An analysis of the vocabulary of eight fifth grade geography books

Thesis (Ed.M.)--Boston Universit

Critical Success Factors in the Promotion of Sustainable Rural Tourism by Destination Marketing Organisations: A Study of Ballyhoura Fáilte

With the Irish tourism industry maturing, destination marketing organisations (DMOs) must meet tourists’ changing expectations. For rural tourism destinations, the challenge lies in ensuring that they obtain a position of sustainability in the Irish tourism industry (Department of Arts, Heritage and Gaeltacht, 2011). Due to the highly volatile nature of the Irish rural tourism industry, treating rural tourism like any other product does not comply with the new approach to destination marketing management, which considers the resources available, the environment, the tourist, and the residents themselves (Buhalis, 2000; Pike, 2008). The aim of this study is to carry out a comprehensive review of extant literature to identify the critical success factors in destination marketing management and assess how these success factors compare with the practice of destination marketing management by a small rural destination management organisation (DMO) in Ireland, namely Ballyhoura Fáilte. The paper finds that Ballyhoura Fáilte has been largely successful in identifying and carrying out the CSF activities that are vital to drive strategy and ensure sustainable competitive advantage. This paper also proposes a full set of Critical Success Factors (CSFs), or essential tasks, important for ensuring the long-term success of DMOs

An exploration of the cognitive processes of design teams to inform design education and practice

While design is associated with novelty and creativity, few studies have explored the cognitive processes employed during team interactions. Design practice is collaborative where designers work in multidisciplinary teams. Along with the cognitive skills involved in designing, designers also need skills to work in teams, share information, and negotiate decisions. The aim of this study is to understand the cognitive processes used by design teams during the early phases of product design.  This study uses case studies and applies content analysis to examine the conversations of design teams during the problem definition, ideation, and concept development phases of the design process. Creativity has been described in terms of sudden bursts of ideas described as creative leaps and is associated with creative thinking. The findings in this study shows that while creative thinking is essential to creative teams, other cognitive modes such as knowledge processing, critical thinking, and metacognition are engaged in more frequently.  The emphasis of each cognitive process also varies depending on the phase of the design process. These findings have implications for how design students are educated, the skills required and how we promote creativity in design teams

Influence of cavity lifetime on high-finesse microcavity two-photon absorption photodetectors

For optical pulse incidence as compared with continuous-wave incidence, the enhancement of two-photon absorption inside a high-finesse planar microcavity is reduced, the pulse inside the cavity and the cavity spectrum are broadened. The analysis shows that for transform-limited pulse incidence, the true pulsewidth and the cavity frequency resolution can be estimated if the cavity lifetime or the cavity bandwidth has been obtained from the reflection or transmission spectrum of the cavit

Design and fabrication of highly efficient non-linear optical devices for implementing high-speed optical processing

We present the design and fabrication of micro-cavity semiconductor devices for enhanced Two-Photon-Absorption response, and demonstrate the use of these devices for implementing sensitive autocorrelation measurements on pico-second optical pulses

High-sensitivity two-photon absorption microcavity autocorrelator

A GaAs-AlAs microcavity device has been used as a photodetector in an autocorrelator for measuring the temporal pulsewidth of 1.5-/spl mu/m optical pulses. Enhancement of the two-photon absorption photocurrent due to the microcavity structure results in an autocorrelation (average power times peak power) sensitivity of 9.3/spl times/10/sup -4/ (mW)/sup 2/, which represents two orders of magnitude improvement when compared with conventional autocorrelators

Two-photon absorption in microcavities for optical autocorrelation and sampling

We have designed novel semiconductor microcavity structures for the enhancement of the two-photon absorption (TPA) photocurrent. We report a TPA autocorrelation technique for short optical pulses that uses the microcavity structure instead of a second harmonic generation crystal. Knowledge of these characteristics is important for implementation in applications such as optical switching and sampling in optical time division multiplexed (OTDM) communications systems