Protests and tourism crises. A social movement approach to causality

Research into tourism crises to date has largely focused on management and resolution applications. However, theoretical analyses of these crises also need to focus on exogenous economic and sociopolitical events that produce such crises rather than only on ways to manage or resolve them. This study analysed social movements – in particular protests involving conflict – as a causal agent of tourism crises. The research highlighted the characteristics of violent social movements that are important to defining the scope and magnitude of tourism crises, differentiating these movements’ effects from those of other causal agents. Social movements have a multiplier effect, recurrence potential and associations with uncertainty and high-risk issues, which are factors that can significantly shape the severity of tourism crises. Based on a social movement approach, these results were drawn from an analysis of recent teachers’ protests and their effects on the tourism industry in a Mexican destination

Destination image and crime in Mexico: An analysis of foreign government travel advice

Destination image has been recognised as an influential component of travel decision processes. Although organic sources of information play an important role in shaping destination image, researchers have often ignored the types of sources and the information they deliver. In particular, official websites where government travel advice is given, especially in relation to crime, have been widely excluded from scholarly research. This paper analyses the relationship between crime-related travel advice given by foreign governments and Mexicos destination image. Qualitative content analysis of official websites from the US, Canada, the UK and Spain reveals that the travel advice given relates largely to the violence and insecurity that Mexico is currently experiencing. No advisory in effect, Exercise caution and Defer non-essential travel are messages commonly found in the governments travel advice about Mexico

Construcciones socioculturales de la playa nudista. Entre lo liminar y el homoerotismo

A partir de la función liminar del turismo y del homoerotismo como marco de análisis se caracterizan las diversas construcciones socioculturales de una playa nudista en el Pacífico sur deMéxico. El estudio revela que las interacciones entre visitantes varones a la playa dan lugar a significados y prácticas diversos que definen colectivamente el uso del espacio turístico-recreativo. La playa nudista es depositaria de múltiples construcciones definidas en lo particular por la cultura propia de los actores sociales participantes. Se concluye que la construcción de la playa nudista es altamente compleja, toda vez que en ella convergen lo liminar, el homoerotismo y la multiculturalidad

Tourist stereotypes and servers’ attitudes: a combined theoretical approach

Local attitudes towards tourism comprise one of the most researched topics in tourism. However, researchers still need to examine attitudes of specific local groups, acknowledge tourist stereotypes as an influential factor and test different theoretical approaches, to develop a broader understanding and explanation of attitudes. Based on an emic perspective, this study analysed servers’ stereotypes of a specific group of tourists – locally known as chilangos – and associated attitudes in a Mexican resort. By adopting a combined theoretical approach drawn from social exchange theory and integrated threat theory, this study’s results reveal that individuals who depend economically on tourism do not always have positive attitudes and that negative stereotypes on their own are not the strongest predictors of attitudes. By combining both theories’ postulations, the findings show that perceived economic benefits and personal positive contact together account for positive attitudes but that these factors are significantly counterbalanced by negative tourist stereotypes. The practical and theoretical implications of these findings are discussed

Exploring nudist festival attendance at a Mexican beach: a tourist motivation approach

Artículo de investigación en revista indizadaMotivations to attend nudist festivals and their association with tourist motivation factors have been largely unexplored. Based on qualitative interviews with nudist tourists, this study explored these individuals’ motivations for attending a nudist festival in Mexico. The findings reveal a complex amalgamation of both festival and tourism motivation constructs. Based on the escape-seeking dichotomy and push-pull framework, data analyses revealed that the interpersonal festival motivations are more significant than personal factors are and the pull factors of the event-hosting destination can dominate over festival factors. The findings have important practical implications for nudism festival organisers

The Historical Development of Supermassive Black Holes and Their Formation in the Early Universe

Black holes are a prediction of Einstein’s theory of gravity, foreshadowed by the hypothesis of John Mitchel who first suggested the theoretical scenario for an object with strong gravitational pull where light could not escape it. The simplest kind of black hole was discovered by Karl Schwarzschild using Einstein’s field equations, and Oppenheimer was one of the first men to consider the physical existence of black holes. The subject gained life, but the newly discovered material puzzled and challenged the scientific community to wonder how a black hole is formed. Moreover, In 1960 John Lynden bell proposed that a black hole a billion times the size of the sun (supermassive black hole – SMBHs), existed in the center of the Milky Way, which caused more questions to arise, and answers to reveal without any relevant and concise evidence support. Different explanations about how SMBHs are formed and can reach massive sizes of billions times the sun have been proposed. However, recent research and discovery of quasars has shown that SMBH have been around in earlier stages of the universe, and how they gained so much mass in such a short time remains an open field of research. Yet, some simulations have been tested in order to explain the formation of this massive objects, and organize the stages and origins of SMBHs

Performance comparison of deep learning models applied for satellite image classification

Satellite images classification is important for applications that involve the distribution of the human activities. Such distribution helps the governments to determine the best places to expand cities avoiding problems related to natural disasters or legal constrains. Currently, existing few agencies in charge of image classification and the area to cover is enormous. Therefor an automation of this process is necessary for this task otherwise, it will take an eternity to perform this task manually. On the other hand, detection and classification algorithms used before Machine Learning (ML) have not shown good result classifying this specific sort of images. However, latest approaches for image classification using Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) have shown quite accurate results. In this research, we analyses the performance in four different CNN architectures used for satellite image classification. We use a dataset provided in 2017 by IARPA names IARPA fMoW. It contains more than two thousand images belonging to 62 classes already separated in train and validation. The solution was implemented in Python using the Keras and Tensorflow libraries. The research was divided in two parts: Hyperparameters optimization and architectures results evaluation. For the first part we used only seven classes from a sample of the dataset (The sample is three hundred times smaller than the complete dataset). The architectures are trained using these seven classes of this small dataset to determine the best hyperparameters. After having selected the hyperparameters the architectures are trained with the complete sample. The evaluation is based on visual examination with the help of the tool Tensorboard and SKLearn metrics. All the architectures showed accuracies near to 90% over the training dataset sample. The architecture with the best accuracy result was Resnet-152 with one accuracy of 99% over the training dataset Sample. The accuracy over the validation dataset will become important after training the architectures with the complete dataset. The training with the complete dataset will be performed in future works.ITESO, A. C

Construcciones sociales del espacio turístico recreativo. Un estudio interpretativo sobre las prácticas recreativas en el Parque Nacional Molino de Flores Nezahualcóyotl, México

Como cualquier otro espacio, los espacios turístico-recreativos se construyen socialmente, y dichas construcciones se generan en función de los significados, las prácticas e interacciones de quienes los visitan, principalmente. Desde esta premisa, este trabajo tiene como objetivo conocer las construcciones sociales, turísticas y recreativas de un destino en particular mediante la observación y el análisis de la experiencia, las prácticas y las interacciones sociales de sus visitantes. Los hallazgos se discuten a partir de un caso de estudio en el Parque Nacional Molino de Flores Nezahualcóyotl, México. A partir de las interacciones con el lugar y con los otros, el lugar es construido por los visitantes como un espacio de recreación familiar y de observación cultural, principalmente