Exploring The Motives Of Religious Travel By Applying The Ahp Method – The Case Study Of Monastery Vujan (Serbia)

Religious tourism is considered as the oldest form of people’s travel. Thousands of years ago people travelled miles led by religious motives. Even though pilgrimage is older than most of the other tourism forms, research on the major motives for religious travel still occupies scientific attention. Vujan Monastery represents one of the main riddles among religious tourism researchers in Serbia. After the mysterious healing of Serbian Patriarch Pavle in 1946 who suffered from tuberculosis, this monastery became one of the most famous sacred places for orthodox Christians. The principle aim of this paper is to propose a new way for exploring and ranking the religious motivation using the Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) approach. In addition, the study proposes a set of motives – both religious and secular, which can be applied for exploring the motivations for visiting any sacred site. The method was applied to discover the main motives which drive people to visit Vujan Monastery, get their rankings, as well as their preferences between different types of secular and religious motives. The results indicated a strong preference for religious motives compared to secular motives of visit of this sacred site. On balance, the research provides us with a complete ranking structure, encompassing all analyzed motives of visit which show us a clear picture of the main motivation for visits to Vujan monastery

Strength and thermal stability of Cu-Al2O3 composite obtained by internal oxidation

The objective of the work is to study the effects of the high-energy milling on strengthening, thermal stability and electrical conductivity of Cu-Al2O3 composite. The prealloyed copper powders, atomized in inert gas and containing 3 wt. % Al, were milled up to 20 h in the planetary ball mill to oxidize in situ aluminium with oxygen from the air. Composite compacts were obtained by hot-pressing in an argon atmosphere at 800 degrees C for 3 h under the pressure of 35 MPa. The microstructural characterization was performed by the optical microscope, scanning electron microscope (SEM), transmission electron microscope (TEM) and X-ray diffraction analysis (XRD). The microhardness, electrical conductivity and density measurements were also carried out. The effect of internal oxidation and high-energy milling on strengthening of Cu-Al2O3 composite was significant, The increase of the microhardness of composite compacts (292 HV) is almost threefold comparing to compacts processed from the as-received Cu-3 wt. % Al powder (102 HV). The grain size of Cu-Al2O3 compacts processed from 5 and 20 h-milled powders was 75 and 45 nm, respectively. The small increase in the grain size and the small microhardness drop indicate the high thermal stability of Cu-Al2O3 composite during high-temperature exposure at 800 degrees C

Mortality after surgery in Europe: a 7 day cohort study

Background: Clinical outcomes after major surgery are poorly described at the national level. Evidence of heterogeneity between hospitals and health-care systems suggests potential to improve care for patients but this potential remains unconfirmed. The European Surgical Outcomes Study was an international study designed to assess outcomes after non-cardiac surgery in Europe.Methods: We did this 7 day cohort study between April 4 and April 11, 2011. We collected data describing consecutive patients aged 16 years and older undergoing inpatient non-cardiac surgery in 498 hospitals across 28 European nations. Patients were followed up for a maximum of 60 days. The primary endpoint was in-hospital mortality. Secondary outcome measures were duration of hospital stay and admission to critical care. We used χ² and Fisher’s exact tests to compare categorical variables and the t test or the Mann-Whitney U test to compare continuous variables. Significance was set at p<0·05. We constructed multilevel logistic regression models to adjust for the differences in mortality rates between countries.Findings: We included 46 539 patients, of whom 1855 (4%) died before hospital discharge. 3599 (8%) patients were admitted to critical care after surgery with a median length of stay of 1·2 days (IQR 0·9–3·6). 1358 (73%) patients who died were not admitted to critical care at any stage after surgery. Crude mortality rates varied widely between countries (from 1·2% [95% CI 0·0–3·0] for Iceland to 21·5% [16·9–26·2] for Latvia). After adjustment for confounding variables, important differences remained between countries when compared with the UK, the country with the largest dataset (OR range from 0·44 [95% CI 0·19 1·05; p=0·06] for Finland to 6·92 [2·37–20·27; p=0·0004] for Poland).Interpretation: The mortality rate for patients undergoing inpatient non-cardiac surgery was higher than anticipated. Variations in mortality between countries suggest the need for national and international strategies to improve care for this group of patients.Funding: European Society of Intensive Care Medicine, European Society of Anaesthesiology