Unlocking the Benefits of Outbound Incentive Travel: A Comprehensive Review Study

Purpose The objective of this research was to contribute to the literature on incentive travel programs and provide a foundation for future research in this area. To highlight the social implications of outbound incentive travel programs, including their potential impact on employee well-being, customer relationships, tourism, economic development, and the environment. Theoretical Framework A framework for knowledge generation and theory development in incentive travel is attempted through the literature review.   Design/ Method / approach A chronological analysis of the literature on incentive travel and event tourism is the focal point of this study. With reference to seminal contributions, key terms and concepts are underlined. Journals, publications, and research pertaining to this topic have been reviewed using content analysis. Each article was subjected to a series of content analyses, where the type of content, nature of the research, theme and sub-theme, publication year, type of journals, area or city focus, type of data and analysis tool used, respondent and author profile were all taken into consideration. A total of 45 papers were categorized according to the year they were published and then analyzed using the descriptive analysis approach. Findings The findings of the study are likely to provide a comprehensive understanding of outbound incentive travel programs and their potential benefits and challenges, and offer practical guidance for organizations looking to implement these programs in a responsible and effective manner.   Research, Practical & Social implications The study may identify gaps in the existing literature on outbound incentive travel programs, highlighting areas for future research and exploration.   Originality/ value the study has the potential to contribute to both academic research and practical applications related to outbound incentive travel programs, and may have broader implications for organizational culture, values, and social responsibility

Voice-preserving Zero-shot Multiple Accent Conversion

Most people who have tried to learn a foreign language would have experienced difficulties understanding or speaking with a native speaker's accent. For native speakers, understanding or speaking a new accent is likewise a difficult task. An accent conversion system that changes a speaker's accent but preserves that speaker's voice identity, such as timbre and pitch, has the potential for a range of applications, such as communication, language learning, and entertainment. Existing accent conversion models tend to change the speaker identity and accent at the same time. Here, we use adversarial learning to disentangle accent dependent features while retaining other acoustic characteristics. What sets our work apart from existing accent conversion models is the capability to convert an unseen speaker's utterance to multiple accents while preserving its original voice identity. Subjective evaluations show that our model generates audio that sound closer to the target accent and like the original speaker.Comment: Submitted to IEEE ICASSP 202

Optimization of structural and optical properties of sputter deposited TiO2 thin films by controlling deposition parameters

735-739Titanium oxide (TiO2) thin films have been deposited onto highly cleaned soda lime glass substrates by DC magnetron reactive sputtering system. The Ti target with purity 99.99% is sputtered by argon gas in the sputtering chamber. Oxygen gas with purity 99.99% is introduced during the deposition process into the sputtering chamber as reactive gas for the synthesis of titanium oxide. Structural and optical properties of TiO2 thin films have been characterized by X-ray diffraction (XRD), Raman spectroscopy and UV-Vis. spectroscopy. The effect of substrate temperature and sputtering power on the optical properties of TiO2 thin films has been studied. The XRD and Raman spectroscopy of as-deposited films are used to study the structural properties of TiO2 as a function of substrate temperature and sputtered power. The structural studies show the crystalline nature of TiO2 thin films. The narrowing of energy band gap of sputtered deposited TiO2thin films was studied using UV-Vis. spectroscopy

Advances in Molecular Quantum Chemistry Contained in the Q-Chem 4 Program Package

A summary of the technical advances that are incorporated in the fourth major release of the Q-Chem quantum chemistry program is provided, covering approximately the last seven years. These include developments in density functional theory methods and algorithms, nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) property evaluation, coupled cluster and perturbation theories, methods for electronically excited and open-shell species, tools for treating extended environments, algorithms for walking on potential surfaces, analysis tools, energy and electron transfer modelling, parallel computing capabilities, and graphical user interfaces. In addition, a selection of example case studies that illustrate these capabilities is given. These include extensive benchmarks of the comparative accuracy of modern density functionals for bonded and non-bonded interactions, tests of attenuated second order Møller–Plesset (MP2) methods for intermolecular interactions, a variety of parallel performance benchmarks, and tests of the accuracy of implicit solvation models. Some specific chemical examples include calculations on the strongly correlated Cr2 dimer, exploring zeolite-catalysed ethane dehydrogenation, energy decomposition analysis of a charged ter-molecular complex arising from glycerol photoionisation, and natural transition orbitals for a Frenkel exciton state in a nine-unit model of a self-assembling nanotube

Software for the frontiers of quantum chemistry:An overview of developments in the Q-Chem 5 package

This article summarizes technical advances contained in the fifth major release of the Q-Chem quantum chemistry program package, covering developments since 2015. A comprehensive library of exchange–correlation functionals, along with a suite of correlated many-body methods, continues to be a hallmark of the Q-Chem software. The many-body methods include novel variants of both coupled-cluster and configuration-interaction approaches along with methods based on the algebraic diagrammatic construction and variational reduced density-matrix methods. Methods highlighted in Q-Chem 5 include a suite of tools for modeling core-level spectroscopy, methods for describing metastable resonances, methods for computing vibronic spectra, the nuclear–electronic orbital method, and several different energy decomposition analysis techniques. High-performance capabilities including multithreaded parallelism and support for calculations on graphics processing units are described. Q-Chem boasts a community of well over 100 active academic developers, and the continuing evolution of the software is supported by an “open teamware” model and an increasingly modular design

Finishing the euchromatic sequence of the human genome

The sequence of the human genome encodes the genetic instructions for human physiology, as well as rich information about human evolution. In 2001, the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium reported a draft sequence of the euchromatic portion of the human genome. Since then, the international collaboration has worked to convert this draft into a genome sequence with high accuracy and nearly complete coverage. Here, we report the result of this finishing process. The current genome sequence (Build 35) contains 2.85 billion nucleotides interrupted by only 341 gaps. It covers ∼99% of the euchromatic genome and is accurate to an error rate of ∼1 event per 100,000 bases. Many of the remaining euchromatic gaps are associated with segmental duplications and will require focused work with new methods. The near-complete sequence, the first for a vertebrate, greatly improves the precision of biological analyses of the human genome including studies of gene number, birth and death. Notably, the human enome seems to encode only 20,000-25,000 protein-coding genes. The genome sequence reported here should serve as a firm foundation for biomedical research in the decades ahead

Dipole moments and polarizabilities of some small radicals using constrained variational response to Fock-space multi-reference coupled-cluster theory

In this letter, we present dipole moments and polarizabilities of some open-shell doublet radicals, obtained analytically using constrained variational response to Fock-space (FS) multi-reference (MR) coupled cluster (CC) theory. These radicals can be treated as electron attached (EA) states of the corresponding closed-shell cations. Additionally, we also report analytical polarizabilities of some doublet radicals, which can be considered as ionized (IP) states of the corresponding anions. We compare our results with finite field FSMRCC response and the available benchmark results

Extended coupled-cluster approach for magnetizabilities of small molecules

Extended coupled-cluster method has emerged as a compact method for study of energies and electric properties of molecules and extended systems. In this letter, we present a linear response to the above method for study of magnetizabilities of small test molecules. Specifically, we have presented results of diamagnetic and paramagnetic magnetizabilities of HF and CO in appropriate basis sets and studied the gauge dependence and basis set dependence of the properties evaluated through the above method. The results have been compared with SCF and NCC values, as well as experimental values

First- and second-order electrical properties computed at the FSMRCCSD level for excited states of closed-shell molecules using the constrained-variational approach

Fock space multireference coupled-cluster (FSMRCC) method emerged as an efficient tool to describe the electronic structure of nearly degenerate cases. Development of linear response has been one of the challenging problems in FSMRCC due to the multiple-root nature of the effective Hamiltonian. A response from any of the roots would span the space for getting the properties. Hence, all roots perturbed by the external field would proliferate the excited states. We recently developed the FSMRCC method for the efficient evaluation of analytic response properties using a constrained variation approach. In this paper, we present analytic dipole moments and polarizabilities of H2O, O3, and CH+ molecules in low-lying excited states along with brief discussion of singlet triplet decoupling of (1,1) sector of FSMRCC resulting from spin adaptation