Bridging Concept Research Articles

A scoping review on the multiplicity of scale in spatial analysis

Scale is a central concept in the geographical sciences and is an intrinsic property of many spatial systems. It also serves as an essential thread in the fabric of many other physical and social sciences, which has contributed to the use of different terminology for similar manifestations of what we refer to as ‘scale’, leading to a surprising amount of diversity around this fundamental concept and its various ‘multiscale’ extensions. To address this, we review common abstractions about spatial scale and how they are employed in quantitative research. We also explore areas where the conceptualizations of multiple spatial scales can be differentiated. This is achieved by first bridging terminology and concepts, and then conducting a scoping review of the topic. A typology for spatial scale is discussed that can be used to categorize its multifarious meanings and measures. This typology is then used to distinguish what we term ‘process scale,’ from other types of spatial scale and to highlight current trends in uncovering aspects of process scale. We end with suggestions on how to further build knowledge regarding spatial processes through the lens of spatial scale.

A Multi-Perspective Framework of Vision Zero: Toward Collaborative Promotion of Safety, Health and Well-Being at Work

In the globalized field of safety, health, and well-being, the need to build multi-stakeholder alliances to find solutions to complex challenges is growing. This requires common ground for collaboration, as well as concepts and tools to grasp and manage the areas of interest. Over recent years, Vision Zero has awakened interest and it continues to evolve into many forms of approaches and initiatives, which provide a strategic direction and practical tools for supporting the development of safety, health, and well-being at work. Consequently, there is a need to build a shared understanding of ‘zero’. This article reflects the potential of Vision Zero as a bridging concept and an approach for building multi-stakeholder collaboration. Thus, we present a multi-perspective framework of Vision Zero to support further dialoge and collaboration in joint undertakings.

Locating cultural studies: The limits of translation in knowledge production

This article reflects on translation practices engendered by location, disciplinary constraints, and Western hegemonies in the work of cultural studies scholars from the Global South. Focusing on issues of translation beyond language and text, the article tackles cultural translation practices at the levels of theory and analysis, which scholars engage in to render their research legible within academic contexts that continue to pay lip service to stretching the canons of cultural studies curricula and intellectual agendas. How does the labor of cultural translation – often unremarked and invisible – shape the scope and possibilities of cultural studies research that addresses media and technology in the Global South? The article goes behind the frontstage of visible knowledge production to critically examine the directionality and discursive power of specific mechanisms of cultural translation – bridge concept, analogy, and metaphor – which are grounded in historical and geopolitical conditions that constrain the transformational goals of de-Westernizing cultural studies.

Organization needs organization: Understanding integrated control in living organisms

Organization figures centrally in the understanding of biological systems advanced by both new mechanists and proponents of the autonomy framework. The new mechanists focus on how components of mechanisms are organized to produce a phenomenon and emphasize productive continuity between these components. The autonomy framework focuses on how the components of a biological system are organized in such a way that they contribute to the maintenance of the organisms that produce them. In this paper we analyze and compare these two accounts of organization and argue that understanding biological organisms as cohesively integrated systems benefits from insights from both. To bring together the two accounts, we focus on the notions of control and regulation as bridge concepts. We start from a characterization of biological mechanisms in terms of constraints and focus on a specific type of mechanism, control mechanisms, that operate on other mechanisms on the basis of measurements of variables in the system and its environment. Control mechanisms are characterized by their own set of constraints that enable them to sense conditions, convey signals, and effect changes on constraints in the controlled mechanism. They thereby allow living organisms to adapt to internal and external variations and to coordinate their parts in such a manner as to maintain viability. Because living organisms contain a vast number of control mechanisms, a central challenge is to understand how they are themselves organized. With the support of examples from both unicellular and multicellular systems we argue that control mechanisms are organized heterarchically, and we discuss how this type of control architecture can, without invoking top-down and centralized forms of organizations, succeed in coordinating internal activities of organisms.

Union Coalitions and Strategic Framing: The Case of the Agricultural Advisory Panel for Wales

This article analyses the creation of a union coalition that introduced a new employment relations institution: the Agricultural Advisory Panel for Wales. Building on social movement theory, the article argues that the union’s strategic framing within a conducive political opportunity structure enabled the coalition to form and pursue its goals. The union engaged in a specific frame alignment strategy, frame bridging, to explore and mobilize intersections and shared interests between its own frame and those of its coalition partners. Frame bridging prompted actors to reverse their policy preferences and participate in the coalition, which was facilitated by a political opportunity structure formed from the political salience of the agricultural sector and pre-existing social ties in the ‘small state’ political economy of Wales. The article contributes to the literature by developing and extending the frame bridging concept as a process enabling union coalitions.

RC deck - stiffened arch existing bridges: simulated design and structural analysis

The 20th century is known as the age that gave birth to the largest reinforced concrete structures. Many applications of this new material were realized at that time, both from a theoretical and practical point of view. With reference to bridges, the engineer Robert Maillart achieved a new concept of arched bridges, characterized by very stiff deck beams and slender and wide vaults, i.e., the "Deck-Stiffened Arch". The paper deals with the study of such bridge typology, particularly widespread in Italy around the 50s of the 20th century. While, nowadays, calculation tools allow developing very refined structural modelling, in the past very simple structural schemes were adopted in the design phase in order to simplify the calculation effort. The study starts from a "simulated design" of such a bridge typology adopting a reliable geometry and following the design rules and the simplified structural schemes of the time and, then, by means of a refined three-dimensional model, the performance of a typical "Maillart-Type Arch" bridge is analysed.

The Population of Interstellar Objects Detectable with the LSST and Accessible for In Situ Rendezvous with Various Mission Designs

Abstract The recently discovered population of interstellar objects presents us with the opportunity to characterize material from extrasolar planetary and stellar systems up close. The forthcoming Vera C. Rubin Observatory Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) will provide an unprecedented increase in sensitivity to these objects compared to the capabilities of currently operational observational facilities. We generate a synthetic population of ‘Oumuamua-like objects drawn from their galactic kinematics and identify the distribution of impact parameters, eccentricities, hyperbolic velocities, and sky locations of objects detectable with the LSST, assuming no cometary activity. This population is characterized by a clustering of trajectories in the direction of the solar apex and antiapex, centered at orbital inclinations of ∼90°. We identify the ecliptic or solar apex as the optimal sky location to search for future interstellar objects as a function of survey limiting magnitude. Moreover, we identify the trajectories of detectable objects that will be reachable for in situ rendezvous with a dedicated mission with the capabilities of the forthcoming Comet Interceptor or proposed Bridge concept. By scaling our fractional population statistics with the inferred spatial number density, we estimate that the LSST will detect of order ∼15 interstellar objects over the course of its ∼10 yr observational campaign. Furthermore, we find that there should be ∼1–3 and ∼0.0007–0.001 reachable targets for missions with propulsion capabilities comparable to Bridge and Comet Interceptor, respectively. These numbers are lower limits and will be readily updateable when the number density and size–frequency distribution of interstellar objects are better constrained.

Panacea, placebo or pathogen? An evaluation of the integrated performance of polycentric urban structures in the Chinese prefectural city-regions

Although the polycentric urban structure is perceived as a bridging concept to achieve various policy goals, such as promoting economic efficiency, diminishing spatial inequity, and encouraging environmental sustainability, most studies tend to focus only on a singular dimension of polycentricity. Drawing on the non-radial direction distance function approach, our study aimed to provide a three-dimensional integrated assessment of the benefits of polycentric spatial structure in the Chinese prefectural city-regions. However, our findings were not as expected; specifically, a lower degree of polycentric city structure is robustly associated with better overall performance, and this performance is size-dependent and dominated by economic efficiency. These results shed light on the prevailing role of agglomeration economies and suggest that a polycentric-oriented spatial strategy may not be a feasible policy for Chinese prefecture-level cities.

The co-evolutionary approach to nature-based solutions: A conceptual framework

The concept of NbS bridges between researchers and practitioners who search for innovative solutions to a wide range of societal problems and challenges, mostly related to ecological issues. Our conceptual paper aims at grounding the concept in theorizing NbS as a variant of ‘co-evolutionary technology’ CET, informed by ecological and institutional economics, and contextualized in recent Anthropocene research. This results in a new definition of NbS. NbS mediate between technosphere and biosphere evolution. We formulate four principles of CET, with the pivot of CET meeting both human needs and enhancing biospheric evolutionary potential, which feeds back on CET in co-creative design. The paper introduces core theoretical concepts, such as distributed agency and affordances, and proceeds in detailing CET along the standard tripartite view of technology, that is, design, production and use. We conclude in arguing that CET are inherently ethical since their design requires equal recognition of various human and non-human actors, both in terms of functions and ways of world-making.

Systematic Metadata Analysis of Wind-Exposed Long-Span Bridges for Road Vehicle Safety Assessments

Abstract Long-span bridges are part of a vital road infrastructure for communities living in the coastal regions of Norway. New projects considering advanced bridge concepts will contribute to soli...

A Bisociated Research Paper Recommendation Model using BiSOLinkers

In the current days of information overload, it is nearly impossible to obtain a form of relevant knowledge from massive information repositories without using information retrieval and filtering tools. The academic field daily receives lots of research articles, thus making it virtually impossible for researchers to trace and retrieve important articles for their research work. Unfortunately, the tools used to search, retrieve and recommend relevant research papers suggest similar articles based on the user profile characteristic, resulting in the overspecialization problem whereby recommendations are boring, similar, and uninteresting. We attempt to address this problem by recommending research papers from domains considered unrelated and unconnected. This is achieved through identifying bridging concepts that can bridge these two unrelated domains through their outlying concepts – BiSOLinkers. We modeled a bisociation framework using graph theory and text mining technologies. Machine learning algorithms were utilized to identify outliers within the dataset, and the accuracy achieved by most algorithms was between 96.30% and 99.49%, suggesting that the classifiers accurately classified and identified the outliers. We additionally utilized the Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) algorithm to identify the topics bridging the two unrelated domains at their point of intersection. BisoNets were finally generated, conceptually demonstrating how the two unrelated domains were linked, necessitating cross-domain recommendations. Hence, it is established that recommender systems' overspecialization can be addressed by combining bisociation, topic modeling, and text mining approaches.

The visual gamut and syntactic abstraction

Abstract Charles S. Peirce’s second trichotomy, which introduces the concepts of iconicity, indexicality, and symbolicity, is probably the only piece of his semiotic that is familiar to visual artists and designers. Although the concepts have found their way into the academy, their utility in the field has been reduced for a couple of reasons. First, as with all of Peirce’s philosophy, his second trichotomy is a concept that is subtle, fluid, and difficult to fully grasp in a sound bite. Second, there has simply been no bridge concept that would form a working connection between that philosophy in its logical guise and the studio practice in the visual arts. The purpose of this article is to remedy that situation by investigating the subtle ways the second trichotomy functions within the visual sphere, and to then suggest a model that can serve to bridge the divide between pure theory and practice. The article makes four main points: first, using examples from visual identity and the graphic arts, it demonstrates how the modes of icon, index, and symbol tend to be blended; second, examples from fine art are used to illustrate how the concept of abstraction, as used in the art world, can only be partially accounted for within the second trichotomy, but can be modeled by supplying a syntactical supplement; third, it expands on and elaborates a previously sketched model, the visual gamut, which makes it possible to classify visual entities according to their position within a map of semantic and syntactic space; finally, it concludes by suggesting ways this enhanced version of the visual gamut model might be used in the analysis of, or creation of, art and design, presenting suggestions for further study.

Instrumentals behind embryo and cancer: a platform for prospective future in cancer research

<abstract> <p>The cancer cells could be celled biomass without normal cellular regulation. They bypass most of the signaling pathways leading to programmed cell division. On the other hand, the embryos are highly regulated, giving rise to the whole organism based on the planned regulation. Understanding the bridge concepts between them might be an interventional art for discovering valuable cancer drugs. The present review highlighted the most similarities between them and recent literary works.</p> </abstract>

Integrated Framework for Proper Constructability in Bridges Using Value Engineering and Analytical Network Process 'ANP" (Analytical Study)

Due to recent environmental and Political requirements, and regulations of the construction industry, in which bridges is one of its important category, deciding its proper constructability is becoming vital. Therefor the objective of this research is to develop a decision model for selecting proper constructability of green bridges constructions, the model was built based on analytical network process (the ANP) soft were program, integrated with value engineering approach. For this analytical study different parameters are identified and ranked to be implemented for the decision model developed on the biases of four surveying studies conducted in this study the results of these surveying's was be analyzed by using the statically analytical program; "SPSS". Model validation and reliability is carried out using the analytical network process (ANP) for statistically analysis using case study which is a cable bridge project constructed in Egypt. ANP proves to be an effective framework for assessing readiness to adopt and facilitating TQM. The result of the study illustrate that the proper constructability alternative in green bridge concept for this determinate project is the concrete box girder type, upon this there is a cost loss of $3, 500 per square meter, equivalent to 50% losses, respect to the life cycle cost this is due to did not using the best alternate of the estimated project. upon the possibility of applying this decision model to such studies of infrastructure projects, and with respect to the results gained; it is recommend to apply the ANP model with respect to VE procedures to bridges projects of all kinds and their determinants, as well as all other construction projects, especially national ones, in future studies, which allows decision- makers to make decisions that aim at the highest quality without any waste in unnecessary costs.

Magnetic Bridge Concept

Magnetic Bridge Concept

Mentalized affectivity in a nutshell: Validation of the Italian version of the Brief-Mentalized Affectivity Scale (B-MAS).

The term “mentalized affectivity” describes the ability to reflect on, process, modulate and express emotions through the prism of autobiographical memory. It represents a bridge concept that integrates previous contributions on emotion regulation and mentalization, offering a quite unique perspective on affective and reflective functioning. The overall aim of this study was to validate the Brief-Mentalized Affectivity Scale (B-MAS), a 12-items self-report instrument, on the Italian population. We tested both the factorial validity of the instrument and its reliability and convergent validity with other similar constructs. We also obtained normative data for the Italian population, broken down by gender. Participants (n = 389) were recruited through snowball sampling. Data was collected through an online survey. Besides the Brief-Mentalized Affectivity Scale, the survey included an ad hoc schedule with questions investigating socio-demographic characteristics, and self-report measures of empathy and reflective functioning. Statistical analysis has shown a three-component (Identifying, Processing, and Expressing emotions) hierarchical structure underlying mentalized affectivity, mirroring the model already proposed in the original validation of the instrument. Moreover, the B-MAS showed good psychometric properties for what regards both reliability and convergent validity. The results of our study highlight the good operationalization and robust empirical foundation of the construct, revealing that the B-MAS is a promising instrument to assess mentalized affectivity. Its brevity makes it particularly valuable both in clinical and research contexts, and the normative data provided in this study will allow an easy comparison with the scores obtained by other samples (clinical and non-clinical).

Planetary well-being

Tensions between the well-being of present humans, future humans, and nonhuman nature manifest in social protests and political and academic debates over the future of Earth. The increasing consumption of natural resources no longer increases, let alone equalises, human well-being, but has led to the current ecological crisis and harms both human and nonhuman well-being. While the crisis has been acknowledged, the existing conceptual frameworks are in some respects ill-equipped to address the crisis in a way that would link the resolving of the crisis with the pivotal aim of promoting equal well-being. The shortcomings of the existing concepts in this respect relate to anthropocentric normative orientation, methodological individualism that disregards process dynamics and precludes integrating the considerations of human and nonhuman well-being, and the lack of multiscalar considerations of well-being. This work derives and proposes the concept of planetary well-being to address the aforementioned conceptual issues, to recognise the moral considerability of both human and nonhuman well-being, and to promote transdisciplinary, cross-cultural discourse for addressing the crisis and for promoting societal and cultural transformation. Conceptually, planetary well-being shifts focus on well-being from individuals to processes, Earth system and ecosystem processes, that underlie all well-being. Planetary well-being is a state where the integrity of Earth system and ecosystem processes remains unimpaired to a degree that species and populations can persist to the future and organisms have the opportunity to achieve well-being. After grounding and introducing planetary well-being, this work shortly discusses how the concept can be operationalised and reflects upon its potential as a bridging concept between different worldviews.

Deception as a Bridging Concept in the Study of Disinformation, Misinformation, and Misperceptions: Toward a Holistic Framework

AbstractWe propose deception as a bridging concept that will enhance the study of misinformation, disinformation, and misperceptions. As we set it out here, the concept integrates insights from multiple social science disciplines and uniquely connects actors’ intentions, information, and attitudinal or behavioral outcomes. A focus on deception will enrich research that describes the existence of false and misleading information but stops short of identifying their influence. Equally, through its focus on how actors’ deceptive strategies are important in attempts to exercise power, it can augment the study of the cognitive and attitudinal biases that render people susceptible to misperceptions. We identify the main themes in the study of deception: media-systemic distortions in information supply; the relational interactions that both produce and activate cognitive biases; and the attributes, strategies, and techniques of deceptive entities. We conclude with a summary typology of 10 principal variables and their 57 focal indicators.

What do you mean by values? Integration of social with biophysical knowledge in the development of a landscape decision support system

Environmental decision-making is recognised as requiring integration of biophysical and social knowledge, but integration of knowledges based in different epistemic assumptions is challenging. We used an action research approach to observe integration in the development of a landscape decision support system (DSS) for forest and fire management in Victoria, Australia. We found two different knowledge integration processes, conceptually-driven to shape the structure of the DSS and technically-driven through modelling. Project framing dominated by biophysical sciences and technically-driven integration presented a barrier to many potential social science contributions that could connect a DSS with the surrounding social and decision contexts. Nonetheless, some conceptually-driven integration occurred when social researchers contributed their analysis of values of the public to the DSS design. The need for this integration emerged through initial conflict over disciplinary understandings of ‘value’. While initially uncomfortable, this opened the way to differentiate knowledge related to the term and to negotiate some conceptual synthesis and an agreed multidisciplinary list of values to structure the DSS. Technically-driven integration occurred through incorporation of social and biophysical metrics in model software. Our research highlights that bridging concepts such as values and related frameworks act as boundary objects that help in overcoming barriers to integration between social and biophysical knowledge. Integration is itself a potential boundary object and early discussions to differentiate and clarify how the term is understood can help in designing interdisciplinary processes. Critically, projects need adequate time for interdisciplinary differentiation, tolerance amongst the team for uncomfortable conversations, and leadership that fosters interdisciplinary interactions to achieve a high degree of knowledge integration.

Narrating by Doing: A Bridging Concept for Understanding and Informing the Design of Tangible Interfaces for Storytelling

Abstract We present and discuss the concept ‘narrating by doing’ as the process of creating narratives by performing different embodied actions with tangible interfaces for storytelling. We characterize it as a ‘bridging concept’ that can facilitate exchange between theory and design, informing research and design of TUIs for storytelling targeting young children. The concept builds on theories of cognition, learning and narration, specifically drawing upon the following perspectives: Constructionism, Socio-Constructivism, Embodied Cognition, Narratology and The Narrative Practice Hypothesis. Building upon these theoretical foundations, we identify and discuss four ‘design articulations’ (i.e. important parameters that express the qualities of the concept), namely communicative situation, narrative function of the tangible objects, collaborative and embodied actions and the narrator’s position. Finally, we add evidence to the concept and discuss its productiveness by presenting a set of considerations to inform the design of tangible interfaces for storytelling.