors: Hussien Muaad , Capo‐Chichi Nina , Starr Nichole , Johansen Elizabeth , Negash Samuel , Utam Terseer , Negussie Tihitena , Fernandez Katie , Weiser Thomas G. 
Published: March 2023

AbstractBackgroundHigh‐quality surgical lighting is often lacking in low‐resource settings. Commercial surgical headlights are unavailable due to high cost and supply and maintenance challenges. We aimed to understand user needs of a surgical headlight for low‐resource settings by evaluating a preselected robust but relatively inexpensive headlight and lighting conditions.
MethodsWe observed headlight use by ten surgeons in Ethiopia and six in Liberia. All surgeons completed surveys about their lighting environment and experience using headlight, and were subsequently interviewed. Twelve surgeons completed logbooks on headlight use. We distributed headlights to 48 additional surgeons, and all surgeons were surveyed for feedback.ResultsIn Ethiopia, five surgeons ranked operating room light quality as poor or very poor; seven delayed or cancelled operations within the last year and five described intraoperative complications due to poor lighting. In Liberia, lighting was rated as “good”, however fieldnotes, and interviews noted generator fuel‐rationing, and poor lighting conditions. In both countries, the headlight was considered extremely useful. Surgeons recommended nine improvements, including comfort, durability, affordability and availability of multiple rechargeable batteries. Thematic analysis identified factors influencing headlight use, specifications and feedback, and infrastructure challenges.
ConclusionLighting in surveyed operating rooms was poor. Although conditions and need for the headlights differed between Ethiopia and Liberia, headlights were considered highly useful. However, discomfort was a major limiting factor for ongoing use, and the hardest to objectively characterise for specification and engineering purposes. Specific needs for surgical headlights include comfort and durability. Refinement of a fit‐for‐purpose surgical headlight is ongoing.
Probabilistic and Analytical Aspects of the Symmetric and Generalized Kaiser–Bessel Window Function
Authors: Baricz Árpád , Pogány Tibor K. 
Published: March 2023

AbstractThe generalized Kaiser–Bessel window function is defined via the modified Bessel function of the first kind and arises frequently in tomographic image reconstruction. In this paper, we study in details the properties of the Kaiser–Bessel distribution, which we define via the symmetric form of the generalized Kaiser–Bessel window function. The Kaiser–Bessel distribution resembles to the Bessel distribution of McKay of the first type, it is a platykurtic or sub-Gaussian distribution, it is not infinitely divisible in the classical sense and it is an extension of the Wigner’s semicircle, parabolic andn-sphere distributions, as well as of the ultra-spherical (or hyper-spherical) and power semicircle distributions. We deduce the moments and absolute moments of this distribution and we find its characteristic and moment generating function in two different ways. In addition, we find its cumulative distribution function in three different ways and we deduce a recurrence relation for the moments and absolute moments. Moreover, by using a formula of Ismail and May on quotient of modified Bessel functions of the first kind, we deduce a closed-form expression for the differential entropy. We also prove that the Kaiser–Bessel distribution belongs to the family of log-concave and geometrically concave distributions, and we study in details the monotonicity and convexity properties of the probability density function with respect to the argument and each of the parameters. In the study of the monotonicity with respect to one of the parameters we complement a known result of Gronwall concerning the logarithmic derivative of modified Bessel functions of the first kind. Finally, we also present a modified method of moments to estimate the parameters of the Kaiser–Bessel distribution, and by using the classical rejection method we present two algorithms for sampling independent continuous random variables of Kaiser–Bessel distribution. The paper is closed with conclusions and proposals for future works.