Nature-Based Tourism Businesses in Colorado: Interpreting Environmental Ethics and Responsible Behavior

Tourism businesses operate from a primarily economic-centric point of view, but nature-based tourism businesses are also acutely aware of the need to sustain the natural resource that attracts the client to their outdoor recreation service. A preliminary qualitative inquiry reveals how nature-based tourism organizations in Colorado view themselves as operating from environmentally ethical positions, what specific actions they take to minimize negative environmental impacts, and how they educate their clients about resource conservation. Findings indicate that too often companies fail to realize opportunities in which they can encourage meaningful bonds between people and nature through the use of education and environmental interpretation. Education is seen more as a means to equip tourists with skills pertaining to a certain sport/activity, rather than as a way to enrich the total experience. Due to the industry’s reliance upon natural resources, a higher level of resource interpretation should be encouraged, promoting natural resource conservation

Game-Based Learning in Engineering Education

The new generation of undergraduates entering UK higher education have grown up with computer games of ever increasing sophistication. In this educational project a race game, Racing Academy, was developed to investigate how game technology and gaming communities could enhance undergraduate engineering education. The computer game embodied the principles of engineering dynamics to simulate and display in real time a car drag race in which students ‘designed’ their car by selecting an engine, tyres and gearbox from a set menu. The aim was to complete a set course in the minimum time and graphically display the dynamic performance in order to better understand the engineering system. The students and staff involved in this project provided extensive feedback on the exercise and identified the visual nature of game-based learning software as a positive feature that helped illustrate engineering dynamics. Game-based learning communities, organised around tutor groups, were seen as an excellent way of encouraging an element of competition in a small non-threatening environment while discussion forums based around Moodle provided efficient support for the large group of 160 students. Finally, learning through ‘doing’ in a game environment was proven to be a successful method of illustrating physical phenomena

Unmanned Aviation Systems and FAA Requirements

Unmanned aviation systems (drones) have become a serious concern and topic for potential conflicts with airplane traffic. This presentation will provide information concerning drone activity in relation to aircraft and FAA requirements

An investigation into sub-surface strain measurement using X-ray radioscopy

There are numerous techniques used to measure strain. Most are only capable of taking surface measurements. The penetrating nature of X-rays has been used to measure deformation, and thus strain, but only with radiographic images. Radioscopic techniques are faster and do not require film processing, but produce less detailed results than digitised radiographic images. The research covered by this thesis tested radioscopic images and showed them to be suitable for strain measurement. The thesis includes details of the design and capabilities of the radioscopic equipment. Pin cushion distortion is a common feature of radioscopic images, and an automatic method of identifying, and correcting for the distortion was implemented. [Continues.

The Swift BAT Survey Detects Two Optical Broad Line, X-ray Heavily Obscured Active Galaxies: NVSS 193013+341047 and IRAS 05218-1212

The Swift Burst Alert Telescope (BAT) is discovering interesting new objects while monitoring the sky in the 14-195 keV band. Here we present the X-ray properties and spectral energy distributions for two unusual AGN sources. Both NVSS 193013+341047 and IRAS 05218-1212 are absorbed, Compton-thin, but heavily obscured (NH \sim 10^23 cm-2), X-ray sources at redshifts < 0.1. The spectral energy distributions reveal these galaxies to be very red, with high extinction in the optical and UV. A similar SED is seen for the extremely red objects (EROs) detected in the higher redshift universe. This suggests that these unusual BAT-detected sources are a low- redshift (z << 1) analog to EROs, which recent evidence suggests are a class of the elusive type II quasars. Studying the multi-wavelength properties of these sources may reveal the properties of their high redshift counterparts.Comment: 20 pages, accepted to Ap

The effects of entry on incumbent innovation and productivity

How does firm entry affect innovation incentives in incumbent firms? Microdata suggest that there is heterogeneity across industries. Specifically, incumbent productivity growth and patenting is positively correlated with lagged greenfield foreign firm entry in technologically advanced industries, but not in laggard industries. In this paper we provide evidence that these correlations arise from a causal effect predicted by Schumpeterian growth theory—the threat of technologically advanced entry spurs innovation incentives in sectors close to the technology frontier, where successful innovation allows incumbents to survive the threat, but discourages innovation in laggard sectors, where the threat reduces incumbents' expected rents from innovating. We find that the empirical patterns hold using rich micro panel data for the United Kingdom. We control for the endogeneity of entry by exploiting major European and U.K. policy reforms, and allow for endogeneity of additional factors. We complement the analysis for foreign entry with evidence for domestic entry and entry through imports