Implementing Service-learning to the Information Systems and Technology Management Program: A study of an Undergraduate Capstone Course

Service-learning has been identified as an extremely valuable educational tool and applied to different disciplines and areas, but literature review on service learning has indicated that service-learning is little used in Information Systems education. This paper presents our design and development of a service-learning capstone course for graduating college seniors enrolled in an Information Systems and Technology Management program. A conceptual model is proposed to guide the implementation of service-learning into such a course. Following this model, we discuss our experiences and reflections on designing the course and particularly, how to assess students\u27 performance

Sustainable tourism, deforestation and growth: a case for Malaysia

Sustainable tourism perceived as a significant driver of income and creates job opportunities for local communities, which, as a result, deliver significant incentives to preserve biodiversity. Preserving the quality of environment becomes the prime concern to attract more tourists, which as a result, increase funds for biodiversity conservation. Massive increase in tourism together with limited environmental resources capacity, there is an urgent need to raise the awareness on the issue of biodiversity for tourism development. For the purpose of this research, we examine the impact and economic growth on sustainable tourism for the period 1996 – 2012 in Malaysia. For the purpose of this study, we construct a Sustainable Tourism Index (STI) and employed few methods which are the Ordinary Least Squares (OLS), Canonical cointegrating regression (CCR), Dynamic OLS (DOLS) and Fully-Modified OLS (FMOLS) methods to test the long-run model of sustainable tourism. Generally, our results found that economic growth and mitigating do contribute to sustainable tourism in Malaysia

“Doing well” by “doing good”? Evidence from tourism-related firms in four South Asia countries

This study explores the corporate giving and financial performance nexus in tourism-related firms from four South Asia countries. Specifically, this study investigates if there exists an inverse U-shaped link between corporate giving and financial performance and assesses the potential bi-directional relationship between these two variables. Results generated from system-GMM estimator reveal that the effects of corporate giving on both ROA and Tobin’s Q are curvilinear. In particular, an inverse U-shaped relationship is observed, implying that firms are rewarded for their corporate giving engagement, which denotes “doing-good” leads to “doing well,” within a certain limit. Interestingly, this study also finds evidence that the firms which perform well financially are shown to engage less in corporate giving. Specifically, “doing-well” firms are shown to lead to lower level of “doing good,” supporting the management opportunity hypothesis. This study has policy implications in pushing for further CSR initiatives in other industries and emerging markets

The impact of the dimensions of environmental performance on firm performance in travel and tourism industry

This study investigates the impact of the aggregate and individual dimensions of environmental performance (EP) on financial performance (FP), based on a dataset covering the travel and tourism industry (airlines, casinos, hotels, and restaurants) across different economic regions over the period 2003–2014. The results reveal that EP positively affects the FP in the hotel industry when aggregate EP is used. When individual dimensions of EP are considered, resource reduction is found to positively (negatively) affect the performance in the hotel (airline) industry, while product innovation positively affects the performance in the restaurant industry. Hence, the trade-off effect seems to be dominant in the airline industry, and the ‘heterogeneous resources and reputation-building’ hypothesis is evident in both the hotel and restaurant industries. In addition, in general, the findings support the positive moderating effect of slack resources on the relationship between the individual dimensions of EP and FP in the travel and tourism industry, and, hence, are supportive of the slack resources hypothesis. These effects, however, vary depending on the travel and tourism industry under investigation

Enhancing Security Patch Identification by Capturing Structures in Commits

With the rapid increasing number of open source software (OSS), the majority of the software vulnerabilities in the open source components are fixed silently, which leads to the deployed software that integrated them being unable to get a timely update. Hence, it is critical to design a security patch identification system to ensure the security of the utilized software. However, most of the existing works for security patch identification just consider the changed code and the commit message of a commit as a flat sequence of tokens with simple neural networks to learn its semantics, while the structure information is ignored. To address these limitations, in this paper, we propose our well-designed approach E-SPI, which extracts the structure information hidden in a commit for effective identification. Specifically, it consists of the code change encoder to extract the syntactic of the changed code with the BiLSTM to learn the code representation and the message encoder to construct the dependency graph for the commit message with the graph neural network (GNN) to learn the message representation. We further enhance the code change encoder by embedding contextual information related to the changed code. To demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, we conduct the extensive experiments against six state-of-the-art approaches on the existing dataset and from the real deployment environment. The experimental results confirm that our approach can significantly outperform current state-of-the-art baselines

Development of ListeriaBase and comparative analysis of Listeria monocytogenes

Background: Listeria consists of both pathogenic and non-pathogenic species. Reports of similarities between the genomic content between some pathogenic and non-pathogenic species necessitates the investigation of these species at the genomic level to understand the evolution of virulence-associated genes. With Listeria genome data growing exponentially, comparative genomic analysis may give better insights into evolution, genetics and phylogeny of Listeria spp., leading to better management of the diseases caused by them. Description: With this motivation, we have developed ListeriaBase, a web Listeria genomic resource and analysis platform to facilitate comparative analysis of Listeria spp. ListeriaBase currently houses 850,402 protein-coding genes, 18,113 RNAs and 15,576 tRNAs from 285 genome sequences of different Listeria strains. An AJAX-based real time search system implemented in ListeriaBase facilitates searching of this huge genomic data. Our in-house designed comparative analysis tools such as Pairwise Genome Comparison (PGC) tool allowing comparison between two genomes, Pathogenomics Profiling Tool (PathoProT) for comparing the virulence genes, and ListeriaTree for phylogenic classification, were customized and incorporated in ListeriaBase facilitating comparative genomic analysis of Listeria spp. Interestingly, we identified a unique genomic feature in the L. monocytogenes genomes in our analysis. The Auto protein sequences of the serotype 4 and the non-serotype 4 strains of L. monocytogenes possessed unique sequence signatures that can differentiate the two groups. We propose that the aut gene may be a potential gene marker for differentiating the serotype 4 strains from other serotypes of L. monocytogenes. Conclusions: ListeriaBase is a useful resource and analysis platform that can facilitate comparative analysis of Listeria for the scientific communities. We have successfully demonstrated some key utilities of ListeriaBase. The knowledge that we obtained in the analyses of L. monocytogenes may be important for functional works of this human pathogen in future. ListeriaBase is currently available at http://listeria.um.edu.my

Does biodiversity attract the number of tourist arrivals? a cross-country analysis

It has been recognized that biodiversity is vital for tourism. Biodiversity become the main attraction of nature tourism, for instance scuba diving, wildlife tourism and tourism in protected areas. Biodiversity can be the determining factor that influencing the tourists’ choices where to go for their next trip. In this study we analyse whether biodiversity is the attractor for international tourists’ destinations for a cross-section of 107 countries for 2013. Apart from the level of economic development, we employed three biodiversity indicators – stock of forest cover, protected areas, and number of fish species threatened as tourists’ destination choices. Further, we also included the governance indicators to account for the level of risk and safety offered to tourists. Our results suggest that the level of economic development, forest area, protected areas, and number of fish species threatened, and also governance are important factors determining tourist destination choices worldwide. The results of our study clearly justify the importance of biodiversity conservation that will benefit the tourism sector and related industries

The number of tourist arrivals, governance and their impact on threatened bird species: worldwide evidence

The number of international tourist arrivals is crucial for the tourism sector. However, there are positive and negative sides of tourism. Unsustainable tourism will result in the destruction of the forest and consequently led to biodiversity loss. The great benefits of forest which is a home for a wide variety of animals and plants which help to stored carbon, preventing the risk of flood and drought to occur, influencing climate change, stabilizing soils as well as providing food and a place for the indigenous people to live. As long as these benefits are being concerned, the role of international community is needed to prevent them from any harm in the future. The government of both the developed and developing nations recognized the importance of sustainable biodiversity for the national ecosystem as well as to the global environment. In this study we also investigate the response of biodiversity loss (measured by the number of threatened bird species on six measures of governance: voice and accountability, political stability and absence of violence, government effectiveness, regulatory quality, rule of law, and control of corruption. The OLS outcomes suggest that tourism exhibit positive relationship with biodiversity loss. On the other hand, the six governance indicators suggest that good governance reduces biodiversity loss. Our further analysis using quantile regression estimates suggest that tourism affect positively biodiversity loss for all quantiles (0.05 0.25 0.50 0.75 0.90 0.95); while governance affect negatively biodiversity loss only at certain quartiles. One main policy implication of this study is that sustainable tourism is important to mitigate biodiversity loss, and effort for biodiversity conservation is supported by this study