Assessment of Interpretive Facilities and the Delivery of Interpretive Services in Nigeria National Parks

Assessment of interpretive facilities and the delivery of interpretive services in Chad Basin National Park (CBNP), Kainji Lake National Park (KLNP), Okomu National Park (OKNP), and Yankari National Park (YNP) were conducted. The parks were selected to represent the major ecological zones where National Parks are located in Nigeria. There methods of data collection were utilized in this study. The first was the use of interview guide adapted from the Department of Natural Resources and Environment (1999) to obtain information from the management of the four national parks; the second was on-site assessment of interpretive facilities and services available in the parks. Finally, data were obtained through questionnaire from the visitors to the parks on the interpretive facilities and services provided to Data obtained were subjected to descriptive statistics. The results indicated the presence of interpretive brochures and leaflets, interpretive signs, park publications, museum/interpretive exhibits, interpretive talks, school group activities, children activities, guided tours, video, visitor centre and audio/video viewing at visitor centre in these parks. None of these Parks provided internet site, night walks, self-guided activities and trailside exhibits. The study also showed that between 2.7% and 6.3% of the total number of full-time staff in these parks were available for the delivery of interpretive services. Also, between N100,000 and N1,000,000 were budgeted annually for interpretive services out of between N5,000,000 and N100,000,000 annual operating budget for the parks.Key Words: Interpretive facilities, interpretive services, delivery, visitors, Nigeria National Park

An investigation of web-based hypermedia design support: methods and tools

Since the Internet networking was first established, the World Wide Web (or WWW) provides a new opportunity to deliver information and to communicate with others. Therefore, many organisations and industries have joined this exciting technology to take advantage of the Web. In recent years, the opportunity has arisen for other tasks to be carried out on the Web apart from delivering information. As the Web applications and documents have become larger and more complex, they have experienced many design and development problems which often lead to very high maintenance cost. To improve the quality of Websites and the structure of information, the designers need structured design methods, guidelines, and tools to assist their work. Some researchers have proposed hypermedia design methods and guidelines, which contain development cycle with formal design techniques to assist the construction of Web page designs. To overcome the design and development problems, this research is carried out by surveying currently available design methods. It shows the ways to apply these methods for developing structured Web sites. The results of this research led to identifying the design stages involved in developing Web sites using hypermedia methods. It also presents a CASE tool to provide a development environment for producing Web pages based on hypermedia design stages. This encourages Web designers to apply structured hypermedia design methods to improve the quality of design and to reduce the maintenance cost. The thesis is relevant for end-users, Web designers from organisations, institutes, and institutes for those who want to apply structured hypermedia design methods for producing their Web documents

A Novel Puzzle-Based Framework for Mitigating Distributed Denial of Service Attacks Against Internet Applications

Cryptographic puzzles are promising techniques for mitigating DDoS attacks via decreasing the incoming rate of service eligible requests. However, existing cryptographic puzzle techniques have several shortcomings that make them less appealing as a tool of choice for DDoS defense. These shortcomings include: (1) the lack of accurate models for dynamically determining puzzle hardness; (2) the lack of an efficient and effective counter mechanism for puzzle solution replay attacks; and (3) the wastefulness of the puzzle computations in terms of the clients' computational resources. In this thesis, we provide a puzzle based DDoS defense framework that addresses these shortcomings. Our puzzle framework includes three novel puzzle mechanisms. The first mechanism, called Puzzle+, provides a mathematical model of per-request puzzle hardness. Through extensive experimental study, we show that this model optimizes the effectiveness of puzzle based DDoS mitigation while enabling tight control over the server utilization. In addition, Puzzle+ disables puzzle solution replay attacks by utilizing a novel cache algorithm to detect replays. The second puzzle mechanism, called Productive Puzzles, alleviates the wastefulness of computational puzzles by transforming the puzzle computations into computations of meaningful tasks that provide utility. Our third puzzle mechanism, called Guided Tour Puzzles, eliminates the wasteful puzzle computations all together, and adopts a novel delay-based puzzle construction idea. In addition, it is not affected by the disparity in the computational resources of the client machines that perform the puzzle computations. Through measurement analysis on real network testbeds as well as extensive simulation study, we show that both Productive Puzzles and Guided Tour Puzzles achieve effective mitigation of DDoS attacks while satisfying no wasteful computation requirement. Lastly, we introduce a novel queue management algorithm, called Stochastic Fair Drop Queue (SFDQ), to further strengthen the DDoS protection provided by the puzzle framework. SFDQ is not only effective against DDoS attacks at multiple layers of the protocol stack, it is also simple to configure and deploy. SFDQ is implemented over a novel data structure, called Indexed Linked List, to provide enqueue, dequeue, and remove operations with O(1) time complexity

Collections for people: museums' stored collections as a public resource

Collections in UK museums grew enormously in the latter half of the 20th century yet museum collections, mostly maintained at public expense, are perceived as an underused resource. The Museums Association’s 2005 report, Collections for the Future1, together with press comments and books such as Treasures on Earth (2002)2 and Fragments of the World (2005)3, brought this issue into sharp focus. Collections for People set out to understand the scale of museum stored collections, and the main parameters of their access and use: • What is the size and nature of collections as a resource? How are they distributed, geographically and among different types of museum? • How much are different types of collection used by people other than museum staff? What sort of people use collections? What do they use them for: research, teaching and learning, creative activities, visits for enjoyment such as store tours? • How do users perceive this service? Do museums actively market collections access? Do they publicise what is in their collections? • How do museums facilitate collections use? What are the factors associated with greater use of collections? What do museums see as the barriers to more use

Augmenting applications with hyper media, functionality and meta-information

The Dynamic Hypermedia Engine (DHE) enhances analytical applications by adding relationships, semantics and other metadata to the application\u27s output and user interface. DHE also provides additional hypermedia navigational, structural and annotation functionality. These features allow application developers and users to add guided tours, personal links and sharable annotations, among other features, into applications. DHE runs as a middleware between the application user interface and its business logic and processes, in a n-tier architecture, supporting the extra functionalities without altering the original systems by means of application wrappers. DHE automatically generates links at run-time for each of those elements having relationships and metadata. Such elements are previously identified using a Relation Navigation Analysis. DHE also constructs more sophisticated navigation techniques not often found on the Web on top of these links. The metadata, links, navigation and annotation features supplement the application\u27s primary functionality. This research identifies element types, or classes , in the application displays. A mapping rule encodes each relationship found between two elements of interest at the class level . When the user selects a particular element, DHE instantiates the commands included in the rules with the actual instance selected and sends them to the appropriate destination system, which then dynamically generates the resulting virtual (i.e. not previously stored) page. DHE executes concurrently with these applications, providing automated link generation and other hypermedia functionality. DHE uses the extensible Markup Language (XMQ -and related World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) sets of XML recommendations, like Xlink, XML Schema, and RDF -to encode the semantic information required for the operation of the extra hypermedia features, and for the transmission of messages between the engine modules and applications. DHE is the only approach we know that provides automated linking and metadata services in a generic manner, based on the application semantics, without altering the applications. DHE will also work with non-Web systems. The results of this work could also be extended to other research areas, such as link ranking and filtering, automatic link generation as the result of a search query, metadata collection and support, virtual document management, hypermedia functionality on the Web, adaptive and collaborative hypermedia, web engineering, and the semantic Web

High-Level Object Oriented Genetic Programming in Logistic Warehouse Optimization

Disertační práce je zaměřena na optimalizaci průběhu pracovních operací v logistických skladech a distribučních centrech. Hlavním cílem je optimalizovat procesy plánování, rozvrhování a odbavování. Jelikož jde o problém patřící do třídy složitosti NP-težký, je výpočetně velmi náročné nalézt optimální řešení. Motivací pro řešení této práce je vyplnění pomyslné mezery mezi metodami zkoumanými na vědecké a akademické půdě a metodami používanými v produkčních komerčních prostředích. Jádro optimalizačního algoritmu je založeno na základě genetického programování řízeného bezkontextovou gramatikou. Hlavním přínosem této práce je a) navrhnout nový optimalizační algoritmus, který respektuje následující optimalizační podmínky: celkový čas zpracování, využití zdrojů, a zahlcení skladových uliček, které může nastat během zpracování úkolů, b) analyzovat historická data z provozu skladu a vyvinout sadu testovacích příkladů, které mohou sloužit jako referenční výsledky pro další výzkum, a dále c) pokusit se předčit stanovené referenční výsledky dosažené kvalifikovaným a trénovaným operačním manažerem jednoho z největších skladů ve střední Evropě.This work is focused on the work-flow optimization in logistic warehouses and distribution centers. The main aim is to optimize process planning, scheduling, and dispatching. The problem is quite accented in recent years. The problem is of NP hard class of problems and where is very computationally demanding to find an optimal solution. The main motivation for solving this problem is to fill the gap between the new optimization methods developed by researchers in academic world and the methods used in business world. The core of the optimization algorithm is built on the genetic programming driven by the context-free grammar. The main contribution of the thesis is a) to propose a new optimization algorithm which respects the makespan, the utilization, and the congestions of aisles which may occur, b) to analyze historical operational data from warehouse and to develop the set of benchmarks which could serve as the reference baseline results for further research, and c) to try outperform the baseline results set by the skilled and trained operational manager of the one of the biggest warehouses in the middle Europe.

The street food experiences of the local-guided tour in the meal-sharing economy: the case of Bangkok

Purpose This study aims to understand the components of the street food experiences of the local-guided tour in the meal-sharing economy based on the online reviews of tourists who experienced a meal-sharing activity with a local guide in Bangkok. Design/methodology/approach Based on the qualitative approach, this study involved a content analysis of 384 narratives on Withlocals. Findings The study identified five components that embrace the street food experience: a local guide’s attributes, perceived food authenticity, local culture, perceived hygiene or cleanliness. Results also revealed that the Thai street foods are unique and authentic and can reach this experience level through a local guide. Originality/value Although the importance of international travellers' street food experiences and the popularity of the meal-sharing economy platforms are rapidly growing, there is no study which had combined both of these phenomena together to date. It is the first attempt to reveal the components of street food experiences in a meal-sharing platform

Profile extrema for visualizing and quantifying uncertainties on excursion regions. Application to coastal flooding

We consider the problem of describing excursion sets of a real-valued function $f$, i.e. the set of inputs where $f$ is above a fixed threshold. Such regions are hard to visualize if the input space dimension, $d$, is higher than 2. For a given projection matrix from the input space to a lower dimensional (usually $1,2$) subspace, we introduce profile sup (inf) functions that associate to each point in the projection's image the sup (inf) of the function constrained over the pre-image of this point by the considered projection. Plots of profile extrema functions convey a simple, although intrinsically partial, visualization of the set. We consider expensive to evaluate functions where only a very limited number of evaluations, $n$, is available, e.g. $n<100d$, and we surrogate $f$ with a posterior quantity of a Gaussian process (GP) model. We first compute profile extrema functions for the posterior mean given $n$ evaluations of $f$. We quantify the uncertainty on such estimates by studying the distribution of GP profile extrema with posterior quasi-realizations obtained from an approximating process. We control such approximation with a bound inherited from the Borell-TIS inequality. The technique is applied to analytical functions ($d=2,3$) and to a $5$-dimensional coastal flooding test case for a site located on the Atlantic French coast. Here $f$ is a numerical model returning the area of flooded surface in the coastal region given some offshore conditions. Profile extrema functions allowed us to better understand which offshore conditions impact large flooding events

Industrial tourism as a factor of sustainability and competitiveness in operating industrial companies

This paper presents a systematic literature review (SLR) about industrial tourism and intends to show how this product can increase sustainability and competitiveness in operating industrial companies. It uses bibliometric analysis with data from 32 journal articles that address this topic. Through this sample of articles, we do not intend to generalize conclusions but rather to concretely identify factors of sustainability and competitiveness based on a set of scientific studies that met a very specific set of criteria. Industrial tourism is categorized as a form of tourism encompassing excursions to industrial locations spanning the spectrum of contemporary, historical, or prospective significance. This encompasses venues that have ceased their industrial operations, presently functioning industrial enterprises, and forthcoming industrial establishments. Additionally, it involves visits to other destinations with an industrial theme, such as industrial technology hubs, museums, industrial tourist routes, educational institutions with industrial programs, laboratories, and analogous venues. The focus of this article is to analyze the literature on industrial tourism from the point of view of active industrial companies, the so-called “living industry”, to identify how this type of tourism can contribute to enhancing these companies. Industrial tourism allows industrial companies to achieve environmental, social, and economic benefits and can be seen as a marketing tool and a promoter of innovation within companies.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Resources for Cycling-Interested Tourists in Copenhagen

The goal of this project was to develop material that aided in the creation of an accessible and dynamic compendium of cycling resources to make cycling more attractive and available to short-term tourists to Copenhagen. As part of the Danish Cyclists Federation\u27s effort to develop a comprehensive information gateway to encourage Denmark\u27s tourists to cycle, we collected and assessed information regarding bike rentals, safety, culture, routes, and guided tours, conducted interviews with cycling and tourism professionals, and researched Copenhagen tourist demographics. In addition to fully documenting our results in this report, our research helped us create a model information gateway with example content and recommendations for further improvement and development