Profile of practice, travel behaviour and motivations for geocaching

Geocaching is a recreational sport activity considered as apostmodern treasure hunting game. Associated with the movement to distant places, the search for new landscapes, culture and adventure, geocaching is being integrated into the tourism industry. In spite of its growth and economic significance, few studieshave been developed to understand this sport tourism activity. Thus, this study was developed to understand the geocaching practice profile, geocaching travel behaviour and the motivations for the practice of geocaching, and to examine whether these variables are associated with the socio-demographic characteristics of geocachers.An online questionnaire survey was applied to geocachers living in Portugal, and 613 responses were obtained. The results show that geocaching is a recent sport activity in Portugal, whose motivations for practice are related to nature and escape, and that geocachers have a strong disposition to travel, highlighting the potential of geocaching for sport tourism. Statistical tests also revealed that socio-demographic characteristics are not associated with the geocaching practice profile and geocaching travel behaviour. However, the socio-demographic characteristics are associated with the motivations for the practice of geocaching, particularly when compared by sex, age and education level. Management and marketing implications for sport tourism operators and destinations are discussed.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Application-Specific Memory Subsystems

The disparity in performance between processors and main memories has led computer architects to incorporate large cache hierarchies in modern computers. These cache hierarchies are designed to be general-purpose in that they strive to provide the best possible performance across a wide range of applications. However, such a memory subsystem does not necessarily provide the best possible performance for a particular application. Although general-purpose memory subsystems are desirable when the work-load is unknown and the memory subsystem must remain fixed, when this is not the case a custom memory subsystem may be beneficial. For example, in an application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) or a field-programmable gate array (FPGA) designed to run a particular application, a custom memory subsystem optimized for that application would be desirable. In addition, when there are tunable parameters in the memory subsystem, it may make sense to change these parameters depending on the application being run. Such a situation arises today with FPGAs and, to a lesser extent, GPUs, and it is plausible that general-purpose computers will begin to support greater flexibility in the memory subsystem in the future. In this dissertation, we first show that it is possible to create application-specific memory subsystems that provide much better performance than a general-purpose memory subsystem. In addition, we show a way to discover such memory subsystems automatically using a superoptimization technique on memory address traces gathered from applications. This allows one to generate a custom memory subsystem with little effort. We next show that our memory subsystem superoptimization technique can be used to optimize for objectives other than performance. As an example, we show that it is possible to reduce the number of writes to the main memory, which can be useful for main memories with limited write durability, such as flash or Phase-Change Memory (PCM). Finally, we show how to superoptimize memory subsystems for streaming applications, which are a class of parallel applications. In particular, we show that, through the use of ScalaPipe, we can author and deploy streaming applications targeting FPGAs with superoptimized memory subsystems. ScalaPipe is a domain-specific language (DSL) embedded in the Scala programming language for generating streaming applications that can be implemented on CPUs and FPGAs. Using the ScalaPipe implementation, we are able to demonstrate actual performance improvements using the superoptimized memory subsystem with applications implemented in hardware

a influência do geocaching na escolha de um destino

O Geocaching é uma atividade de caça ao tesouro em ascensão por todo o mundo, principalmente desde o ano de 2000. Como jogo que motiva à deslocação,para zonas afastadas da zona de residência, e ao conhecimento de novos locais, foi-se integrando, de forma crescente, na indústria do turismo. O objetivo deste trabalho de investigação é caracterizar os praticantes de Geocaching, compreender o seu perfil de prática, os seus comportamentos de viagem, as suas motivações para a realização deste jogo e conhecer os atributos de destino mais apreciados por este tipo de viajantes. Para o efeito foi aplicado um inquérito por questionário, online, a uma amostra de geocachers nacionais, maiores de 18 anos (n=613). Os dados foram tratados através do programa IBM SPSS Statistics (versão 21). A amostra é constituída maioritariamente por jovens, do género masculino, com escolaridade ao nível do ensino superior, trabalhadores em grupos profissionais qualificados e com rendimentos acima da média nacional. Foi usado o método da análise fatorial para reduzir os 26 itens das motivações para a prática de Geocaching em cinco dimensões:“Evasão”, “Independência/Autorrealização”, “Desafio/Aventura”, “Cultura/Conhecimento” e “Sociabilidade” e; para reduzir os 21 itens dos atributos mde destino em quatro dimensões: “Ambiente natural e socio cultural”, “Ambiente autêntico e genuíno”, “Serviços de lazer e turismo” e “Geoatributos”. A segmentação dos geocachers, baseada nas motivações, resultou em cinco grupos de praticantes: “Praticantes naturalista patrimoniais”, “Praticantes solitários”, “Praticantes aventureiros”, “Praticantes culturais”, e os “Praticantes sociabilizadores”. Estes seis segmentos foram caracterizados em função das características dos praticantes que os compõem. Estes dados podem fornecer informações importantes para o processo de tomada de decisões por diversos atores dos territórios onde ocorrem as atividades de Geocaching

O geocaching como estratégia competitiva para o enoturismo da Bairrada

A crescente procura da região da Bairrada para eventos gastronómicos e vínicos, devido à sua história, cultura e etnologia, despoletou a necessidade da reinvenção de atividades de lazer associadas às tecnologias de informação, proporcionando associar o Geocaching à Enologia para uma maior divulgação da região e diferenciação da sua oferta. A região da Bairrada, mundialmente reconhecida pelos seus famosos e premiados vinhos, é também conhecida por integrar no seu território aquela que é considerada a capital nacional do espumante, Anadia. O estudo desenvolvido no âmbito da presente dissertação de mestrado visa analisar o potencial do Geocaching como estratégia competitiva para a dinamização do Enoturismo na região da Bairrada, concretamente em Anadia. Pretende-se em específico analisar as caraterísticas do Geocaching, identificando valores naturais e culturais/patrimoniais da região da Bairrada com maior potencial de dinamização desta modalidade, traçar o perfil dos geocachers e compreender as suas motivações para esta prática para, assim, procurar desenvolver novos produtos na região em estudo que vão de encontro ao perfil da procura. A metodologia adotada assentou no desenvolvimento de um estudo de caso, recorrendo a uma abordagem mista de recolha de dados qualitativos e quantitativos. Numa primeira fase, procedeu-se à pesquisa documental e realização de entrevistas semiestruturadas a atores-chave com conhecimentos aprofundados na área e, numa segunda fase, à aplicação de um inquérito por questionário a grupos de Geocaching na rede social do Facebook. Os resultados sugerem que o turismo nesta região pode beneficiar da definição de estratégias de desenvolvimento de novos produtos que aliem o turismo com o Geocaching, como é o caso da proposta de um novo itinerário de Geocaching, resultante do estudo empírico desenvolvido, e que passou pela colocação de caches em pontos estratégicos da região, com o intuito de promover e divulgar lugares de relevo para a enologia e viticultura da Região da Bairrada

Qualitative impact assessment of land management interventions on Ecosystem Services (“QEIA”). Report 3.7: Cultural Services

The focus of this project was to provide a rapid qualitative assessment of land management interventions on Ecosystem Services (ES) proposed for inclusion in Environmental Land Management (ELM) schemes. This involved a review of the current evidence base by ten expert teams drawn from the independent research community in a consistent series of ten Evidence Reviews. These reviews were undertaken rapidly at Defra’s request and together captured more than 2000 individual sources of evidence. These reviews were then used to inform an Integrated Assessment (IA) to provide a more accessible summary of these evidence reviews with a focus on capturing the actions with the greatest potential magnitude of change for the intended ES and their potential co-benefits and trade-offs across the Ecosystem Services and Ecosystem Services Indicators. The final IA table captured scores for 741 actions across 8 Themes, 33 ES and 53 ES-indicators. This produced a total possible matrix of 39,273 scores. It should be noted that this piece of work is just one element of the wider underpinning work Defra has commissioned to support the development of the ELM schemes. The project was carried out in two phases with the environmental and provisioning services commissioned in Phase 1 and cultural and regulatory services in a follow-on Phase 2. Due to the urgency of the need for these evidence reviews, there was insufficient time for systematic reviews and therefore the reviews relied on the knowledge of the team of the peer reviewed and grey literature with some rapid additional checking of recent reports and papers. This limitation of the review process was clearly explained and understood by Defra. The review presented here is one of the ten evidence reviews which informed the IA

Microcaches

We describe a radically new cache architecture and demonstrate that it offers a huge reduction in cache cost, size and power consumption whilst maintaining performance on a wide range of programs. We achieve this by giving the compiler control of the cache and by allowing regions of the cache to be allocated to specific program objects. Our approach has widespread application, especially in media processing and scientific computing

A Novel Coordinated Edge Caching with Request Filtration in Radio Access Network

Content caching at the base station of the Radio Access Network (RAN) is a way to reduce backhaul transmission and improve the quality of experience. So it is crucial to manage such massive microcaches to store the contents in a coordinated manner, in order to increase the overall mobile network capacity to support more number of requests. We achieve this goal in this paper with a novel caching scheme, which reduces the repeating traffic by request filtration and asynchronous multicast in a RAN. Request filtration can make the best use of the limited bandwidth and in turn ensure the good performance of the coordinated caching. Moreover, the storage at the mobile devices is also considered to be used to further reduce the backhaul traffic and improve the users’ experience. In addition, we drive the optimal cache division in this paper with the aim of reducing the average latency user perceived. The simulation results show that the proposed scheme outperforms existing algorithms