The Metropolitan Travel Survey Archive: A Case Study in Archiving

This paper summarizes research on standards for archiving travel survey data. It then describes some of the efforts at organizing data and developing metadata. The development of metadata standards used for documenting datasets using DDI (Data Documentation Initiative) for DTD (Document Type Definitions) is described. A case, applying these approaches to a US Metropolitan Travel Survey Archive is presented. The Metropolitan Travel Survey Archive, housed at the University of Minnesota, now contains over 60 surveys from almost 30 metropolitan areas. The paper concludes with some recommendations for archiving data.Travel Surveys, Activity Surveys, Archiving

Discovery of novel biomarkers and phenotypes by semantic technologies.

Biomarkers and target-specific phenotypes are important to targeted drug design and individualized medicine, thus constituting an important aspect of modern pharmaceutical research and development. More and more, the discovery of relevant biomarkers is aided by in silico techniques based on applying data mining and computational chemistry on large molecular databases. However, there is an even larger source of valuable information available that can potentially be tapped for such discoveries: repositories constituted by research documents

Determinants of information behaviour and information literacy related to healthy eating among Internet users in five European countries

Introduction. This study investigates how Europeans seek information related to healthy eating, what determines their information seeking and whether any problems are encountered in doing so. Method. A survey was administered through computer-assisted on-line web-interviewing. Respondents were grouped by age and sex (n=3003, age + 16) in Belgium, Denmark, Italy, Poland, and the UK. Analysis. Descriptive statistics and regression analysis were used to analyse the influence of social, demographic, psychological and economic characteristics on the information seeking of the respondents. Results. Nearly half of those surveyed do not know where to look for information on healthy diets. Men, less well educated, poorer and sicker person know less about where to look for such information and are less likely to attempt finding it. Most of the respondents searching for information on the Internet use Google as a search tool. Conclusions. Individual and environmental factors affect information behaviour and should be taken into account in public campaigns aimed at changing eating habits of the population to increase their effectiveness. More emphasis should be placed on raising health information literacy of the information-poor, men, the uneducated, and the economically disadvantaged

Digital Media and Youth: Unparalleled Opportunity and Unprecedented Responsibility

Part of the Volume on Digital Media, Youth, and Credibility This chapter argues that understanding credibility is particularly complex -- and consequential -- in the digital media environment, especially for youth audiences, who have both advantages and disadvantages due to their relationship with contemporary technologies and their life experience. The chapter explains what is, and what is not, new about credibility in the context of digital media, and discusses the major thrusts of current credibility concerns for scholars, educators, and youth

Characterizing and Evaluating Users' Information Seeking Behavior in Social Tagging Systems

Social tagging systems in the Web 2.0 era present an innovative information seeking environment succeeding the library and traditional Web. The primary goals of this study were to, in this particular context: (1) identify the general information seeking strategies adopted by users and determine their effectiveness; (2) reveals the characteristics of the users who prefer different strategies; and (3) identify the specific traits of users' information seeking paths and understand factors shaping them. A representative social tagging system, Douban (http://www.douban.com/) was chosen as the research setting in order to generate empirical findings.Based on the mixed methods research design, this study consists of a quantitative phase and a qualitative phase. The former firstly involved a clickstream data analysis of 20 million clickstream records requested from Douban at the footprint, movement, and track levels. Limited to studying physical behavior, it was complemented by an online survey which captured Douban users' background information from various aspects. In the subsequent qualitative phase, a focus group gathered a number of experienced Douban users to help interpret the quantitative results.Major findings of this study show that: (1) the general strategies include encountering, browsing by resource, browsing by tag, browsing by user/group, searching, and monitoring by user/group; (2) while browsing by resource is the most popular strategy, browsing by tag is the most effective one; (3) users preferring different strategies do not have significantly different characteristics; and (4) on users' information seeking paths these exist two resource viewing patterns - continuous and sporadic, and two resource collecting patterns - lagged and instant, and they can be attributed to user, task, and system factors.A model was developed to illustrate the strategic and tactic layers of users' information seeking behavior in social tagging systems. It offers a deep insight into the behavioral changes brought about by this new environment as compared to the Web in general. This model can serve as the theoretical base for designing user-oriented information seeking interfaces for social tagging systems so that the general strategies and specific tactics will be accommodated efficiently

What Drives Car Attitudes: An Analysis of How Demographics and Environmental Views Relate to Car Attitudes

Successfully marketing new, clean, car technologies to consumers requires an advertising strategy that fits consumers’ priorities and attitudes towards cars. We created a survey to study how attitudes towards cars are associated with demographics and environmental views. Our study examined car preferences and environmental concerns of a sample of Gettysburg College students in comparison to a national sample obtained from Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. Overall, we concluded that environmental beliefs are a significantly better prediction of car behaviors than demographics. We found that on average people would pay more for a car with a higher fuel economy, but not enough to cover the higher price of newer, cleaner technologies, such as hybrid cars. Gettysburg College students’ environmental concern scores were significantly higher on average than that of the general American population. Survey respondents from both samples supported devoting more research and resources to hybrid, electric, and biofuel technologies. However, in regards to their personal purchases they ranked safety and other qualities of the car as higher priorities than greenhouse gas emissions or fuel economy. According to our results, marketing electric cars as safe and reliable is a better strategy than marketing their high fuel economy

The Effect of Digital Marketing Tools on Promoting Ethiopian Tourism Sector: A Case of Bale Mountain National Park, Bale Zone

The purpose of this study is to analyze the effects of digital marketing tools in promoting Ethiopian tourism in case of bale zone tourism destination specifically on BMNP. Interview and questionnaire were the main data gathering tools. And the target population of the study was the tourists (both foreign and domestic) and 165 respondents were selected with convenience sampling methods. From the mean score value of the tourist’s information source, Search engines became the most used information source to come to Ethiopia followed by Social Media. Mobile advertising was found out to be the last preference of the tourists to serve as tourist information source. Bale mountain national park Digital marketing may succeed more if it considers user needs as a top priority by identifying its target group. The destinations must also focus on the demographic differences of the tourists so as to arrange digital promotions that fit to the needs and requirements of these different segments of international tourists. Finally, Digital marketing has no boundaries. Bale mountain national park can use any devices such as smartphones, tablets, laptops, televisions, games, digital billboards, and media such as social media, SEO (search engine optimization), videos, content, e-mail and lot more to promote the park as a tourist destination. Keywords: Marketing, promotion, tourism, Digital tool DOI: 10.7176/JTHS/63-01 Publication date: January 31st 2023

Empirical Analysis of Entrepreneurial Development and Implication for Nigerian Economic Growth

The study seeks to identify the contributions of entrepreneurial development to economic growth; identify the challenges to entrepreneurial development in Nigeria and to determine the extent of entrepreneurship development in Nigeria. The study was carried out in 6 small and medium scale enterprises in Asaba, Delta state. The study had population size of 90 out which a sample size of 73 was realised using Taro Yamane’s formula at 5% error tolerance and 95% level of confidence. Instrument used for data collection was primarily questionnaire and interview. The total number of 78 copies of the questionnaire were distributed while 65 copies were returned. The descriptive research design was adopted for the study. The three hypotheses were tested using chi square statistical tools. The findings indicate that Job creation and increase in national income are the contributions of Entrepreneurial development to economic growth and that  lack of strong patent law and lack of knowledge of entrepreneurship in the basic science and technology constitute  the challenges to entrepreneurial development .the extent of entrepreneurial development in Nigeria is high. The study however, recommends that there is need to change the mind set of young people to embrace self-employed job rather than waiting for non-existing government job and there is need for government to set up workshops where young and old entrepreneurs will  can come  and  acquire new skills needed for their businesses Keywords: key words, Entrepreneurial development, Job creation, SMEs Economic growt