Social media and tourism : a wishful relationship

For decades hospitality firms were used to domain the communication process. Thematic social network sites such as TripAdvisor became very important tools for travelers when deciding which hotels to book, and what restaurants and tourist attractions to visit, been a visible part of tourism communication evolution. Evidence suggests that e-WOM serves as a primary information source when tourists choose destinations, hotels, and other experiences. The role and use of social media in tourists’ decision making has been widely discuss in tourism and hospitality research, especially in the research phase of the tourist’ travel planning process. With the wide adoption of social media the influence of customers’ word-of-mouth increased and influences not only the research phase, but the repetition and overall customers’ experiences. To answer these questions a model assessing e-wom was developed and data was gathering from TripAdvisor regarding customer’s opinion in restaurant experiences. The results found establish the bases for understanding tourists’ engagement level and profiles.N/

A servant leadership model for the church of Brazil

https://place.asburyseminary.edu/ecommonsatsdissertations/1498/thumbnail.jp

Dashboard interativa do estado global do ATLASCAR2

The transportation industry has deployed new efforts to make our driving experience safer and more comfortable. Nowadays, one developed solution points to dashboards. These devices are an Advanced Driver-Assistance System that allows the users to check information regarding the vehicle that transports them through a dynamic display. Within the ATLAS project, the present dissertation aims to create a dashboard for the ATLASCAR2. Given this need, a new power solution for the central process unit responsible for booting all external installed equipment was installed first. The electric board already in place presented some limitations. Therefore, a new one was installed and placed on the vehicle’s trunk. Next, the car was equipped with an inverter that withdraws energy from the vehicle’s lead battery to feed the computer. Then, an information network built upon a ROS architecture had to be created to feed information from the car’s in-built systems to the dashboard display. The Controller Area Network bus of the vehicle was used for this purpose. This work presents the developed solution and all features embedded in it. In addition, a field test was performed, which helped to evaluate the new solution’s functionality.A indústria automóvel tem desenvolvido inúmeros esforços para tentar tornar a nossa experiência de condução mais segura e confortável. Atualmente, uma das soluções desenvolvidas são ”dashboards”. Estes dispositivos são Sistemas Avançados de Assistência ao Condutor que permitem aos utilizadores obterem todas as informações relativas ao estado do veículo que os transporta através de um ”display” dinâmico. No âmbito do projeto ATLAS, esta dissertação tem como objetivo criar uma dashboard para o ATLASCAR2. Tendo em vista este projeto, primeiro foi instalada uma nova solução de energia para a unidade central de processamento do veículo, responsável pelo funcionamento dos equipamentos instalados. O antigo quadro elétrico do carro apresentava algumas limitações. Por essa razão, foi instalado um novo quadro e colocado no porta-malas do veículo. Em seguida, o ATLASCAR2 foi equipado com um inversor que retira energia da bateria de chumbo do veículo para alimentar o computador. Numa segunda fase, foi criada uma nova rede de informação baseada numa arquitetura ROS que fornece o estado dos sistemas integrados no carro ao display da dashboard. O barramento Controller Area Network do veículo foi utilizado para este fim. Este trabalho apresenta a solução desenvolvida e todas as funcionalidades nela incorporada. Por fim. foi realizado um teste que auxiliou na avaliação da usabilidade da nova solução.Mestrado em Engenharia Mecânic

Essays in Housing Markets and Finance

In my research, I have tried to integrate spatial heterogeneity into new asset pricing theories of housing, emphasizing that the value of a house as an investment also depends on its location. In particular, I apply asset pricing tools and theory to the study of housing prices in a spatial framework, thereby identifying and quantifying sources of risk and returns and how they interact with location in housing markets. In the first chapter of my thesis, I focus on documenting stylized facts about the spatial distribution of returns to housing. In the second and third chapters of my thesis, I explore the drivers of housing returns by focusing on the roles of idiosyncratic housing price risk and liquidity. Finally, I examine how systematic regional differences in housing risk explain the growing regional gap in housing prices. In “Superstar Returns? Spatial Heterogeneity in Returns to Housing”, which is co- authored with Moritz Schularick, Martin Dohmen, and Sebastian Kohl, we document the spatial distribution of total returns to housing and provide supporting evidence for its drivers. To conduct this analysis, we have assembled a new long run city-level dataset covering annual house prices and rents in twenty-seven prominent (”superstar”) cities across fifteen OECD countries over the past 150 years. Our data reveals that, over the long run, superstar cities have experienced lower total returns on housing in comparison to other regions within the same country. While house prices have grown more rapidly in these larger cities, the rental returns are significantly higher in more remote locations, resulting in overall higher returns in other parts of the country. We show that our key finding can be explained within a standard asset pricing framework, where excess returns outside large cities serve as compensation for higher risk. We then test this mechanism empirically and find that housing investments are indeed riskier outside large cities. In the second chapter of my thesis, I use detailed transaction-level data to quantify the extent to which idiosyncratic risk impacts housing prices and returns. In Price Uncertainty and Returns to Housing, I present empirical evidence that residential properties with higher idiosyncratic price risk are, on average, sold at lower prices and yield higher total returns. I show that this result can be rationalized within a bargaining model, in which a risk-averse and non-diversified buyer faces future sales price uncertainty. Finally, I present empirical evidence that houses with higher idiosyncratic risk undergo a more uncertain trading process, thereby exposing their buyers to greater liquidity risk. In the third chapter of my thesis I explore in more depth the relation between liquidity, location and housing prices. In Urban Spatial Distribution of Housing Liquidity, which is co-authored with Mark Toth and Jonas Zdrzalek, we examine how location, liquidity and prices interact in housing markets. By combining real estate online listings data with transaction data, we introduce a novel dataset that pro- vides transaction-level measures of liquidity in large German cities over the past decade. Empirically, we find that both housing liquidity and prices decrease with distance to the city center. To explain our empirical findings, we build a spatial search model of a housing market within a monocentric city. We show qualitatively and quantitatively that increasing travel costs to the city center can explain the joint urban spatial distribution of prices and liquidity. Using our calibrated model, we structurally estimate a spatial liquidity premium gradient. In the fourth and final chapter of my thesis, I analyse the consequences of heterogeneity in housing risk across regions. In “Interest Rates and the Spatial Polarisation of Housing Markets”, which is co-authored with Moritz Schularick, Martin Dohmen, and Sebastian Kohl, we reexamine the causes of regional housing price inequality. We build a spatial housing valuation model to demonstrate how a fall in real interest rates at the national level disproportionately affects the valuation of housing in regions with lower housing risk

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly: Food Quality in UGC

AbstractUser-generated content diffusion on social networks has triggered an explosive attention in various disciplines. Within tourism activities, social media has growth in the past years rapidly through regular social network sites, or thematic social network sites such as TripAdvisor. The present study aims to provide a deeper insight into this matter, having as starting point the thought that clients posts good or bad reviews, regarding to different aspects of their experience; and, that a client who has a good experience in restaurant tends to revisit it and recommended it to friends, as opposite if the experience was bad they tell this to friend and recommend not visit. To assess customers’ reviews of restaurants, data was gathered on TripAdvisor of Top 10 restaurants in two island context Azores and Hawaii. All the comments were studied carefully and categorized in set of dimensions that measured how the entirety of a meal was perceived: sight, hearing, smell, taste and touch. As the results showed, food is the most decisive variable adopted in the UGC. Additionally, our findings support the notion that the overall quality of the meal reflects a lot more than flavor or taste of the food. To these elements, we need to add visual effect, freshness of the ingredients, and healthiness of the meal, among others as main contents spread on SNS. Thus, results reinforce the literature relative to the social media and ads to the knowledge of the contents created and shared by tourists relative to restaurant experience as a whole

Plasma membrane-specific interactome analysis reveals calpain 1 as a druggable modulator of rescued Phe508del-CFTR cell surface stability

Cystic fibrosis (CF) is a genetic disease caused by mutations in the gene encoding CF transmembrane conductance regulator (CFTR), a chloride channel normally expressed at the surface of epithelial cells. The most frequent mutation, resulting in Phe-508 deletion, causes CFTR misfolding and its premature degradation. Low temperature or pharmacological correctors can partly rescue the Phe508del-CFTR processing defect and enhance trafficking of this channel variant to the plasma membrane (PM). Nevertheless, the rescued channels have an increased endocytosis rate, being quickly removed from the PM by the peripheral protein quality-control pathway. We previously reported that rescued Phe508del-CFTR (rPhe508del) can be retained at the cell surface by stimulating signaling pathways that coax the adaptor molecule ezrin (EZR) to tether rPhe508del–Na+/H+-exchange regulatory factor-1 (NHERF1) complexes to the actin cytoskeleton, thereby averting the rapid internalization of this channel variant. However, the molecular basis for why rPhe508del fails to recruit active EZR to the PM remains elusive. Here, using a proteomics approach, we characterized and compared the core components of wt-CFTR– or rPhe508del–containing macromolecular complexes at the surface of human bronchial epithelial cells. We identified calpain 1 (CAPN1) as an exclusive rPhe508del interactor that prevents active EZR recruitment, impairs rPhe508del anchoring to actin, and reduces its stability in the PM. We show that either CAPN1 downregulation or its chemical inhibition dramatically improves the functional rescue of Phe508del-CFTR in airway cells. These observations suggest that CAPN1 constitutes an attractive target for pharmacological intervention, as part of CF combination therapies restoring Phe508del-CFTR function.This work was supported by a center grant UID/MULTI/04046/2019 to BioISI and project PTDC/BIA-CEL/28408/2017 and IF2012 to PM, both from FCT, Portugal. AMM was recipient of fellowship SFRH/BD/52490/2014 from BioSYS PhD programme PD65-2012, and PB of fellowship SFRH/BPD/94322/2013.N/

Centrality anomalies in complex networks as a result of model over-simplification

Tremendous advances have been made in our understanding of the properties and evolution of complex networks. These advances were initially driven by information-poor empirical networks and theoretical analysis of unweighted and undirected graphs. Recently, information-rich empirical data complex networks supported the development of more sophisticated models that include edge directionality and weight properties, and multiple layers. Many studies still focus on unweighted undirected description of networks, prompting an essential question: how to identify when a model is simpler than it must be? Here, we argue that the presence of centrality anomalies in complex networks is a result of model over-simplification. Specifically, we investigate the well-known anomaly in betweenness centrality for transportation networks, according to which highly connected nodes are not necessarily the most central. Using a broad class of network models with weights and spatial constraints and four large data sets of transportation networks, we show that the unweighted projection of the structure of these networks can exhibit a significant fraction of anomalous nodes compared to a random null model. However, the weighted projection of these networks, compared with an appropriated null model, significantly reduces the fraction of anomalies observed, suggesting that centrality anomalies are a symptom of model over-simplification. Because lack of information-rich data is a common challenge when dealing with complex networks and can cause anomalies that misestimate the role of nodes in the system, we argue that sufficiently sophisticated models be used when anomalies are detected.Comment: 14 pages, including 9 figures. APS style. Accepted for publication in New Journal of Physic

Determinants of Loyalty Intention in Portuguese Mobile Market

Copyright © 2011, IGI Global. Copying or distributing in print or electronic forms without written permission of IGI Global is prohibited.Our work conceptualizes and highlights the determinants of customers’ loyalty in the Portuguese mobile market. We raise questions about the interrelationships of the cost and values dimensions and the consequences of these relationships on customer satisfaction and trust and consequently loyalty among different operators, addressing some recent models. By organizing and synthesizing the major research streams and tests empirically a conceptual framework through a SEM, with data gather in a survey of Portuguese clients, the present study advances knowledge on the nature of the relative importance of different components of loyalty to mobile communications operators. Some useful preliminary insights were produced related to customers’ retention process in primary mobile operator, which appears strongly related to price/quality, followed by the emotional connection to the operator staff and others clients. Nonetheless, a considerable number of issues were left for future research, including the possibility of extending the investigation to other countries