Do Blue Flag promotions influence tourists’ willingness to pay a price premium for coastal destinations?

The Blue Flag is a popular eco-label in tourism. This study aims at examining the effectiveness of Blue Flag promotion on tourists' willingness to pay a price premium to coastal destinations via two online experiments. Study 1 shows (n = 152) that the Blue Flag stimulates higher willingness to pay a price premium for coastal destinations directly as well as indirectly through self-congruity and destination brand identification. Study 2 (n = 160) used a new sample to enhance external validity and generalizability of the Study 1 findings. Study 2 shows that destination brand quality and destination brand identification serially mediate the effect of Blue Flag promotions on the tourist's willingness to pay a price premium. The findings suggest that destination managers should deploy the Blue Flag Logo in destination promotions to enhance self-congruence, destination brand identification, perceived destination quality, and the tourist's willingness to pay a price premium

Cylindrically Symmetric Vacuum Solutions in Higher Dimensional Brans-Dicke Theory

Higher dimensional, static, cylindrically symmetric vacuum solutions with and without a cosmological constant in the Brans-Dicke theory are presented. We show that, for a negative cosmological constant and for specific values of the parameters, a particular subclass of these solutions include higher dimensional topological black hole-type solutions with a flat horizon topology. We briefly extend our discussion to stationary vacuum and $\Lambda-$vacuum solutions.Comment: V3: Published Versio

The effect of 3-Methyl 1-Pentyn 3-ol on the corrosion of Al-Si-Cu alloys in acid solutions by using SEM, EDX and AAS

In this study, the effect of alloying elements on the corrosion of Al-Si-Cu alloys in H 2 SO 4 and HCl media content 3-methyl–1pentyn–3-ol (3mlp3ol) is investigated by using SEM, EDX, AAS. The effect of active elements and 3-methyl–1-pentyn–3-ol (inhibitor) on the corrosion of alloys is determined using SEM, EDX and AAS results. Experimental results which indicated active alloying elements are Cu, Zn, Mg for Al-Si-Cu alloys in the studied solutions

Electroanalytical Characterisation of Dopa Decarboxylase Inhibitors Carbidopa and Benserazide on Multiwalled Carbon Nanotube and Poly(Nile blue A) Modified Glassy Carbon Electrodes

Modified glassy carbon electrodes have been made by deposition of functionalised multiwalled carbon nanotubes (MWCNTs) followed by formation of poly(Nile blue) (PNB) films by electropolymerisation, using potential cycling in 0.1 M phosphate buffer solution (PBS) at pH 6.0. The electrochemical oxidation of carbidopa (CD) and benserazide (BS) on these MWCNTs/PNB-modified electrodes was investigated using cyclic and differential pulse voltammetry in 0.1 M PBS at different values of pH between 5.0 and 8.0; both CD and BS gave one diffusion-controlled irreversible oxidation peak in cyclic voltammetry. Analytical characterisation of CD and BS was carried out in 0.1 M PBS, pH 5.0. Peak currents in differential pulse voltammetry were linear over the concentration range of 1×10−5 to 1×10−4 M for CD and 4×10−6 to 4×10−5 M for BS. The repeatability, precision, and accuracy of the method were also investigated. Higher sensitivities and lower detection limits, of 1.17 μM for CD and 0.50 μM for BS, were obtained with this new modified electrode compared with previous studies reported in the literature

Integrating Prosodic and Lexical Cues for Automatic Topic Segmentation

We present a probabilistic model that uses both prosodic and lexical cues for the automatic segmentation of speech into topically coherent units. We propose two methods for combining lexical and prosodic information using hidden Markov models and decision trees. Lexical information is obtained from a speech recognizer, and prosodic features are extracted automatically from speech waveforms. We evaluate our approach on the Broadcast News corpus, using the DARPA-TDT evaluation metrics. Results show that the prosodic model alone is competitive with word-based segmentation methods. Furthermore, we achieve a significant reduction in error by combining the prosodic and word-based knowledge sources.Comment: 27 pages, 8 figure

Supersymmetric approach to exactly solvable systems with position-dependent effective masses

We discuss the relationship between exact solvability of the Schr\"{o}dinger equation with a position-dependent mass and the ordering ambiguity in the Hamiltonian operator within the frame of supersymmetric quantum mechanics. The one-dimensional Schr\"{o}dinger equation, derived from the general form of the effective mass Hamiltonian, is solved exactly for a system with exponentially changing mass in the presence of a potential with similar behaviour, and the corresponding supersymmetric partner Hamiltonians are related to the effective-mass Hamiltonians proposed in the literature.Comment: 12 pages article in LaTEX (uses standard article.sty). Please check http://www1.gantep.edu.tr/~ozer for other studies of Nuclear Physics Group at University of Gaziantep. [arXiv admin note: excessive overlap with quant-ph/0306065 and "Supersymmetric approach to quantum systems with position-dependent effective mass" by A. R. Plastino, A. Rigo, M. Casas, F. Garcias, and A. Plastino - Phys. Rev. A 60, 4318 - 4325 (1999)

Türkiye'de ülke içinde yerinden edilme sorunu: tespitler ve çözüm önerileri = The problem of internal displacement in Turkey: assessment and policy proposals

Bu rapor, Doç. Dr. A. Tamer Aker (psikiyatr, Kocaeli Üniversitesi), Yrd. Doç. Dr. A. Betül Çelik (siyaset bilimci, Sabancı Üniversitesi), Dilek Kurban (hukuk doktoru, TESEV), Doç. Dr. Turgay Ünalan (nüfusbilimci, Hacettepe Üniversitesi) ve Yrd. Doç. Dr. H. Deniz Yükseker'den (sosyolog, Koç Üniversitesi) oluşan TESEV Ülke İçinde Yerinden Edilme Araştırma ve İzleme Grubu tarafından hazırlanmıştır. Grup, yerinden edilmeyi çatışma ortamının keskinleştirdiği devlet merkezli düşünüşün ve çeşitli ideolojik kamplaşmaların ötesinde, yurttaşlık haklarının yeniden tesisi ve toplumsal rehabilitasyon eksenlerinde ve insani boyutları bağlamında ele almaktadır

Maternal placi protein levels in early- and late-onset preeclampsia

Objectives: The objective of this study was to determine the maternal PLAC1 protein levels in early and late onset preec­lampsia. Material and methods: A total of 135 pregnant women were included in the study, of which 55 were at < 34 weeks of gesta­tion and 80 were at ≥ 34 weeks of gestation, between June and November 2014 were recruited in this case control study. Results: Analysis of maternal serum PLAC1 levels did not reveal any significant differences between early onset PE and controls (p = 0.422). However, late onset PE patients exhibited significantly elevated levels of PLAC1, in comparison with healthy controls (p = 0.026). The difference in PLAC1 levels between early onset PE and late onset PE was also significant (p = 0.001). Area under ROC curve of PLAC1 for early and late onset PE was 0.563 and 0.646 with p values of 0.422 and 0.026 respectively. Area under ROC curve of PLAC1 in PE was 0.613 with p value = 0.024. The cutoff value for PLAC1 was 6.19 ng/mL with sensitivity: 56% (95% CI 44.1–67.3) and specificity: 63 %; (95% CI 49.9–75.1) and diagnostic odds ratio: 2.2 (95% CI 1.1–4.4) (p value = 0.037). The cutoff value for PLAC1 was 7.2 ng/mL with sensitivity: 43% (95% CI 31.5–54.6) and specificity: 78% (95% CI 65.5–87.5) and diagnostic odds ratio: 2.69 (95% CI 1.25–5.79) (p value = 0.016) Conclusion: In conclusion, the results of the current study showed that PLAC1 protein levels were significantly elevated in pregnant women with late onset PE in comparison with healthy control group