The Resilience of Rural Tourism and Adjustment Measures for Surviving The COVID-19 Pandemic: Evidence from Bromo Tengger Semeru National Park, Indonesia

The COVID-19 virus pandemic has generated an unprecedented impact on all aspects of life, including rural tourism. This study aims to study the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the performance of homestay businesses in Gubukklakah Village, Malang Regency, and their adjustment measures to get out of the pandemic. A survey research with descriptive and quantitative approaches was conducted on 47 active homestay owners. 98% of the respondents stated that the pandemic affected their homestay business activities. About 44.6% of them said that the pandemic would not last long, while more than 50% of them said that the pandemic would last a long time. The pandemic has decreased the number of active homestays from 47 to 11, coupled with an 81% decline in income. Due to the pandemic, about 85.1% of the respondents returned to farming activities. The study suggests several actions that can be done to respond to the pandemic, namely the application of health protocols in various activities, the provision of cash or non-cash assistance to pandemic affected families, the strengthening of the agricultural sector and skilled human resources in tourism services, and the innovation of outdoor tourism products based on local uniqueness.

A singular perturbed problem with critical Sobolev exponent

This paper deals with the following nonlinear elliptic problem \begin{equation}\label{eq0.1} -\varepsilon^2\Delta u+\omega V(x)u=u^{p}+u^{2^{*}-1},\quad u> 0\quad\text{in}\ \R^N, \end{equation} where $\omega\in\R^{+}$, $N\geq 3$, $p\in (1,2^{*}-1)$ with $2^{*}={2N}/({N-2})$, $\varepsilon> 0$ is a small parameter and $V(x)$ is a given function. Under suitable assumptions, we prove that problem (\ref{eq0.1}) has multi-peak solutions by the Lyapunov-Schmidt reduction method for sufficiently small $\varepsilon$, which concentrate at local minimum points of potential function $V(x)$. Moreover, we show the local uniqueness of positive multi-peak solutions by using the local Pohozaev identity.

Ivan Skušek Jr. and His Collection of Chinese Coins

Ivan Skušek Jr. (1877–1947), whose collection of Chinese and Japanese objects has been the subject of research and interest in recent years, can be considered the first collector of East Asian objects in the Slovene ethnic space to have built his collection systematically, examining and verifying the provenance, value, and significance of each item. His extensive collection can compare to Western European collections of East Asian objects while at the same time bearing a stamp of local uniqueness pertaining to the European periphery. Skušek’s legacy includes an important collection of Chinese money from all periods of Chinese history, which is introduced in this paper for the first time. A crucial distinction between this and other collections of Chinese coins is that evidence exists that tells us how Skušek collected the coins, and reveals a lot about his sources and advisors. It has long been known that during his stay in Beijing Skušek befriended many influential and knowledgeable people, including a Franciscan missionary, Fr. Maurus Kluge, who assisted him in assembling his numismatic collection. The paper presents the cooperation between the two in the light of a recent find––the original list and summary appraisal of the most valuable part of Skušek’s numismatic collection and Kluge’s letters to Skušek.

A measure of local uniqueness to identify linchpins in a social network with node attributes

Network centrality measures assign importance to influential or key nodes in a network based on the topological structure of the underlying adjacency matrix. In this work, we define the importance of a node in a network as being dependent on whether it is the only one of its kind among its neighbors’ ties. We introduce linchpin score, a measure of local uniqueness used to identify important nodes by assessing both network structure and a node attribute. We explore linchpin score by attribute type and examine relationships between linchpin score and other established network centrality measures (degree, betweenness, closeness, and eigenvector centrality). To assess the utility of this measure in a real-world application, we measured the linchpin score of physicians in patient-sharing networks to identify and characterize important physicians based on being locally unique for their specialty. We hypothesized that linchpin score would identify indispensable physicians who would not be easily replaced by another physician of their specialty type if they were to be removed from the network. We explored differences in rural and urban physicians by linchpin score compared with other network centrality measures in patient-sharing networks representing the 306 hospital referral regions in the United States. We show that linchpin score is uniquely able to make the distinction that rural specialists, but not rural general practitioners, are indispensable for rural patient care. Linchpin score reveals a novel aspect of network importance that can provide important insight into the vulnerability of health care provider networks. More broadly, applications of linchpin score may be relevant for the analysis of social networks where interdisciplinary collaboration is important.