Tourism curriculum in the University Sector: Does it meet future requirements? Evidence from Australia

In the contemporary competitive and globally connected marketplace, factors that guaranteed business success in the past may be of limited relevance in the future. Within the paradigms of today’s business, many successful operators continually introduce new products and services to maintain their market leadership position. Whilst firms in the tourism industry seek to maintain competitive position through policy planning, strategic marketing, budgeting and R&D, tourism education providers occupy a key position by seeking to enhance the skill levels of management and employees, both present and future. This paper reviews some Australian tourism and hospitality education programmes and course curriculum and briefly compares them with some trends in other English-speaking countries. The research explores tourism industry demand, trainees’ expectations and additionally identifies gaps and opportunities for the future curriculum content. The findings may, therefore, assist tourism programme providers with a broader perspective with which to shape future tourism courses

Fermionic Symmetry Protected Topological Phases and Cobordisms

It has been proposed recently that interacting Symmetry Protected Topological (SPT) phases can be classified using cobordism theory. We test this proposal in the case of fermionic SPT phases with Z/2 symmetry, where Z/2 is either time-reversal or an internal symmetry. We find that cobordism classification correctly describes all known fermionic SPT phases in space dimension less than or equal to 3 and also predicts that all such phases can be realized by free fermions. In higher dimensions we predict the existence of inherently interacting fermionic SPT phases.Comment: 26 pages, new references added and a new section on decorated domain walls in v

Satisfiers and dissatisfiers for international vocational education students: A case study using narrative frames

While the satisfaction of international students is frequently surveyed, much of this research is based on a very limited range of closed-item data collection methods, producing findings that partially reflect the researchers’ assumptions in designing the survey items. Recognizing the potential value in using methods that are more open-ended and qualitative analyses, the present study employed narrative frames and follow-up interviews to explore the satisfiers and dissatisfiers for international vocational education students at one institution in New Zealand. Reporting on perceptions of the class, institution, and community, the findings identify the participants’ top-of-mind (dis)satisfiers and complement the existing literature by identifying seldom-reported themes. Discussion of issues in analyzing narrative frames is also provided

The Falling Factorial Basis and Its Statistical Applications

We study a novel spline-like basis, which we name the "falling factorial basis", bearing many similarities to the classic truncated power basis. The advantage of the falling factorial basis is that it enables rapid, linear-time computations in basis matrix multiplication and basis matrix inversion. The falling factorial functions are not actually splines, but are close enough to splines that they provably retain some of the favorable properties of the latter functions. We examine their application in two problems: trend filtering over arbitrary input points, and a higher-order variant of the two-sample Kolmogorov-Smirnov test.Comment: Full version for the ICML paper with the same titl