A three-way partnership model of tourism graduate employability

Abstract: The aim of this paper presentation is to show the employability of tourism graduates, using a three-way perspective. The concept of employability differs depending on the context, as well as the views of the people making employment decisions and those seeking employment. Graduates are not always employable, because they lack certain knowledge, skills, employability attributes, and practical work experience. Therefore, it has become imperative to ensure an adequate level of preparedness of tourism graduates, including their employability attributes, to enhance their chances of securing and sustaining employment in the tourism industry. The researcher adopted a sequential explanatory mixed method, which entailed combining quantitative and qualitative methods. The researcher conducted a quantitative survey on a purposive sample of 561 managers, supervisors and owners within the tourism industry and tourism graduates working in the tourism industry. The researcher used means, standard deviations, exploratory factor analysis and independent t-test. The qualitative research approach was applied to investigate graduate employability more in-depth. A total of twelve interviews were conducted with three academics within higher education institutions (HEIs) that offer a tourism qualification, three graduates working within the industry and three experts within the tourism industry. The researcher found a significant relationship between the professional skills, personality traits, knowledge skills and operation skill within the tourism industry. The researcher constructed a model to enhance graduate employability through a three-way perspective within the tourism industry. The model links all three partners the tourism graduate, tourism industry and Higher education institutions) that play a key role in the industry regarding the transfer of knowledge, skills and other employability attributes. The originality of this paper is that it constructed a model for the tourism industry to enhance graduate employability that links three partners, and creates further constructive debate

Determining tourism graduate employability, knowledge, skills, and competencies in a VUCA world : constructing a tourism employability model

Abstract: The aim of this study was to determine tourism graduates’ employability, knowledge, skills, and competencies in a VUCA world by constructing a tourism employability model. The concept of employability differs depending on the context, as well as the views of the people making employment decisions and those seeking employment in a VUCA world. It has become imperative to ensure an adequate level of preparedness among tourism graduates in a world dominated by technology, by understanding what the important knowledge, skills, and competencies are to enhance graduates’ chances of securing and sustaining employment in the tourism industry in South Africa..

The late Ordovician Soom Shale Lagerstȁtte: an extraordinary post-glacial fossil and sedimentary record

Fossils of the Late Ordovician Soom Shale Lagerstätte are characterized by exceptional preservation of their soft tissues in clay minerals. The low-diversity community lived in an unusual cold-water setting, dominated by anoxic bottom waters, in the immediate aftermath of the Hirnantian glaciation. Giant conodonts represented by complete tooth sets, and one with trunk musculature and liver preserved, unarmoured jawless fish, lobopods and enigmatic taxa are some of the more important fossils. Furthermore, this Lagerstätte also preserves biomineralized Ordovician taxa such as brachiopods, orthoconic nautiloids and trilobites. It is important in capturing the only known examples of many taxa, extending temporal ranges of others and providing a unique glimpse of a post-glacial refugium, at a time when other Lagerstätten are unknown

Bosonization in d=2 from finite chiral determinants with a Gauss decomposition

We show how to bosonize two-dimensional non-abelian models using finite chiral determinants calculated from a Gauss decomposition. The calculation is quite straightforward and hardly more involved than for the abelian case. In particular, the counterterm $A\bar A$, which is normally motivated from gauge invariance and then added by hand, appears naturally in this approach.Comment: 4 pages, Revte

Tuberculosis research in South Africa over the past 30 years: From bench to bedside

The South African Medical Research Council Centre for Tuberculosis Research has a rich history of high-impact research that has influenced our understating of this hyper-epidemic which is further exacerbated by the emergence and spread of drug-resistant forms of the disease. This review aims to summarise the past 30 years of research conducted in the Centre which has influenced the way that tuberculosis (TB) is diagnosed and treated. The review includes the development of new technologies for rapid screening of people with probable TB and the repurposing of human diagnostics for wildlife conservation

Post-viral idiopathic purpura fulminans is associated with inherited thrombophilia and anti-cardiolipin antibodies

IntroductionIdiopathic purpura fulminans (IPF) is a rare and severe coagulation disorder, associated with transient anti-protein S (anti-PS) antibodies in the context of post-viral infection such as varicella. Anti-protein S antibodies are frequently found in the context of varicella, in contrast with the rarity of IPF. Other factors such as anti-phospholipid antibodies (APL) and inherited thrombophilia may be associated with severe vascular complication.MethodThis is an ancillary study of a French multicenter retrospective series and systematic review of literature. We analyzed patients who were tested for inherited thrombophilia, namely antithrombin, protein C, protein S deficiency; prothrombin gene G20210A polymorphism (FII:G20210A),Factor V R506Q polymorphism (FV:R506Q); and/or for APL (lupus anticoagulant (LA), anti-cardiolipin antibodies (ACL), or anti-beta 2-GPI antibodies (Aβ2GP1).ResultsAmong the 25 patients tested for inherited thrombophilia, 7 (28%) had positive results. Three had FV R506Q, two FII:G20210A, one compound heterozygote FV:R506Q associated to FII:G20210A, and one protein C deficiency. APL testing was performed in 32 patients. It was positive in 19 patients (59%): 17 ACL (53%), 5 LA (16%), 4 Aβ2GP1 (13%). The risk of severe complications was not associated with presence of inherited thrombophilia or APL presence, with RR: 0.8 [95% CI: 0.37–1.71], p = 1 and RR: 0.7 [95% CI: 0.33–1.51], p = 0.39, respectively. We found a high prevalence of inherited thrombophilia or APL in a population of patients with IPF. However, we do not find an association with the occurrence of severe vascular complications or venous thromboembolism

Inertial Mass of a Vortex in Cuprate Superconductors

We present here a calculation of the inertial mass of a moving vortex in cuprate superconductors. This is a poorly known basic quantity of obvious interest in vortex dynamics. The motion of a vortex causes a dipolar density distortion and an associated electric field which is screened. The energy cost of the density distortion as well as the related screened electric field contribute to the vortex mass, which is small because of efficient screening. As a preliminary, we present a discussion and calculation of the vortex mass using a microscopically derivable phase-only action functional for the far region which shows that the contribution from the far region is negligible, and that most of it arises from the (small) core region of the vortex. A calculation based on a phenomenological Ginzburg-Landau functional is performed in the core region. Unfortunately such a calculation is unreliable, the reasons for it are discussed. A credible calculation of the vortex mass thus requires a fully microscopic, non-coarse grained theory. This is developed, and results are presented for a s-wave BCS like gap, with parameters appropriate to the cuprates. The mass, about 0.5 $m_e$ per layer, for magnetic field along the $c$ axis, arises from deformation of quasiparticle states bound in the core, and screening effects mentioned above. We discuss earlier results, possible extensions to d-wave symmetry, and observability of effects dependent on the inertial mass.Comment: 27 pages, Latex, 3 figures available on request, to appear in Physical Review

Sequence-based prediction for vaccine strain selection and identification of antigenic variability in foot-and-mouth disease virus

Identifying when past exposure to an infectious disease will protect against newly emerging strains is central to understanding the spread and the severity of epidemics, but the prediction of viral cross-protection remains an important unsolved problem. For foot-and-mouth disease virus (FMDV) research in particular, improved methods for predicting this cross-protection are critical for predicting the severity of outbreaks within endemic settings where multiple serotypes and subtypes commonly co-circulate, as well as for deciding whether appropriate vaccine(s) exist and how much they could mitigate the effects of any outbreak. To identify antigenic relationships and their predictors, we used linear mixed effects models to account for variation in pairwise cross-neutralization titres using only viral sequences and structural data. We identified those substitutions in surface-exposed structural proteins that are correlates of loss of cross-reactivity. These allowed prediction of both the best vaccine match for any single virus and the breadth of coverage of new vaccine candidates from their capsid sequences as effectively as or better than serology. Sub-sequences chosen by the model-building process all contained sites that are known epitopes on other serotypes. Furthermore, for the SAT1 serotype, for which epitopes have never previously been identified, we provide strong evidence - by controlling for phylogenetic structure - for the presence of three epitopes across a panel of viruses and quantify the relative significance of some individual residues in determining cross-neutralization. Identifying and quantifying the importance of sites that predict viral strain cross-reactivity not just for single viruses but across entire serotypes can help in the design of vaccines with better targeting and broader coverage. These techniques can be generalized to any infectious agents where cross-reactivity assays have been carried out. As the parameterization uses pre-existing datasets, this approach quickly and cheaply increases both our understanding of antigenic relationships and our power to control disease