Effect of Accessibility Information on Restaurant Selection of Consumers with Disabilities

OBJECTIVE: The study addressed the research question, How does accessibility information about restaurants affect the diversity of restaurant choices for people with disabilities compared to others who only have general review information about restaurants? The literature describes that people with disabilities experience limited participation in community activities. One community activity is dining out at restaurants. It is hypothesized that the availability of accessibility information will diversify restaurant choices, as it would minimize the risk of encountering unforeseen barriers that enable them to prepare for ones that they anticipate. METHOD: Participants (N-14), half with disabilities and half without disabilities, selected dining experiences at 5 restaurants. They chose restaurants from a unique list of 10 restaurants composed of 5 restaurants they had visited and 5 restaurants they had not. Participants were assigned to either a group that received restaurant accessibility information through the Access Ratings for Buildings (AR-B) website (intervention) or a group that received general review information about the restaurants through Yelp.com (control). They were asked to review their respective website information as they chose 5 restaurants for dining. The number of restaurants that participants chose were compared among the 4 groups to address 3 hypotheses. Questionnaires completed by the participants provided qualitative data and informed the researchers about the participants\u27 decision making process as they were selecting restaurants. RESULTS: One of the 3 apriori hypotheses was statistically supported. On the other hand, qualitative data consistently supported the theoretical underpinnings of the study. Hypothesis 1 posed that people with a disability using the AR-B website would select more new restaurants than participants with a disability that used Yelp. The results did not reveal a significant difference. Hypothesis 2 posed that participants without a disability who used AR-B would chose a similar number of new restaurants as those without a disability who used AR-B. This was supported. Hypothesis 3 stated that participants with a disability who used Yelp would select fewer new restaurants than participants without a disability who used Yelp. This was not statistically supported. To the contrary, the overall visual analysis of the data showed consistent trends supporting the underlying theoretical constructs that AR-B information affected the restaurant choice. Additionally, qualitative analysis of questionnaire data showed that accessibility is a highly valued feature for restaurants and that the accessibility information provided through the AR-B app was beneficial to people both with and without a disability. CONCLUSION: While this small study did not find statistical significance on the effects of using the AR-B website information during dining selection, it corroborated that restaurant accessibility is a commonly valued feature for restaurant patrons and that people with disabilities find benefit from accessibility information about public buildings. People also seem to select more new restaurants when they read web-based restaurant reviews of any type during their decision-making

Creating Opportunities for Cross-Generational Interaction Through Placemaking in Hong Kong

The purpose of this project is to develop recommendations for the creation of a public space which encourages cross-generational interaction in Hong Kong. We collaborated with the Chinese University of Hong Kong in their efforts to redevelop Sheung Fung Lane in Sai Ying Pun. To understand the current state of the space as well as document its daily use, we observed the lane and compared it to similar public spaces. We also developed and implemented an interactive design activity within Sheung Fung Lane that engaged the community in the redesign of the space. We recommend a plan to improve the space for its community by implementing intergenerational activities and introducing novel features based on community desires

Tourism in Metropolitan Manila - Philippines: An Analysis

Tourism has become important for (mega)cities in Southeast Asia. Metropolitan Manila competes in the tourism market, but its tourism is scholarly unexplored so far. This Ph.D. thesis takes the approach, that urban tourism is a system comprising interacting stakeholders at the supply and consumer side, and visitor attractions. This dissertation analyses and characterizes Metropolitan Manila`s tourism system referring to its stakeholders, visitor attractions and services. Metropolitan Manila is able to tap the domestic and international tourism market with various attraction resources. But Metropolitan Manila`s supply-side stakeholder field appears highly diverse. The relations among these stakeholders can be characterized through discontinuous links, unequal participation, and non power-sharing. This adverse status is aggravated through the absence of tourism policy, obsolete tourism planning approaches and the dominance of top-down deciding political elites. Consequently, a consensual, goal-oriented acting is inhibited. Instead stakeholders act mutually exclusive or compete with each other. Tourism is predominately seen as a valuable economic tool. As a result, other important dimensions of tourism like socio-cultural, experiential, and infrastructural aspects are negated to a great extent. The current visitor is a short staying stop-over traveller who recognizes the capital`s built heritage as unique. Visitor activities and spatial flow are mainly confined on the heritage of the city centre. But the visitor`s impression of the capital is negative and dissatisfaction with public sector services occurs. Valuable visitor attractions are difficult to access and the tourism infrastructure is perceived as weakly developed. This emphasizes that the tourism officials are not able to create a fully convincing tourism product and they neglect other metropolitan-wide tourism potentials. Recommended future measures should improve the cooperation of supply-side stakeholders and tourism planning embracing the whole metropolis. Moreover, measures must improve tourism infrastructure, public sector services, marketing, and destination image of the capital in order to enhance its competitiveness

A comparative analysis of recommender systems based on item aspect opinions extracted from user reviews

In popular applications such as e-commerce sites and social media, users provide online reviews giving personal opinions about a wide array of items, such as products, services and people. These reviews are usually in the form of free text, and represent a rich source of information about the users’ preferences. Among the information elements that can be extracted from reviews, opinions about particular item aspects (i.e., characteristics, attributes or components) have been shown to be effective for user modeling and personalized recommendation. In this paper, we investigate the aspect-based recommendation problem by separately addressing three tasks, namely identifying references to item aspects in user reviews, classifying the sentiment orientation of the opinions about such aspects in the reviews, and exploiting the extracted aspect opinion information to provide enhanced recommendations. Differently to previous work, we integrate and empirically evaluate several state-of-the-art and novel methods for each of the above tasks. We conduct extensive experiments on standard datasets and several domains, analyzing distinct recommendation quality metrics and characteristics of the datasets, domains and extracted aspects. As a result of our investigation, we not only derive conclusions about which combination of methods is most appropriate according to the above issues, but also provide a number of valuable resources for opinion mining and recommendation purposes, such as domain aspect vocabularies and domain-dependent, aspect-level lexiconsThis work was supported by the Spanish Ministry of Economy, Industry and Competitiveness (TIN2016-80630-P)

Proceedings of the 5th Baltic Mechatronics Symposium - Espoo April 17, 2020

The Baltic Mechatronics Symposium is annual symposium with the objective to provide a forum for young scientists from Baltic countries to exchange knowledge, experience, results and information in large variety of fields in mechatronics. The symposium was organized in co-operation with Taltech and Aalto University. Due to Coronavirus COVID-19 the symposium was organized as a virtual conference. The content of the proceedings1. Monitoring Cleanliness of Public Transportation with Computer Vision2. Device for Bending and Cutting Coaxial Wires for Cryostat in Quantum Computing3. Inertial Measurement Method and Application for Bowling Performance Metrics4. Mechatronics Escape Room5. Hardware-In-the-Loop Test Setup for Tuning Semi-Active Hydraulic Suspension Systems6. Newtonian Telescope Design for Stand-off Laser Induced Breakdown Spectroscopy7. Simulation and Testing of Temperature Behavior in Flat Type Linear Motor Carrier8. Powder Removal Device for Metal Additive Manufacturing9. Self-Leveling Spreader Beam for Adjusting the Orientation of an Overhead Crane Loa

The Search for Third Options in a Two-Bathroom Society

This Note presents a narrative on and the history of transgender bathroom rights in this country, beginning with the reasoning for a two-bathroom society and the development of “bathroom laws”. The development of the two-bathroom society is intertwined with and rooted in beliefs that have remained prevalent since the Victorian Era, ideas about core differences between men and women, and how best to protect the virtues of women. In order to weave this narrative, this Note focuses particularly on current cases that are making their way through our Courts: the stories of Gavin Grimm and Coy Mathis, whose battles are still in their early stages as they are caught up in embittered legal battles that delve into deeply private and personal issues about how trans children and adults identify in a public arena. This Note will look to various state and city laws that are in effect and offer an analysis as to their effects on the transgender population. Finally, this Note discusses the experience of being transgender in prison, and the idea of a dual imprisonment in those states that determine housing for inmates on the basis of sex at birth