Assessing Destination Competitiveness: An Application to the Hot Springs Tourism Sector

This paper proposes a model to identify the factors determining the competitiveness of the hot springs tourism sector, with particular application to Taiwan. The proposed conceptual framework brings together two approaches, namely the theories of industry organization (10) and the resource-based view (RBV). The proposition underlying this framework is that destination competitiveness is achieved by the adoption of policies and strategies aligned with market opportunities, drawing upon the unique or distinctive tourism features offered by the destination. It is proposed that three major influences are evident in the case of hot springs tourism, namely Tourism Destination Resources and Attractors, Tourism Destination Strategies and Tourism Destination Environments. An evaluation is provided of the administration of a three-round Delphi survey, which was intended to validate the determinants of destination competitiveness that were derived from the literature. Drawing upon the results of the pilot study it is concluded that the development of a sector-specific model of destination competitiveness is capable of capturing the nature and characteristics of the hot springs tourism sector

Microencapsulation and viability of a probiotic in a simulated gastrointestinal environment

The human-origin probiotic Lactobacillus rhamnosus strain GG (LGG) proved to exert health benefits in dogs. Like other strains, the viability of this probiotic is reduced while passing through the stomach and upper intestine because of the low pH and presence of bile. In this study, calcium alginate microcapsules, loaded with LGG, with and without the addition of xanthan gum coated chitosan, were prepared with the traditional extrusion method. The capsules of all formulations were able to improve the viability of LGG (P107 CFU/g when separately exposed to simulated gastric fluid (SGF) for 2 h and simulated intestinal fluid (SIF) for 4 h. However, results of sequential incubation in SIF after SGF revealed a dramatic reduction in the viability of encapsulated cells with no difference from control, which cannot be explained with little information in the literature. The alginate beads incorporated with xanthan gum resulted in less severe wrinkles on the surface. All the formulations achieved encapsulation yields of around 80% and the cell viability remained at least 107 CFU/g after 4 weeks storage at refrigeration temperature. The overall situation indicated that the most stable microcapsules were chitosan-coated alginate (2.5% w/v)-xanthan gum (0.15% w/v) beads. These results indicated the potential of industrial application of chitosan-coated alginate-xanthan gum microcapsules

Study of Charging Nitrogen to External Floating Roof Tank to Prevent Rim-seal Fires from Lightning

AbstractIt is estimated that 95% of rim seal fires are caused by lightning strikes. To avoid rim-seal fires caused by lightning, the existing methods mainly focus on the use of secondary sealing to reduce volatilization of oil and the electrical connections measures such as air terminals, deflectors, grounding device, discharge shunts and scalable grounding device to avoid sparks caused by lightning current. But these devices can’t eliminate the spark generation thoroughly. A new method charging nitrogen to external floating roof tank seal ring is proposed to prevent rim-seal fires from lightning. In this paper, the safe oxygen content is set as the goal to charge nitrogen. An annular nitrogen charging pipe network is designed and its reliability is verified by experiment. The time of filling nitrogen to the seal ring of an external floating roof tank with the capacity of 10×104 m3 at the rate of 63.38 m3/h to reach the nitrogen charging goal is proved within the time of lightning warning through experiment. And this experiment can provide some reference to the application of nitrogen charging

Consumer Willingness to Pay and Marketing Opportunities for "Quality Guaranteed Tree-Ripened Peaches" in New York State

This study identifies consumer characteristics associated with willingness to pay a higher price for quality guaranteed tree-ripened peaches, with a focus on evaluating factors important to consumers when making decisions to purchase tree-ripened peaches. Telephone interviews were conducted with consumers in New York State in summer, 2002. Seventy-eight percent of the 258 survey respondents reported that they were willing to pay a higher price. A logistical regression model of willingness to pay was estimated. The empirical results indicated that willingness to pay was positively affected by the existence of previous experiences in purchasing tree-ripened peaches and by consumer dissatisfaction with peaches consumed in the past. An analysis of consumer experiences and consumer dissatisfaction showed that consumers in the two identified segments had mutually exclusive characteristics that present marketing opportunities for high quality New York-grown peaches.Consumer/Household Economics,

HQDec: Self-Supervised Monocular Depth Estimation Based on a High-Quality Decoder

Decoders play significant roles in recovering scene depths. However, the decoders used in previous works ignore the propagation of multilevel lossless fine-grained information, cannot adaptively capture local and global information in parallel, and cannot perform sufficient global statistical analyses on the final output disparities. In addition, the process of mapping from a low-resolution feature space to a high-resolution feature space is a one-to-many problem that may have multiple solutions. Therefore, the quality of the recovered depth map is low. To this end, we propose a high-quality decoder (HQDec), with which multilevel near-lossless fine-grained information, obtained by the proposed adaptive axial-normalized position-embedded channel attention sampling module (AdaAxialNPCAS), can be adaptively incorporated into a low-resolution feature map with high-level semantics utilizing the proposed adaptive information exchange scheme. In the HQDec, we leverage the proposed adaptive refinement module (AdaRM) to model the local and global dependencies between pixels in parallel and utilize the proposed disparity attention module to model the distribution characteristics of disparity values from a global perspective. To recover fine-grained high-resolution features with maximal accuracy, we adaptively fuse the high-frequency information obtained by constraining the upsampled solution space utilizing the local and global dependencies between pixels into the high-resolution feature map generated from the nonlearning method. Extensive experiments demonstrate that each proposed component improves the quality of the depth estimation results over the baseline results, and the developed approach achieves state-of-the-art results on the KITTI and DDAD datasets. The code and models will be publicly available at \href{https://github.com/fwucas/HQDec}{HQDec}

Application of Blind Source Separation Algorithms and Ambient Vibration Testing to the Health Monitoring of Concrete Dams

In this work, using AVT data, a health monitoring method for concrete dams based on two different blind source separation (BSS) methods, that is, second-order blind identification (SOBI) and independent component analysis (ICA), is proposed. A modal identification procedure, which integrates the SOBI algorithm and modal contribution, is first adopted to extract structural modal features using AVT data. The method to calculate the modal contribution index for SOBI-based modal identification methods is studied, and the calculated modal contribution index is used to determine the system order. The selected modes are then used to calculate modal features and are analysed using ICA to extract some independent components (ICs). The square prediction error (SPE) index and its control limits are then calculated to construct a control chart for the structural dynamic features. For new AVT data of a dam in an unknown health state, the newly calculated SPE is compared with the control limits to judge whether the dam is normal. With the simulated AVT data of the numerical model for a concrete gravity dam and the measured AVT data of a practical engineering project, the performance of the dam health monitoring method proposed in this paper is validated