Profile and consumption patterns of non-resident spectators in international sport tourism events

Sporting events create opportunities to develop the local economy of the destination, through the economic impact of the expenses incurred by people who go there to watch it. The aim of this study was to analyse the profile and consumption patterns of non-resident spectators at two international open water events held in Setúbal, in 2022. During the events, 137 questionnaires applied to non-resident spectators were collected. Through multiple linear regression the factors that most influence the total expenditure of spectators were analysed. The results reveal the existence of a small niche of spectators that follow national and international competitions. The accommodation category has a greater weight in the total direct economic impact of events; in turn, spectators who stay overnight in the city, visiting it for the first time, older and with more education, reveal a greater capacity to contribute to the maximization of the direct economic impact of the events. This study highlights the need to define strategies to attract non-resident spectators to enhance accommodation in the city during the events, through an integrated approach, looking forward to integrate events together with the other tourism products offered by the destination. This study emphasizes the advantage of integrating a holistic strategic perspective into the global vision for the city's tourist development and the respective local economy. The importance of developing a strategic events portfolio, aiming to maximize benefits for the destination, would be even bigger by realizing the planning/ strategic leverage in several areas, simultaneously, such as economic, social, environmental, sports, tourist and political.Os eventos desportivos criam oportunidades para desenvolver a economia local do destino, através do impacto económico das despesas realizadas pelas pessoas que aí se deslocam para assistir ao espetáculo desportivo. O objetivo deste estudo foi analisar o perfil e os padrões de consumo dos espectadores não-residentes em dois eventos internacionais de águas abertas realizados em Setúbal, em 2022. Durante os eventos, foram recolhidos 137 questionários, aplicados aos espetadores não residentes. A estatística descritiva foi usada para analisar o perfil e os padrões de consumo dos inquiridos; e através da regressão linear múltipla foram analisados os fatores que mais influenciam a despesa total dos espetadores. Os resultados revelam a existência de um pequeno nicho de espectadores que acompanha as competições nacionais e internacionais, sobretudo alicerçado naqueles que mais praticam natação e natação de águas abertas. A categoria de alojamento tem um maior peso no impacto económico direto total dos eventos; por sua vez, os espectadores que pernoitam na cidade, visitando-a pela primeira vez, mais velhos e mais escolarizados, revelam uma maior capacidade de contribuir para a maximização do impacto económico direto dos eventos. Este estudo destaca a necessidade de serem definidas estratégias para atrair espetadores não residentes para aumentar o alojamento na cidade durante os eventos, através de uma abordagem integrada, perspetivando os eventos juntamente com os outros produtos turísticos oferecidos pelo destino. Este estudo realça, assim, a vantagem de integrar uma perspetiva estratégica holística na visão global para o desenvolvimento turístico da cidade e respetiva economia local. A importância de desenvolver um portefólio estratégico de eventos, visando maximizar os benefícios para o destino, seria ainda maior pela realização de planeamento / alavancagem estratégica em várias áreas, simultaneamente, tais como, económica, social, ambiental, desportiva, turística e política

O espectro das síndromes de hipertensão esteróide na infância e adolescência

Arterial hypertension is not a privilege of adults. Besides renal and vascular causes, adrenocortical and correlated diseases must be considered when investigating a hypertensive child or adolescent. The mineralocorticoid (MC) receptor can be activated by typical MC as well as by cortisol, and even run autonomously, as a result of disturbances in the sodium channel. Thus, MC hyperactivity (hypertension, hypokalemia and renin suppression) may result from excess of: (1) aldosterone, (2) deoxycorticosterone (DOC), and (3) cortisol. The first group, called primary hyperaldosteronism (PHA), includes aldosterone-producing adenoma, carcinoma and hyperplasia, in addition to familial causes: dexamethasone suppressible HA (or type I) and type II familial PAH. The second group encompasses DOC-producing, as well as androgen- and estrogen-producing tumors, and ACTH-dependent DOC hypersecretion (Cushing s syndrome, congenital adrenal hyperplasia due to 11beta- and 17alpha-hydroxylase deficiencies and the syndrome of peripheral cortisol resistance). In the syndrome of apparent MC excess, cortisol acts as the operating MC, due to congenital deficiency or licorice-induced enzymatic inhibition of 11beta-hydroxysteroid dehydrogenase, responsible for cortisol to cortisone oxidation. Sodium and fluids are inappropriately absorbed at the renal tubule, both in Liddle s syndrome (activating mutations in the epithelial Na+ channel gene) and Arnold-Healy-Gordon s syndrome (in which excess tubular chloride and sodium resorption impairs H+ and K+ excretion, producing hypertension with acidosis and hyperkalemia). Although not much prevalent, this wide spectrum of hypertensive adrenal diseases should be considered as the potential cause of childhood and adolescence hypertension.Hipertensão arterial não é privilégio de adultos. Além de causas renais e vasculares, doenças adrenocorticais ou correlatas devem ser consideradas na investigação da criança e adolescente hipertensos. O receptor mineralocortidóide (MC) pode ser ativado tanto por MC típicos como pelo cortisol, e mesmo funcionar de maneira autônoma, decorrente de distúrbio nos canais de sódio. Assim, hiperatividade MC (hipertensão, hipocalemia e supressão de renina) pode resultar do excesso de: (1) aldosterona, (2) deoxicorticosterona (DOC) e (3) cortisol. O primeiro grupo, denominado hiperaldosteronismo primário (HAP), inclui o adenoma, o carcinoma e a hiperplasia produtora de aldosterona, além de causa familiares: HA supressível por dexametasona (ou tipo I) e o tipo II. O segundo grupo engloba os tumores produtores tanto de DOC, como de andrógenos ou estrógenos, e a produção de DOC secundária ao excesso de ACTH (síndrome de Cushing, hiperplasia adrenal congênita por deficiência de 11beta- e 17alfa-hidroxilases e síndrome de resistência periférica ao cortisol). Na síndrome do excesso aparente de MC, cortisol age como um MC graças à deficiência congênita ou à inibição (pelo alcaçuz) da enzima 11beta-hidroxisteróide desidrogenase, responsável pela oxidação do cortisol em cortisona. Sódio e fluidos podem ser absorvidos nos túbulos renais de forma inapropriada, tanto na síndrome de Liddle (mutações ativadoras do gene do canal epitelial de sódio) como na de Arnold-Healy-Gordon (onde a hiperreabsorção de cloretos e sódio no túbulo renal impede a excreção de H+ e K+, produzindo hipertensão com acidose e hipercalemia). Todo este espectro de doenças adrenais hipertensivas, apesar de pouco prevalentes, deve ser lembrado com possível causa da hipertensão que pode ocorrer na infância e adolescência.Universidade Federal de São Paulo (UNIFESP) Escola Paulista de Medicina Departamento de MedicinaUNIFESP, EPM, Depto. de MedicinaSciEL

Scale-Invariant Transition Probabilities in Free Word Association Trajectories

Free-word association has been used as a vehicle to understand the organization of human thoughts. The original studies relied mainly on qualitative assertions, yielding the widely intuitive notion that trajectories of word associations are structured, yet considerably more random than organized linguistic text. Here we set to determine a precise characterization of this space, generating a large number of word association trajectories in a web implemented game. We embedded the trajectories in the graph of word co-occurrences from a linguistic corpus. To constrain possible transport models we measured the memory loss and the cycling probability. These two measures could not be reconciled by a bounded diffusive model since the cycling probability was very high (16% of order-2 cycles) implying a majority of short-range associations whereas the memory loss was very rapid (converging to the asymptotic value in ∼7 steps) which, in turn, forced a high fraction of long-range associations. We show that memory loss and cycling probabilities of free word association trajectories can be simultaneously accounted by a model in which transitions are determined by a scale invariant probability distribution

Erring on the side of rare events? A behavioural explanation for COVID-19 vaccine regulatory misalignment.

The development of new vaccines against COVID-19 has triggered a debate about which of the vaccines should be chosen, and in some countries which vaccines to authorise. The choice of vaccines in Western countries seems to be largely driven by trust in the vaccine manufacturers, with safety concerns regarding potential rare side effects rather than relative efficacy playing the pivotal role in this choice [1]. So far, vaccines developed by China, Russia and India have largely been ignored in Western countries. Amongst the vaccine candidates currently in use in many western countries, access to the AstraZeneca (AZ) and Johnson & Johnson’s (JJ) vaccine has been restricted and, in some cases, suspended as they hav been perceived to be the least safe despite being approved by the European Medicines Agency (EMA) [2] and recommended by the WHO [3]. We argue that regulatory vaccine misalignment can be explained by an ‘erring on the side of rare events’ phenomena. That is, when rare events are heavily publicised, regulators tend to favour a precautionary approach, even when the fatalities from vaccine side effects are only 10% as likely to occur as the risks arising from COVID-19 infection [3]. Furthermore, we argue that such decisions have detrimental consequences for vaccine trust and the success phenomena logically follow not just from the overestimation of the risk of such events, but also from a combination of ambiguity aversion, joint risk, and benefit formation. All of which add to a background of limited trust in government decisions with regards to vaccines, which weaken the vaccination rollout. This note will provide a discussion of these arguments. The next section argues that vaccine regulation follows a clear regulatory misalignment resulting from some countries ‘erring on the side of rare events. We examine the erosion of public trust, followed by a discussion on different behavioural explanations for the ‘erring on the side of rare events’ phenomena. Finally, we conclude with suggestions for a way forward

Predicting the First Response Latency of Maintainers and Contributors in Pull Requests

The success of a Pull Request (PR) depends on the responsiveness of the maintainers and the contributor during the review process. Being aware of the expected waiting times can lead to better interactions and managed expectations for both the maintainers and the contributor. In this paper, we propose a machine-learning approach to predict the first response latency of the maintainers following the submission of a PR, and the first response latency of the contributor after receiving the first response from the maintainers. We curate a dataset of 20 large and popular open-source projects on GitHub and extract 21 features to characterize projects, contributors, PRs, and review processes. Using these features, we then evaluate seven types of classifiers to identify the best-performing models. We also perform permutation feature importance and SHAP analyses to understand the importance and impact of different features on the predicted response latencies. Our best-performing models achieve an average improvement of 33% in AUC-ROC and 58% in AUC-PR for maintainers, as well as 42% in AUC-ROC and 95% in AUC-PR for contributors compared to a no-skilled classifier across the projects. Our findings indicate that PRs submitted earlier in the week, containing an average or slightly above-average number of commits, and with concise descriptions are more likely to receive faster first responses from the maintainers. Similarly, PRs with a lower first response latency from maintainers, that received the first response of maintainers earlier in the week, and containing an average or slightly above-average number of commits tend to receive faster first responses from the contributors. Additionally, contributors with a higher acceptance rate and a history of timely responses in the project are likely to both obtain and provide faster first responses.Comment: Manuscript submitted to IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering (TSE

Understanding the Helpfulness of Stale Bot for Pull-based Development: An Empirical Study of 20 Large Open-Source Projects

Pull Requests (PRs) that are neither progressed nor resolved clutter the list of PRs, making it difficult for the maintainers to manage and prioritize unresolved PRs. To automatically track, follow up, and close such inactive PRs, Stale bot was introduced by GitHub. Despite its increasing adoption, there are ongoing debates on whether using Stale bot alleviates or exacerbates the problem of inactive PRs. To better understand if and how Stale bot helps projects in their pull-based development workflow, we perform an empirical study of 20 large and popular open-source projects. We find that Stale bot can help deal with a backlog of unresolved PRs as the projects closed more PRs within the first few months of adoption. Moreover, Stale bot can help improve the efficiency of the PR review process as the projects reviewed PRs that ended up merged and resolved PRs that ended up closed faster after the adoption. However, Stale bot can also negatively affect the contributors as the projects experienced a considerable decrease in their number of active contributors after the adoption. Therefore, relying solely on Stale bot to deal with inactive PRs may lead to decreased community engagement and an increased probability of contributor abandonment.Comment: Manuscript submitted to ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodolog

Where to Go Now? Finding Alternatives for Declining Packages in the npm Ecosystem

Software ecosystems (e.g., npm, PyPI) are the backbone of modern software developments. Developers add new packages to ecosystems every day to solve new problems or provide alternative solutions, causing obsolete packages to decline in their importance to the community. Packages in decline are reused less overtime and may become less frequently maintained. Thus, developers usually migrate their dependencies to better alternatives. Replacing packages in decline with better alternatives requires time and effort by developers to identify packages that need to be replaced, find the alternatives, asset migration benefits, and finally, perform the migration. This paper proposes an approach that automatically identifies packages that need to be replaced and finds their alternatives supported with real-world examples of open source projects performing the suggested migrations. At its core, our approach relies on the dependency migration patterns performed in the ecosystem to suggest migrations to other developers. We evaluated our approach on the npm ecosystem and found that 96% of the suggested alternatives are accurate. Furthermore, by surveying expert JavaScript developers, 67% of them indicate that they will use our suggested alternative packages in their future projects

On Wasted Contributions: Understanding the Dynamics of Contributor-Abandoned Pull Requests

Pull-based development has enabled numerous volunteers to contribute to open-source projects with fewer barriers. Nevertheless, a considerable amount of pull requests (PRs) with valid contributions are abandoned by their contributors, wasting the effort and time put in by both the contributors and maintainers. To better understand the underlying dynamics of contributor-abandoned PRs, we conduct a mixed-methods study using both quantitative and qualitative methods. We curate a dataset consisting of 265,325 PRs including 4,450 abandoned ones from ten popular and mature GitHub projects and measure 16 features characterizing PRs, contributors, review processes, and projects. Using statistical and machine learning techniques, we find that complex PRs, novice contributors, and lengthy reviews have a higher probability of abandonment and the rate of PR abandonment fluctuates alongside the projects' maturity or workload. To identify why contributors abandon their PRs, we also manually examine a random sample of 354 abandoned PRs. We observe that the most frequent abandonment reasons are related to the obstacles faced by contributors, followed by the hurdles imposed by maintainers during the review process. Finally, we survey the top core maintainers of the studied projects to understand their perspectives on dealing with PR abandonment and on our findings.Comment: Manuscript accepted for publication in ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology (TOSEM