Environmentally sustainable tourism: International and Hungarian relations

Compliance with the principles of sustainability is now a general requirement with respect to any tourism strategy, tourism policy or management. Much has been written about the issue of sustainability and its relationship to tourism management and development. Still, their actual relationship is not always clear, and whilst a number of methodologies profess to be sustainable, there is no clear statement as to how that can be achieved. It is generally accepted, irrespective of the sustainability model used, that there are three key components or strands to sustainability: economic, social and environmental. It is in working towards a balance between the competing demands of all three components that progress towards sustainability can be achieved. One should never forget that in the field of tourism, visitors also have a significant impact on all three strands. For destination management to be sustainable, it needs to address all the economic, social and environmental issues of a particular area. A number of methodologies have been put forward in an attempt to ensure that tourism-related activities are carried out in a sustainable manner. Destination management that follows an accepted process and/or deals effectively with a majority of the key components can be considered sustainable. An action plan or process that does not clearly address the core components of economic, social and environmental well-being or does not pursue a majority of the process components identified in the process framework document presented on the website is unlikely to have sustainability as a core principle. ---------------------------------------- A turisztikai stratégiákra, turizmuspolitikára vagy menedzsmentre vonatkozóan jelenleg már általánosan elvárt igény a fenntarthatóság figyelembe vétele. Bár a legtöbb megközelítés általánosságban foglalkozik a kérdéssel, a kapcsolat és a célok elérhetÅ‘sége nem mindig világos. Ãltalánosan elfogadott, hogy a fenntarthatóság három kulcseleme jelölhetÅ‘ ki: gazdasági, társadalmi és környezeti. Ezek arányainak figyelembevételével közelíthetünk eredményesen a fenntarthatósági célok irányába. Mindenképpen figyelembe kell venni, hogy a turizmusban a látogatónak mind a három tényezÅ‘re hatása van. A desztináció-menedzsmentben mind a három fÅ‘ tényezÅ‘re erÅ‘s figyelemmel kell lenni. A turisztikai fejlesztéseket és célokat fenntartható módon kell elérni. A desztináció-menedzsmentben tehát ezeket a folyamatokat és kulcselemeket fenntartható módon kell figyelembe venni. Az akcióterveknek és folyamatoknak, illetve magának a turizmusszektor fejlÅ‘désének olyan üteműnek kell lennie, hogy a megvalósulást az adott desztináció képes legyen kedvezÅ‘tlen társadalmi és környezeti változások nélkül befogadni. A fenntarthatóság megteremtésében több innovációs lehetÅ‘ség is áll a turizmus elÅ‘tt termékinnováció: új, a környezeti elveket figyelembe vevÅ‘ turisztikai termékek kialakítása, pl. ökotúrák; folyamat-innováció: melyben a szolgáltatások, tevékenységek működési folyamatait alakítják át a környezetet kevésbé terhelÅ‘ technológiákra; menedzsment-innováció: amelyben a vállalkozások és szervezetek munkatársaikat, a helyi lakosságot és a turistákat is bevonják a környezetet kevésbé terhelÅ‘ lehetÅ‘ségek megteremtésébe. Ebben a komplexitásban a Fenntarthatósági Érték Térkép/Modell egy nagyon elÅ‘nyösen használható módszer a turizmus területi és létesítményi tervezésében Magyarországon és külföldön egyaránt.tourism, sustainable development, environment, turizmus, fenntartható fejlÅ‘dés, környezet, Community/Rural/Urban Development, Environmental Economics and Policy,

ENVIRONMENTALISM AND SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT FROM THE POINT OF VIEW OF TOURISM

As a consequence of the rapid growth of the tourism sector, special emphasis is placed on destinations and tourism products connected to or based on certain physical and environmental factors. However, the negative environmental consequences of tourism are, in many cases, overemphasised to the social and/or economic elements of sustainable development. Thus, it is important to find an adequate balance of the elements mentioned above within tourism development in order to achieve an optimal way of fulfilling all requirements of sustainable development. In order to this, a potential method is introduced by applying the Sustainability Value Map, developed originally for buildings and urban development projects, to the evaluation of sustainable tourism products. This method implies further questions arisen concerning the selection of the right set of indicators and the importance of local or regional issues. Using it as a tool, it may promote the process of holistic tourism planning and development.environmentalism, sustainable tourism, environmental impacts, sustainability value map

Inside Job. First-person Documentary in Trauma Cinema: "Balkan Champion" (2006)

Owing to the disappearance of grand narratives in postmodernism, contemporary documentary has become concerned with personal and collective historical traumas. This paper focuses on the documentary filmmaker’s challenge concerning the treatment of traumatic experience and the re-construction of historical events. It examines the filmmaker’s position in her own film and her attitude towards her subjects in documentaries on historical and personal trauma in the framework of a case study. The film analysed is Balkan Champion (2006), which launched a new trend in Hungarian documentary cinema, touching on sensitive issues in the collective memory of the nation that include the striking, controversial involvement of the fi lmmaker herself. Réka Kincses has made an empathic but highly critical portrait of her own father, the one-time political leader of the Hungarian ethnic minority in Romania, which evolved into a portrait of the interethnic conflicts between Romanians and Hungarians, and the political confl icts arising from the Eastern European transition from communist dictatorship to democracy, as well as their traumatic consequences on the life of an ethnic Hungarian family in Romania. Th e fi lmmaker not only confronts her father with his own failure both as a politician and a father, but also challenges her mother’s chauvinism and careerism. The parents’ opinion about and emotional reactions to the Romanian ethnic majority represent the long-term eff ect of the historical trauma of the treaty of Versailles (1921) and the wounds this left  on the collective psyche of the Hungarian nation. A close analysis demonstrates that, on the one hand, the filmmaker’s first-person interactive techniques helped to reveal the repeated ideological, behavioural and emotional patterns rooted in the historical traumas of Hungarian ethnic minority groups in Romania; on the other hand, these techniques prove to be controversial due to the director’s constant shifting between positions outside and inside her own family and her refusal to take the responsibility that the inside position would involve

Multiscale modeling of biomolecular systems

The entire dissertation/thesis text is included in the research.pdf file; the official abstract appears in the short.pdf file (which also appears in the research.pdf); a non-technical general description, or public abstract, appears in the public.pdf file.Title from title screen of research.pdf file (viewed on February 14, 2008)Vita.Thesis (Ph. D.) University of Missouri-Columbia 2007.Studies of structure-function relationships in biomolecular systems require to follow nanometersize systems on time scales spanning from pico- to micro-seconds, while maintaining atomic scale spatial resolution in all-atom molecular dynamics (MD) simulations. In this work we propose new methods to investigate the following, intrinsically multiscale problems: (i) theoretical prediction of optical and spectral properties of pigment-protein complexes, (ii) reconstruction of potential of mean force and its corresponding diffusion coefficient from non-equilibrium molecular dynamics simulations, (iii) transport of potassium ion through the Gramicidin A channel and of glycerol through the GlpF channel, and (iv) prediction of the species-dependent oligomerization state of the light harvesting antenna complexes. The main novelty of these methods is that they rely only on the high resolution atomic structure of the biomolecular system. Therefore, they have not only explanatory, but predictive power as well.Includes bibliographical reference

Area-dependent quantum field theory

Area-dependent quantum field theory is a modification of two-dimensional topological quantum field theory, where one equips each connected component of a bordism with a positive real number—interpreted as area—which behaves additively under glueing. As opposed to topological theories, in area-dependent theories the state spaces can be infinite-dimensional. We introduce the notion of regularised Frobenius algebras in Hilbert spaces and show that area-dependent theories are in one-to-one correspondence to commutative regularised Frobenius algebras. We also provide a state sum construction for area-dependent theories. Our main example is two-dimensional Yang–Mills theory with compact gauge group, which we treat in detail

Electrochemistry of Selected Lanthanides in FLiBe and Possibilities of their Recovery on Reactive Electrode

AbstractAmong other applications, electrochemical based separation of actinides and lanthanides from molten salt media seems to be suitable method for reprocessing of spent nuclear fuel in proposed future types of nuclear reactors such as Molten Salt Reactor. One of the most interesting features of the MSR concept is a circulation of liquid molten fluoride fuel mixture. It allows the fuel to be continuously (“on-line”) reprocessed as it is necessary for continuous reactor operation. The pyrochemical separation processes seem suitable for the “on-line” reprocessing technology and electrochemical separations are one of the most promising methods for separation of fissile material and fission products. This work is focused on electrochemical behaviour of several lanthanides (Sm, Gd) in FLiBe on inert (Mo, Mo) and reactive (Ni) electrodes. Electrochemical behaviour was studied by cyclic voltammetry and in the case of gadolinium, electrolytic product was analysed by SEM-EDX analysis. Specific interactions between rare earth elements and polymer-like structure of Be-based melt were taken into account and experimental results are interpreted. Evaluation of possibilities of lanthanides recovery on reactive electrode (Ni) is presented

Encyclopedic Memory: Long-Term Memory Capacity for Knowledge Vocabulary in Middle School

This article is a synthesis of unpublished and published experiments showing that elementary memory scores (words and pictures immediate recall; delayed recall, recognition), which are very sensitive to aging and in pharmacological protocols, have little or no correlation with school achievement. The alternative assumption developed is that school achievement strongly depends on the long-term memory of scholastic knowledge (history, literature, sciences, maths, etc), called encyclopedic memory.A longitudinal study from the grade 6 to the grade 9 of a cohort of eight classes of a French college, was undertaken in order to observe the implication of the encyclopedic vocabulary (i.e. Julius Caesar, Manhattan, Shangaï, Uranus, vector) in school performance. An inventory in the school textbooks gives approximately 6000 encyclopedic words in grade 6, to 24000 in grade 9. The encyclopedic storage capacity was estimated at the end of each year by a multiple-choice questionnaire with random samples of words (800 items; 8 subject subjects). The results show an estimation of 2500 words acquired at the end of grade 6, to 17000 at the end of the grade 9. The correlations are from .61 to .72 between the score of encyclopedic memory and the average school grades