Towards reviving post-Olympic Athens as a cultural destination

This paper examines the effects of global change on the status and qualities of the Greek national capital, Athens, focusing on how they affect the development of cultural tourism in the city. Although Athens constituted one of the most significant destinations for Greek tourism in the past, in recent years it started to weaken. Athens is characterised by a series of problems, among them are the degradation of its environment and quality of life and traffic congestion. However, in terms of tourism development, the Olympic Games helped in re-imaging the city and upgrading its infrastructure. This study based on semi-structured interviews with top officials reveals how global change has affected Athens’ socio-cultural/economic status, identity and image. Despite the tourism policy/planning responses to global changes, Athens’ tourism continues to decline leaving unexplored potential such as its rich cultural heritage, new multicultural identity and the New Acropolis Museum. The paper suggests that cultural elements of capital cities must be multidimensional including a variety of attractions and amenities. The use of cultural heritage assets needs to be in line with global developments in order for cities to effectively leverage heritage for cultural tourism

Certification of Librarians: An Unproven Demand

This paper examines whether certification of librarians is necessary to ensure high quality service. The paper explains the purpose of professional certification and provides a synopsis of the history of national librarian certification initiatives in the U.S. A literature review evaluates arguments supporting and opposing certification. Arguments in favor of certification are unconvincing and reveal certification supporters’ professional insecurities, failure to consider the certification bureaucracy that would be created, and lack of evidence to support their claims. Given these findings, the paper concludes that librarian certification is unnecessary. Library professionals are encouraged to take other proactive steps to expand their role, importance, and impact in the 21st century

Effective Pre-school and Primary Education 3-11 Project (EPPE 3-11): Final Report from the Primary Phase: Pre-school, School and Family Influences on children's development during Key Stage 2 (7-11)

The Effective Pre-school and Primary Education 3-11 project (EPPE 3-11) has studied pre-school and primary school experiences for a national sample of approximately 2,800 children in England between the ages of 3 and 11 years. This Research Brief summarises the key findings up to the end of primary school. It focuses on the relationships between child, family, home, pre-school and primary school characteristics and pupils\u27 subsequent cognitive (Reading/English and Mathematics) and social/behavioural outcomes (\u27Self-regulation\u27, \u27Pro-social\u27 behaviour, \u27Hyperacti vity\u27 and \u27Anti-social\u27 behaviour) at ages 10 and 11 in Years 5 and 6 of primary school. It also reports on associations between pupils\u27 outcomes and \u27other\u27 factors such as pupils\u27 self-perceptions and their views of primary school at age 10, pupil mobility, out of school hours learning and season of birth. In addition, it explores the school/classroom practices and processes associated with pupil outcomes for a sub-group of pupils in 125 Year 5 classes. These findings update and extend earlier analyses of pupils\u27 outcomes in pre-school and Key Stage 1 (see Sylva et al., 2004) and form the end point of the primary school phase of the research

Improving animal health on organic dairy farms: stakeholder views on policy options

Although ensuring good animal health is a stated aim of organic livestock farming and an important reason why consumers purchase organic products, the health states actually achieved are comparable to those in conventional farming. Unfortunately, there have been no studies to date that have assessed stakeholder views on different policy options for improving animal health on organic dairy farms. To address this deficit, stakeholder consultations were conducted in four European countries, involving 39 supply-chain stakeholders (farmers, advisors, veterinarians, inspectors, processors, and retailers). Stakeholders were encouraged to discuss different ways, including policy change, of improving organic health states. Acknowledging the need for further health improvements in organic dairy herds, stakeholders generally favoured establishing outcome-oriented animal health requirements as a way of achieving this. However, as a result of differing priorities for animal health improvement, there was disagreement on questions such as: who should be responsible for assessing animal health status on organic farms; and how to define and implement minimum health requirements. The results of the study suggest that future research must fully explore the opportunities and risks of different policy options and also suggest ways to overcome the divergence of stakeholders’ interests in public debates

Final Report from the Primary phase: pre-school, school and family influences on children’s development during Key Stage 2 (7-11)

The Effective Pre-school and Primary Education project (EPPE 3-11) is Europe’s largest longitudinal study, which uses multi-level modelling to investigate the effects of pre-school and primary education on pupils’ developmental outcomes. This report explores individual, family and home learning environment (HLE) influences on pupils’ developmental outcomes at age 11. The educational influences of primary school are also investigated, showing how the academic effectiveness of each primary school is related to pupils’ outcomes. Also covered are the associations between pupils’ outcomes and their self-perceptions and views of school at age 10, as well as the impact of other factors such as pupil mobility, season of birth and out of school learning activities

Global-Scale Resource Survey and Performance Monitoring of Public OGC Web Map Services

One of the most widely-implemented service standards provided by the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) to the user community is the Web Map Service (WMS). WMS is widely employed globally, but there is limited knowledge of the global distribution, adoption status or the service quality of these online WMS resources. To fill this void, we investigated global WMSs resources and performed distributed performance monitoring of these services. This paper explicates a distributed monitoring framework that was used to monitor 46,296 WMSs continuously for over one year and a crawling method to discover these WMSs. We analyzed server locations, provider types, themes, the spatiotemporal coverage of map layers and the service versions for 41,703 valid WMSs. Furthermore, we appraised the stability and performance of basic operations for 1210 selected WMSs (i.e., GetCapabilities and GetMap). We discuss the major reasons for request errors and performance issues, as well as the relationship between service response times and the spatiotemporal distribution of client monitoring sites. This paper will help service providers, end users and developers of standards to grasp the status of global WMS resources, as well as to understand the adoption status of OGC standards. The conclusions drawn in this paper can benefit geospatial resource discovery, service performance evaluation and guide service performance improvements.Comment: 24 pages; 15 figure

Reflections on becoming a teacher and the challenges of teacher education

In this lecture, the context and conditions of becoming a teacher from the time of being selected into the programme, through the process of training and being retained to teach are discussed within the framework of Teacher Education in Nigeria. First, the concepts and the history of teacher education are examined. Then, some critical issues as well as my personal research efforts on teacher education are discussed. Finally, recommendations for meeting the challenges of Teacher Education in Nigeria are made

Barriers to ISO 9001 Implementation in Moroccan Organizations: Empirical Study

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to explore obstacles to ISO 9001 quality management system implementation in Moroccan firms. Design/methodology/approach: A questionnaire survey has been conducted among a heterogeneous sample of 200 organizations, operating in different sectors in Morocco, yielding a response rate of 57.5%. The authors have studied barriers to quality initiatives in general and obstacles to QMS implementation in particular through an extensive literature review. Questions related to profiles of respondents, reasons of seeking certification, external consultancy and barriers to ISO 9001 implementation experienced by surveyed organizations. For the purpose of this study, authors considered three categories of quality inhibiting factors: organizational, technical and costs related barriers. Findings: Results indicate that surveyed companies sought ISO 9001 certification mainly for marketing reasons and experienced many difficulties during the implementation process. Barriers reported by respondents were mostly organizational. Resistance to change headed the list according to participants’ opinion. Also, findings highlighted the prominence of bureaucracy and poor interdependence between departments in organizations. Lack of communication, poor top management commitment and insufficient trainings were also ascertained to be obstacles to QMS implementation in Morocco. Originality/value: Earlier studies were led by different researchers in different countries about barriers to quality initiatives in general and to ISO 9001 implementation in particular. Few of those studies were conducted in Arab speaking countries but no research has been carried in Morocco. This study on obstacles to QMS implementation in Morocco will help in completing the jigsaw of difficulties faced by organizations worldwide when preparing to ISO 9001 certification. Research limitations/implications: This research is limited by the geographic context of the study Morocco, although results can be extrapolated to Arab speaking countries in general. Practical implications: The findings of this paper provide Moroccan managers with a practical understanding of the factors that are likely to obstruct ISO 9001 QMS implementation. Managers should overcome these barriers to achieve a successful implementation and higher QMS performance.Peer Reviewe

The Hierarchic treatment of marine ecological information from spatial networks of benthic platforms

Measuring biodiversity simultaneously in different locations, at different temporal scales, and over wide spatial scales is of strategic importance for the improvement of our understanding of the functioning of marine ecosystems and for the conservation of their biodiversity. Monitoring networks of cabled observatories, along with other docked autonomous systems (e.g., Remotely Operated Vehicles [ROVs], Autonomous Underwater Vehicles [AUVs], and crawlers), are being conceived and established at a spatial scale capable of tracking energy fluxes across benthic and pelagic compartments, as well as across geographic ecotones. At the same time, optoacoustic imaging is sustaining an unprecedented expansion in marine ecological monitoring, enabling the acquisition of new biological and environmental data at an appropriate spatiotemporal scale. At this stage, one of the main problems for an effective application of these technologies is the processing, storage, and treatment of the acquired complex ecological information. Here, we provide a conceptual overview on the technological developments in the multiparametric generation, storage, and automated hierarchic treatment of biological and environmental information required to capture the spatiotemporal complexity of a marine ecosystem. In doing so, we present a pipeline of ecological data acquisition and processing in different steps and prone to automation. We also give an example of population biomass, community richness and biodiversity data computation (as indicators for ecosystem functionality) with an Internet Operated Vehicle (a mobile crawler). Finally, we discuss the software requirements for that automated data processing at the level of cyber-infrastructures with sensor calibration and control, data banking, and ingestion into large data portals.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version