Investigating millennial tourists' attitudes and risk perceptions towards terror attacks: a qualitative case study on France

This study explores millennials' risk perceptions and response to terror attacks and the impact of these attacks on their visitor intentions. A qualitative approach employing interviews and focus groups with twenty-four millennials residing in the United Arab Emirates was conducted. France and the widely publicized attacks in Paris in 2015 and Nice in 2016 provided a case context for the data collection. Both participants who had travelled previously to France and those that had not were sampled. Results suggest that millennials indeed perceived terrorism as a risk. However, it is only one of a wide variety of perceived risks. The study provides insights of the variation in reactions to the attacks and the effects on tourist behaviour and decision-making among the sample

Suppression of material transfer at contacting surfaces: The effect of adsorbates on Al/TiN and Cu/diamond interfaces from first-principles calculations

The effect of monolayers of oxygen (O) and hydrogen (H) on the possibility of material transfer at aluminium/titanium nitride (Al/TiN) and copper/diamond (Cu/C$_{\text{dia}}$) interfaces, respectively, were investigated within the framework of density functional theory (DFT). To this end the approach, contact, and subsequent separation of two atomically flat surfaces consisting of the aforementioned pairs of materials were simulated. These calculations were performed for the clean as well as oxygenated and hydrogenated Al and C$_{\text{dia}}$ surfaces, respectively. Various contact configurations were considered by studying several lateral arrangements of the involved surfaces at the interface. Material transfer is typically possible at interfaces between the investigated clean surfaces; however, the addition of O to the Al and H to the C$_{\text{dia}}$ surfaces was found to hinder material transfer. This passivation occurs because of a significant reduction of the adhesion energy at the examined interfaces, which can be explained by the distinct bonding situations.Comment: 27 pages, 8 figure

Anthropomorphic Coding of Speech and Audio: A Model Inversion Approach

Auditory modeling is a well-established methodology that provides insight into human perception and that facilitates the extraction of signal features that are most relevant to the listener. The aim of this paper is to provide a tutorial on perceptual speech and audio coding using an invertible auditory model. In this approach, the audio signal is converted into an auditory representation using an invertible auditory model. The auditory representation is quantized and coded. Upon decoding, it is then transformed back into the acoustic domain. This transformation converts a complex distortion criterion into a simple one, thus facilitating quantization with low complexity. We briefly review past work on auditory models and describe in more detail the components of our invertible model and its inversion procedure, that is, the method to reconstruct the signal from the output of the auditory model. We summarize attempts to use the auditory representation for low-bit-rate coding. Our approach also allows the exploitation of the inherent redundancy of the human auditory system for the purpose of multiple description (joint source-channel) coding