“Ship-space” – Managing Talent on Cruise Ships: A Hospitality Perspective

Academic rigour in the area of cruise ship labour is relatively scarce, with little known of the life / work of cruise ship workers and how they make sense of this semi-closed industry. Through the theory of identity, this exploratory study seeks to investigate the strategies that frontline hospitality workers are able to negotiate and attach meaning to this consumptive work experience. Twenty in-depth qualitative interviews were undertaken with front line hospitality staff (waiters and pursers) and analysed thematically. The findings from the interviews uncovered five main themes which gave some insight into the work and lives of cruise ship workers – this is called ‘Ship-Space’. Ship-space is a term used to describe the attributes that workers related to in order to make sense of themselves in the cruise ship environment. In an under-researched industry, it is hopeful investigations such as this one can make valuable insights for employers, recruiting agencies and potential seafarer

Why tourists thirst for authenticity – and how they can find it

It has been a bumper year for tourists for the small village of Kidlington in Oxfordshire, England. Those on national, international and social media were left scratching their heads, when an unexpected flood of Chinese tourists descended on the town. Groups of curious travellers could be seen roaming down residential streets, taking pictures with locals and even entering garden

An Applied Geographic Information Systems and Science Course in R

This paper presents a masters level geographic information systems and science course (CASA0005) developed by the Bartlett Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA), University College London (UCL). CASA0005 is a compulsory module for both MSc programs within the department, running annually in the autumn term with between 100 and 150 enrolled students. During the summer of 2019 the module was transformed from static practicals with some legacy content related to commercial software to an online interactive book primarily for the open source R data science programming language written using the Bookdown package (Xie, 2016)

Re-defining transport for London’s strategic neighbourhoods from spatial and social perspectives

Neighbourhoods are fundamental spatial units to present social phenomena in urban studies. Many studies use administrative boundaries such as census tracts as representations of neighbourhoods, but such boundaries may poorly represent the underlying social structures and physical attributes which might help define more vernacular conceptions and dialectical evolution of these zones. In this paper, using the goal of creating a new set of ‘Strategic Neighbourhoods’ for Transport for London (TfL) as vehicle for analysis, we evaluate two contrasting spatially and socially focused methodologies of neighbourhood generation. In comparing the outputs of a tertiary-communities (T-Communities) method and a combined Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and Minimum Spanning Tree (MST) cluster analysis method with an earlier iteration of Strategic Neighbourhoods defined by TfL, indices including neighbourhood size, intra-class correlation coefficient (ICC), and the number of community centres are calculated to evaluate their relative performance which demonstrate that both methods create neighbourhood boundaries that can better capture intra-group social homogeneity and are more suitable for analysis than the original SNA boundaries. These results are discussed in the context of the dialectic relationship between neighbourhood outcomes, spatial structures, and social characteristics, leading to more widely relevant conclusions that neighbourhood boundary delineation should combine spatial structure, social attributes, and experimental knowledge to effectively sub-divide urban activity

Understanding the relationships between the family structures and destinations of married migrants with children in China

As China transforms and experiences massive rural-to-urban migration, the destination decisions and family structures of internal migrants have become increasingly diverse. This study investigates how the family structures of married migrants with children relate to the geography of their migration destinations. Our analysis reveals that the family structures of married migrant workers are systematically related to the geography of their migration destinations, with couple migrants relatively more likely to be located in mega cities while entire family migrants are more likely to locate in less developed regions. Furthermore, this study found that migrant workers with different migration paths have distinct preferences for their destinations. Migrant workers who initially migrate with their whole families tend to avoid economically developed areas, whereas those transitioning from lone to couple migration are more inclined to move to developed eastern regions and mega cities. Those finding highlights the importance of family dynamics and social factors in shaping migration decisions, providing a more comprehensive perspective on the factors that influence destination beyond purely economic considerations

Our vulnerable high streets – death by permitted development?

Ben Clifford, Adam Dennett, Bin Chi and Daniel Slade outline some of the key findings of research on the likely impacts of the latest expansion of permitted development rights

The expressive stance: intentionality, expression, and machine art

This paper proposes a new interpretive stance for interpreting artistic works and performances that is relevant to artificial intelligence research but also has broader implications. Termed the expressive stance, this stance makes intelligible a critical distinction between present-day machine art and human art, but allows for the possibility that future machine art could find a place alongside our own. The expressive stance is elaborated as a response to Daniel Dennett's notion of the intentional stance, which is critically examined with respect to his specialized concept of rationality. The paper also shows that temporal scale implicitly serves to select between different modes of explanation in prominent theories of intentionality. It also considers the implications of the phenomenological background for systems that produce art

EUROPEAN UNION Part-financed by the European Regional

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A new attribute-linked residential property price dataset for England and Wales, 2011 to 2019

Current research on residential house price variation in the UK is limited by the lack of an open and comprehensive house price database that contains both transaction price alongside dwelling attributes such as size. This research outlines one approach which addresses this deficiency in England and Wales through combining transaction information from the official open Land Registry Price Paid Data (LR-PPD) and property size information from the official open Domestic Energy Performance Certificates (EPCs). A four-stage data linkage is created to generate a new linked dataset, representing 79% of the full market sales in the LR-PPD. This new linked dataset offers greater flexibility for the exploration of house price (£/m2) variation in England and Wales at different scales over postcode units between 2011 and 2019. Open access linkage codes will allow for future updates beyond 2019