244,880 research outputs found
Database Marketing In Travel And Tourism
An increasing number of organisations are developing customer databases in a bid to get closer to their customers and gain competitive advantage. This report investigates the practice of database marketing among different travel and tourism sectors, including airlines, hotels, museums and tour operators, and draws on UK and international examples. It compares direct marketing and database marketing and examines the different levels of sophistication at which database marketing can be practiced, the role of customer loyalty schemes, the ways in which a database can be segmented, the role of consumer data profiling companies and current developments in database marketing. The use of database marketing for customer retention and business acquisition is also investigated. In order to ensure true customer relationship building it is vital for the industry to leverage the information on their databases and provide customer recognition through the delivery of personalised service. Business acquisition through customer retention is likely to be a key strategy in future through the use of data-mining and cross-selling techniques. The report concludes that organisations must create a new marketing environment by moving away from transaction marketing towards the principles of customer relationship management
Optimization of Nanoparticle-Based SERS Substrates through Large-Scale Realistic Simulations
Surface-enhanced Raman scattering (SERS) has
become a widely used spectroscopic technique for chemical
identification, providing unbeaten sensitivity down to the singlemolecule
level. The amplification of the optical near field
produced by collective electron excitations plasmons in
nanostructured metal surfaces gives rise to a dramatic increase
by many orders of magnitude in the Raman scattering intensities
from neighboring molecules. This effect strongly depends on
the detailed geometry and composition of the plasmonsupporting
metallic structures. However, the search for
optimized SERS substrates has largely relied on empirical
data, due in part to the complexity of the structures, whose
simulation becomes prohibitively demanding. In this work, we
use state-of-the-art electromagnetic computation techniques to
produce predictive simulations for a wide range of nanoparticle-based SERS substrates, including realistic configurations
consisting of random arrangements of hundreds of nanoparticles with various morphologies. This allows us to derive rules of
thumb for the influence of particle anisotropy and substrate coverage on the obtained SERS enhancement and optimum spectral
ranges of operation. Our results provide a solid background to understand and design optimized SERS substrates.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version
High Frequency Radar Wind Turbine Interference Community Working Group Report
Land-based High Frequency (HF) Radars provide critically important observations of the coastal ocean that will be adversely affected by the spinning blades of utility-scale wind turbines. Pathways to mitigate the interference of turbines on HF radar observations exist for small number of turbines; however, a greatly increased pace of research is required to understand how
to minimize the complex interference patterns that will be caused by the large arrays of turbines planned for the U.S. outer continental shelf. To support the U.S.’s operational and scientific needs, HF radars must be able to collect high-quality measurements of the ocean’s surface inand around areas with significant numbers of wind turbines. This is a solvable problem, but given the rapid pace of wind energy development, immediate action is needed to ensure that HF radar wind turbine interference mitigation efforts keep pace with the planned build out of turbines
Geoportals: an internet marketing perspective
A geoportal is a web site that presents an entry point to geo-products (including geo-data) on the web. Despite their importance in (spatial) data infrastructures, literature suggest stagnating or even declining trends in visitor numbers. In this paper relevant ideas and techniques for improving performance are derived from internet marketing literature. We tested the extent to which these ideas are already applied in practice through a survey among 48 geoportals worldwide. Results show in many cases positive correlation with trends in visitor numbers. The ideas can be useful for geoportal managers developing their marketing strateg
Science with the Virtual Observatory: the AstroGrid VO Desktop
We introduce a general range of science drivers for using the Virtual
Observatory (VO) and identify some common aspects to these as well as the
advantages of VO data access. We then illustrate the use of existing VO tools
to tackle multi wavelength science problems. We demonstrate the ease of multi
mission data access using the VOExplorer resource browser, as provided by
AstroGrid (http://www.astrogrid.org) and show how to pass the various results
into any VO enabled tool such as TopCat for catalogue correlation. VOExplorer
offers a powerful data-centric visualisation for browsing and filtering the
entire VO registry using an iTunes type interface. This allows the user to
bookmark their own personalised lists of resources and to run tasks on the
selected resources as desired. We introduce an example of how more advanced
querying can be performed to access existing X-ray cluster of galaxies
catalogues and then select extended only X-ray sources as candidate clusters of
galaxies in the 2XMMi catalogue. Finally we introduce scripted access to VO
resources using python with AstroGrid and demonstrate how the user can pass on
the results of such a search and correlate with e.g. optical datasets such as
Sloan. Hence we illustrate the power of enabling large scale data mining of
multi wavelength resources in an easily reproducible way using the VO.Comment: 8 pages; 7 figures; proceedings of invited talk at "Multi wavelength
astronomy and the Virtual Observatory" conference, December 2008, EuroVO-AIDA
program, European Space Astronomy Centre, Spai
Developing a distributed electronic health-record store for India
The DIGHT project is addressing the problem of building a scalable and highly available information store for the Electronic Health Records (EHRs) of the over one billion citizens of India
Operations Management Curricula: Literature Review and Analysis
A review and analysis of studies on the interface between Operations Management (OM) academicians and industry practitioners indicate the existence of a persistent gap between what is being taught and what is relevant to practitioners in their daily jobs. The majority of practitioner studies have been directed at upper management levels, yet academia typically educates students for entry level or management trainee (undergraduate) and mid-management (MBA) positions. A recurring finding was that academicians prefer to teach quantitative techniques while practitioners favor qualitative concepts. The OM curricula literature shows some disagreements between academicians concerning subject matter, and a wide variety of teaching opinions. This paper provides an extensive analytical review of OM curricula literature along with their respective authors’ conclusions. From this analysis we suggest a customer-focused business plan to close the gap between industry and academia. This plan can be modified to account for faculty teaching and research interests, local industry requirements and institution specific factors such as class sizes and resources
"Advanced" data reduction for the AMBER instrument
The amdlib AMBER data reduction software is meant to produce AMBER data
products from the raw data files that are sent to the PIs of different
proposals or that can be found in the ESO data archive. The way defined by ESO
to calibrate the data is to calibrate one science data file with a calibration
one, observed as close in time as possible. Therefore, this scheme does not
take into account instrumental drifts, atmospheric variations or
visibility-loss corrections, in the current AMBER data processing software,
amdlib. In this article, we present our approach to complement this default
calibration scheme, to perform the final steps of data reduction, and to
produce fully calibrated AMBER data products. These additional steps include:
an overnight view of the data structure and data quality, the production of
night transfer functions from the calibration stars observed during the night,
the correction of additional effects not taken into account in the standard
AMBER data reduction software such as the so-called "jitter" effect and the
visibility spectral coherence loss, and finally, the production of fully
calibrated data products. All these new features are beeing implemented in the
modular pipeline script amdlibPipeline, written to complement the amdlib
software.Comment: 10 pages, will be published in the proceeding of the SPIE conference
"astronomical Telescopes and Instrumentation: Optical and Infrared
Interferometry", held in Marseille from 23 to 27 june 200
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