Who visits World Heritage? A comparative analysis of three cultural sites

Heritage tourism is a growing segment of the modern tourism industry, and several studies have been undertaken to identify the individuals who participate in this type of tourism. These have indicated that heritage tourists, generally, are middle class, middle age, and well educated. However, despite their iconic role, there has been relatively little attention paid to profile of visitors to World Heritage Sites. This study aims to better understand the demography of this specific tourism segment through the use of survey-based research at three geographically diverse World Heritage Sites: Independence Hall in the USA, Studenica Monastery in Serbia, and the Archaeological Site of Volubilis in Morocco. Through the use of descriptive statistics, several over-arching trends were noted among the three sites. World Heritage Site visitors were found to be very well educated, but they did not have any similarities in relation to age, income, or residence, which contrasts the “general” heritage tourist typology. However, there were several World Heritage specific trends. While this work is a snapshot of the three sites under study and thus is difficult to generalize, it provides the basis for more comprehensive demographic research on visitors to World Heritage Sites

Bump hunting with non-Gaussian kernels

It is well known that the number of modes of a kernel density estimator is monotone nonincreasing in the bandwidth if the kernel is a Gaussian density. There is numerical evidence of nonmonotonicity in the case of some non-Gaussian kernels, but little additional information is available. The present paper provides theoretical and numerical descriptions of the extent to which the number of modes is a nonmonotone function of bandwidth in the case of general compactly supported densities. Our results address popular kernels used in practice, for example, the Epanechnikov, biweight and triweight kernels, and show that in such cases nonmonotonicity is present with strictly positive probability for all sample sizes n\geq3. In the Epanechnikov and biweight cases the probability of nonmonotonicity equals 1 for all n\geq2. Nevertheless, in spite of the prevalence of lack of monotonicity revealed by these results, it is shown that the notion of a critical bandwidth (the smallest bandwidth above which the number of modes is guaranteed to be monotone) is still well defined. Moreover, just as in the Gaussian case, the critical bandwidth is of the same size as the bandwidth that minimises mean squared error of the density estimator. These theoretical results, and new numerical evidence, show that the main effects of nonmonotonicity occur for relatively small bandwidths, and have negligible impact on many aspects of bump hunting.Comment: Published at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/009053604000000715 in the Annals of Statistics (http://www.imstat.org/aos/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org

Performance of a spin-based insulated gate field effect transistor

Fundamental physical properties limiting the performance of spin field effect transistors are compared to those of ordinary (charge-based) field effect transistors. Instead of raising and lowering a barrier to current flow these spin transistors use static spin-selective barriers and gate control of spin relaxation. The different origins of transistor action lead to distinct size dependences of the power dissipation in these transistors and permit sufficiently small spin-based transistors to surpass the performance of charge-based transistors at room temperature or above. This includes lower threshold voltages, smaller gate capacitances, reduced gate switching energies and smaller source-drain leakage currents.Comment: 4 pages including 3 figures, APL in pres

From classroom tutor to hypertext adviser: An evaluation

This paper describes a three‐year experiment to investigate the possibility of making economies by replacing practical laboratory sessions with courseware while attempting to ensure that the quality of the student learning experience did not suffer. Pathology labs are a central component of the first‐year medical undergraduate curriculum at Southampton. Activities in these labs had been carefully designed and they were supervised by lab demonstrators who were subject domain experts. The labs were successful in the eyes of both staff and students but were expensive to conduct, in terms of equipment and staffing. Year by year evaluation of the introduction of courseware revealed that there was no measurable difference in student performance as a result of introducing the courseware, but that students were unhappy about the loss of interaction with the demonstrators. The final outcome of this experiment was a courseware replacement for six labs which included a software online hypertext adviser. The contribution of this work is that it adds to the body of empirical evidence in support of the importance of maintaining dialogue with students when introducing courseware, and it presents an example of how this interaction might be achieved in software

Measurement-Device-Independent Approach to Entanglement Measures

Within the context of semiquantum nonlocal games, the trust can be removed from the measurement devices in an entanglement-detection procedure. Here we show that a similar approach can be taken to quantify the amount of entanglement. To be specific, first, we show that in this context a small subset of semiquantum nonlocal games is necessary and sufficient for entanglement detection in the LOCC paradigm. Second, we prove that the maximum pay-off for these games is a universal measure of entanglement which is convex and continuous. Third, we show that for the quantification of negative-partial-transpose entanglement, this subset can be further reduced down to a single arbitrary element. Importantly, our measure is operationally accessible in a measurement-device-independent way by construction. Finally, our approach is simply extended to quantify the entanglement within any partitioning of multipartite quantum states.Comment: 8 pages, 2 figures, the main result is split into two theorems with slight modifications, extended proof

Tourism destination branding and its effects on national branding strategies : brand New Zealand, clean and green but is it smart?

The present work analyses how tourism and non-tourism place brands are integrated under an umbrella national brand, and how the tourism brand may have little value or even prove negative for other industry sectors. The study examines the development of Brand New Zealand and the subsidiary ‘100% Pure’ tourism and ‘New Zealand, New Thinking’ trade brands. In 2002 New Zealand sought to reposition the national brand so that it was perceived internationally as innovative and creative in order to advantage non-tourism and agricultural enterprises. However, while the ‘clean, green and smart’ proposition had domestic appeal it did not have broad international impact. The research highlights the importance of understanding effects of destination branding in a broader policy and place branding context

Designing and implementing a new advanced level biology course.

Salters-Nuffield Advanced Biology is a new advanced level biology course currently being piloted from September 2002 in England with around 1200 students. This paper discusses the reasons for developing a new advanced biology course at this time, the philosophy of the project and how the materials are being written and the specification devised. The aim of the project is to provide an up-to-date course that interests students, is considered appropriate by teachers and other professionals in biology, and takes full advantage of modern developments in biology and in teaching

Sharing versus collaborative economy : how to align ICT developments and the SDGs in tourism?

Abstract: Great hopes have been placed in the sharing economy to provide a new business model based on peer-to-peer (P2P) exchanges of underutilized assets. As a model, the sharing economy has been expected to make significant contributions to sustainability, providing new opportunities for entrepreneurship, more sustainable use of resources, and consumer co-operation in tight economic networks. However, in recent years, digital platforms have turned into the most important actors in the global sharing economy, turning global corporations, such as AirBnB, Booking, or TripAdvisor into intermediaries controlling and profiting from most transactions. Focused on accommodation, this paper conceptualizes the sharing economy in comparison to the wider collaborative economy, and discusses its social, economic, environmental, and political impacts in comparison to the sustainable development goals. It concludes that the sharing economy has great potential to make very significant contributions to sustainability, though the model is increasingly being replaced by the collaborative economy, which performs as an extension and acceleration of neoliberal economic practices

Lands Council, Karuk Tribe, and the Great Environmental Divide in the Ninth Circuit

The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, the nation’s largest appellate court, with jurisdiction over 15 judicial districts and 61 million people—almost 20 percent of the nation’s population—spans from Alaska to Arizona, from Montana to Hawaii. The Ninth Circuit has a reputation for being an environmentally sensitive court, but the court is as diverse as the terrain over which it has jurisdiction. Due to its size, the court’s en banc reviews do not include all 29 judges but instead only panels of 11. Thus, Ninth Circuit en banc panels can reflect the kind of diversity of opinion they aim to reduce. Recently, the two en banc decisions discussed in this article—Lands Council v. McNair and Karuk Tribe of California v. U.S. Forest Service—displayed the court’s apparently schizophrenic approach to review of agency environmental decision-making. A unanimous court in Lands Council called for more deference to Forest Service decisions favoring timber harvests, while the Karuk Tribe majority, with barely a reference to Lands Council, gave close scrutiny to the Forest Service’s interpretation of the Endangered Species Act. The latter decision prompted a bitter dissent from the author of Lands Council, Judge Milan Smith, which seemed to be more of a political diatribe than legal criticism and may have been aimed at attracting the attention of the U.S. Supreme Court. Although the varying results of the two cases can be reconciled, we think that they epitomize a deep philosophical rift within the court on environmental issues, and we include an appendix suggesting to litigators on which side of the environmental divide certain Ninth Circuit judges may fall