Determinants of Satisfaction with the Tourist Destination

Achieving tourist satisfaction is one of the most important factors in terms of stewardship by the different actors in tourist destinations. Even though there is extensive literature that analyses tourist satisfaction, there is no final consensus regarding which variables influence its creation. This study proposes a model in which satisfaction is a consequence of the functional, hedonic and symbolic benefits. The hedonic benefit is considered a multidimensional construct. At the same time, we suggest that this triad of benefits is a consequence of cognitive perception and affective evaluation. For this study, a non-probability sample of 750 tourists was used, based on quotas distributed proportionally among the main Chilean tourist destinations. Once the psychometric properties of the scales used in the study were verified, a structural equation model was estimated and it was found that satisfaction is a consequence of the functional and hedonic, but not the symbolic benefit. It is confirmed as well that the functional, hedonic and symbolic benefits are a consequence of cognitive perception and affective evaluation

Antecedents of Satisfaction with Financial Services: Role of Perceived Benefits

This study seeks to confirm whether favourable affective evaluation of financial services can be a significant antecedent of perception of functional, hedonic, and symbolic benefits, and to show whether these benefits can influence customer satisfaction. The relationships were confirmed through confirmatory factor analysis (CFA), applied to a survey of 786 people, using nonprobabilistic quota sampling. The environment characterized by rational decision-making, the customer’s affective evaluation, is an explanatory factor of satisfaction. The functional, hedonic, and symbolic benefits play an important amplifying role connecting affective evaluation and customer satisfaction. Given the little attention paid by the specialized literature to the link between affective evaluation-benefits and satisfaction, it may be premature to offer final conclusions. The academic sector is provided with some bases to analyse the effect that the perception of the benefits may have on the relationship between the affective evaluation and the satisfaction of the client. For managers in the financial service sector, it provided some analytical instruments oriented to caring for the tangible and intangible characteristics that intervene in providing financial services to their customers. The originality of this study is that the perceived benefits act as antecedents to satisfaction and as a consequence of the affective evaluation

Homeomorphic Embedding for Online Termination of Symbolic Methods

Well-quasi orders in general, and homeomorphic embedding in particular, have gained popularity to ensure the termination of techniques for program analysis, specialisation, transformation, and verification. In this paper we survey and discuss this use of homeomorphic embedding and clarify the advantages of such an approach over one using well-founded orders. We also discuss various extensions of the homeomorphic embedding relation. We conclude with a study of homeomorphic embedding in the context of metaprogramming, presenting some new (positive and negative) results and open problems

Symbolic Model Checking and Safety Assessment of Altarica models

Altarica is a language used to describe critical systems. In this paper we present a novel approach to the analysis of Altarica models, based on a translation into an extended version of NuSMV. This approach opens up the possibility to carry out functional verification and safety assessment with symbolic techniques. An experimental evaluation on a set of industrial case studies demonstrates the advantages of the approach over currently available tools.

Specific "scientific" data structures, and their processing

Programming physicists use, as all programmers, arrays, lists, tuples, records, etc., and this requires some change in their thought patterns while converting their formulae into some code, since the "data structures" operated upon, while elaborating some theory and its consequences, are rather: power series and Pad\'e approximants, differential forms and other instances of differential algebras, functionals (for the variational calculus), trajectories (solutions of differential equations), Young diagrams and Feynman graphs, etc. Such data is often used in a [semi-]numerical setting, not necessarily "symbolic", appropriate for the computer algebra packages. Modules adapted to such data may be "just libraries", but often they become specific, embedded sub-languages, typically mapped into object-oriented frameworks, with overloaded mathematical operations. Here we present a functional approach to this philosophy. We show how the usage of Haskell datatypes and - fundamental for our tutorial - the application of lazy evaluation makes it possible to operate upon such data (in particular: the "infinite" sequences) in a natural and comfortable manner.Comment: In Proceedings DSL 2011, arXiv:1109.032

Applying Formal Methods to Networking: Theory, Techniques and Applications

Despite its great importance, modern network infrastructure is remarkable for the lack of rigor in its engineering. The Internet which began as a research experiment was never designed to handle the users and applications it hosts today. The lack of formalization of the Internet architecture meant limited abstractions and modularity, especially for the control and management planes, thus requiring for every new need a new protocol built from scratch. This led to an unwieldy ossified Internet architecture resistant to any attempts at formal verification, and an Internet culture where expediency and pragmatism are favored over formal correctness. Fortunately, recent work in the space of clean slate Internet design---especially, the software defined networking (SDN) paradigm---offers the Internet community another chance to develop the right kind of architecture and abstractions. This has also led to a great resurgence in interest of applying formal methods to specification, verification, and synthesis of networking protocols and applications. In this paper, we present a self-contained tutorial of the formidable amount of work that has been done in formal methods, and present a survey of its applications to networking.Comment: 30 pages, submitted to IEEE Communications Surveys and Tutorial