AIR TRAVEL BANKS: A VIABLE PUBLIC-PRIVATE PARTNERSHIP APPROACH TO AIRPORT ROUTE DEVELOPMENT?

Financial incentives to develop air services at smaller airports are scrutinized by regulatory authorities. This is especially true within the European Union with its new guidelines on state aid and consequent rulings on the repayment of subsidies provided by airports to airlines that violate state aid rules. Private funds used to develop air services are not state aid. For this reason, air travel banks (ATBs) might be a promising route development tool for smaller airports. This concept builds on the idea of binding monetary pledges from air transport users that constitute a revenue guarantee for new or expanded air services. This paper describes the ATB public-private partnership approach and offers advice to airport authorities and regional development agencies considering this approach to airport route development without public financing

Gender Differences In The Perception Of Expressive And Instrumental Partner Aggression

Men and women (N = 238) in the present study viewed vignettes illustrating either expressive or instrumental forms of aggression between two heterosexual partners that varied by perpetrator gender. Analyses of covariance were conducted using a 2 (respondent gender) by 2 (perpetrator gender) by 2 (expressive versus instrumental vignette) between groups design. Ratings of expressive and instrumental aggression were provided using a revised version of the Expagg questionnaire. No main or interactive effects were found for expressive Expagg ratings. A number of significant findings emerged from analyses of instrumental Expagg ratings. A significant main effect was found for aggressor gender, with male behavior characterized as more instrumental in nature regardless of participant gender or type of aggression. A significant two-way interaction between type of aggression and participant gender indicated that male respondents tended to view the acts depicted in the instrumental vignette more “accurately” than their female counterparts. Additionally, an interaction was found between respondent and aggressor gender with females providing significantly higher instrumental ratings for male perpetrators. Results were consistent with prior research demonstrating gender differences in how men and women perceive aggressive acts by opposite-sex perpetrators, and underscore the utility of aggressive typologies in understanding intimate partner violence (IPV). Areas of further study are discussed in the context of developing broad and specific interventions for aggressive behavior including IPV

An Examination Of Aggressive Responding To Visual Feedback And Physical Provocation

The present study used a modified version of the Taylor Aggression Paradigm to test whether a form of visual provocation might be more salient in producing a physically aggressive response than a physical stimulus (i.e., shock). Male and female university undergraduates were recruited to participate, and assigned to one of three conditions: accurate visual feedback (in which feedback reflected accurately the physical shock received), low visual feedback (in which feedback reflected a lower value than the physical shock received), or high visual feedback (in which feedback reflected a higher value than the physical shock received). Aggressive responses were defined by the extent to which participants chose to shock a fictitious opponent without provocation (baseline), as well as under conditions of low and high provocation. A significant main effect of the visual feedback was observed, with the low feedback condition differing significantly from the accurate and high feedback conditions. Contrary to predictions, the interaction between gender and visual feedback condition was non-significant; both males\u27 and females\u27 responses were influenced by the visual feedback. Results are discussed within the context of Social Role Theory and the impact of gender role on gender differences in aggression

Measuring the vulnerability of global airline alliances to member exits

We analyse the vulnerability of airline alliance route networks to the exit of member airlines. Vulnerability measures how easy it is to disconnect a network. The assessment is performed by applying the theory of complex networks. We compute the normalized vulnerability for Star Alliance, oneworld and SkyTeam using airline schedules data and derive a ranking of member airlines according to their share in the overall vulnerability of the respective alliance. One result of our paper is that oneworld is the most vulnerable global airline alliance, SkyTeam ranks second, followed by Star AlliancePeer ReviewedPostprint (published version

Codesharing network vulnerability of global airline alliances

Global airline alliances provide connectivity based on codesharing agreements between member airlines. An alliance member exit leads to the deletion of routes (if not operated by other members) which affects network connectivity. The paper measures the vulnerability of the codesharing network (CN) of Star Alliance, SkyTeam and oneworld, respectively, by applying the theory of complex networks. A normalized CN vulnerability metric is proposed. Using airline schedules data, a ranking of member airlines according to their share in the overall CN vulnerability is derived. The results for CNs are compared with the ones for the respective total network (TN) that includes routes with and without codesharing. The findings show that oneworld is the most vulnerable global airline alliance, SkyTeam ranks second followed by Star Alliance. The proposed graph theory approach might become a building block for a more comprehensive measurement of real world airline networksPeer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

AIR TRAVEL BANKS: A VIABLE PUBLIC-PRIVATE PARTNERSHIP APPROACH TO AIRPORT ROUTE DEVELOPMENT?

Financial incentives to develop air services at smaller airports are scrutinized by regulatory authorities. This is especially true within the European Union with its new guidelines on state aid and consequent rulings on the repayment of subsidies provided by airports to airlines that violate state aid rules. Private funds used to develop air services are not state aid. For this reason, air travel banks (ATBs) might be a promising route development tool for smaller airports. This concept builds on the idea of binding monetary pledges from air transport users that constitute a revenue guarantee for new or expanded air services. This paper describes the ATB public-private partnership approach and offers advice to airport authorities and regional development agencies considering this approach to airport route development without public financing

Scalable and accurate causality tracking for eventually consistent stores

Lecture Notes in Computer Science 8460, 2014In cloud computing environments, data storage systems often rely on optimistic replication to provide good performance and availability even in the presence of failures or network partitions. In this scenario, it is important to be able to accurately and efficiently identify updates executed concurrently. Current approaches to causality tracking in optimistic replication have problems with concurrent updates: they either (1) do not scale, as they require replicas to maintain information that grows linearly with the number of writes or unique clients; (2) lose information about causality, either by removing entries from client-id based version vectors or using server-id based version vectors, which cause false conflicts. We propose a new logical clock mechanism and a logical clock framework that together support a traditional key-value store API, while capturing causality in an accurate and scalable way, avoiding false conflicts. It maintains concise information per data replica, only linear on the number of replica servers, and allows data replicas to be compared and merged linear with the number of replica servers and versions.(undefined

Improving the Network Scalability of Erlang

As the number of cores grows in commodity architectures so does the likelihood of failures. A distributed actor model potentially facilitates the development of reliable and scalable software on these architectures. Key components include lightweight processes which ‘share nothing’ and hence can fail independently. Erlang is not only increasingly widely used, but the underlying actor model has been a beacon for programming language design, influencing for example Scala, Clojure and Cloud Haskell. While the Erlang distributed actor model is inherently scalable, we demonstrate that it is limited by some pragmatic factors. We address two network scalability issues here: globally registered process names must be updated on every node (virtual machine) in the system, and any Erlang nodes that communicate maintain an active connection. That is, there is a fully connected O(n2) network of n nodes. We present the design, implementation, and initial evaluation of a conservative extension of Erlang — Scalable Distributed (SD) Erlang. SD Erlang partitions the global namespace and connection network using s_groups. An s_group is a set of nodes with its own process namespace and with a fully connected network within the s_group, but only individual connections outside it. As a node may belong to more than one s_group it is possible to construct arbitrary connection topologies like trees or rings. We present an operational semantics for the s_group functions, and outline the validation of conformance between the implementation and the semantics using the QuickCheck automatic testing tool. Our preliminary evaluation in comparison with distributed Erlang shows that SD Erlang dramatically improves network scalability even if the number of global operations is tiny (0.01%). Moreover, even in the absence of global operations the reduced connection maintenance overheads mean that SD Erlang scales better beyond 80 nodes (1920 cores)

The Role of Secondary Airports for Today's Low-Cost Carrier Business Models: The European Case

One of the core characteristics of Low-Cost Carriers (LCCs) is their use of secondary and regional airports. However, nothing is fixed as the market constantly evolves and carriers modify their strategies in order to achieve growth. This paper uses the examples of Ryanair, easyJet and Norwegian to show how changes to LCC business models are affecting secondary airports across Europe. Using a content analysis, this paper first describes how airport choice factors for LCCs have evolved over the last 10 years. This is followed by a data analysis of historical and current airline network capacity to identify how LCC traffic at secondary airports is developing. The paper finds that cost, demand and efficiency are still the most important criteria for LCCs when choosing an airport to operate from. However, it also identifies that LCCs have become more interested in serving business passengers, which is why they are increasingly using primary airports (accounting for 58% of their recent capacity growth). Through the use of a selection of case airports it is finally concluded that the evolution of LCCs increases competition between primary and secondary gateways. In most cases, secondary airports are losing a significant amount of LCC traffic and only sustain flights to less important destinations. This research puts into question the future importance of secondary airports for LCCs. As not all airports have been impacted by the hybridisation of LCCs to the same extent, the results are not equally applicable to the whole European airport industry