The ecology of sustainable tourism

PurposeThis paper questions the present state of the world's tourism industry and advocates the need for an approach where quality assumes greater importance than quantity.Design/methodology/approachThis paper provides an analysis of the tourism industry's recent evolution while trying to identify reasons for its decline which amongst others, include security issues and economic crisis.FindingsIn developing a sustainable tourism industry especially in these economically challenging times, we must learn to appreciate what is precious in our own lives and in our respective communities. This in turn will help us maintain and further explore the uniqueness of our tourist destinations. The greatest threat to leisure and tourism (and to a lesser extent to business travel) is the fact that travel has lost a good deal of its romance and enchantment due to a global approach to its development. In the rush for efficiency and quantitative analysis the travel and tourism industry may have forgotten that each traveller has unique expectations.Originality/valueSustainable tourism is not only about how a tourist location adapts but also about what a city or destination accomplishes when re-discovering its inner essence and then promoting it.

Transparency in Spanish archive and library websites: A comparative study

Transparency is a principle that has attracted a good deal of international attention in recent years, especially in connection with combatting corruption and building open, participatory governments accountable to their citizens. Public libraries and archives are not only information suppliers, but also public bodies obliged to provide the citizenry with information about their own governance and activities. Those obligations are laid down in Spanish Act 19/2013 of 29 December on Transparency, Access to Public Information and Good Governance (Spanish initials LTAIPBG). This article describes the results of applying a transparency measuring tool, TransPa_BA, to 106 regionally administered national historic archives and national public libraries. The tool, in turn the result of a research project, includes 20 indicators to measure active public disclosure by public libraries and 22 by archives in keeping with the provisions of the aforementioned Act. The indicators and their respective parameters (visibility, content, form, accessibility, reusability, dating and currency) provide guidelines to enable these institutions to comply with transparency and accountability requirements by furnishing society in general and their stakeholders in particular with information on their activities and performance in key areas. Further to the findings, the target institutions have made hesitant attempts to enhance transparency with respect to earlier inquiries. Public libraries are observed to be more active than archives, although the transparency scores obtained are low due to the failure to provide information on some indicators as well as on parameters such as dating and reusability. Both types of institution have a long road ahead in the pursuit of greater transparency.

Materialism from Hobbes to Locke

Are human beings purely material creatures, or is there something else to them, an immaterial part that does some (or all) of the thinking, and might even be able to outlive the death of the body? This book is about how a series of seventeenth-century philosophers tried to answer that question. It begins by looking at the views of Thomas Hobbes, who developed a thoroughly materialist account of the human mind, and later of God as well. All this is in obvious contrast to the approach of his contemporary René Descartes. After examining Hobbes’s materialism, the book considers the views of three of his English critics: Henry More, Ralph Cudworth, and Margaret Cavendish. Both More and Cudworth thought Hobbes’s materialism radically inadequate to explain the workings of the world, while Cavendish developed a distinctive, anti-Hobbesian materialism of her own. The second half of the book focuses on the discussion of materialism in John Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding, arguing that we can better understand Locke’s discussion if we see how and where he is responding to this earlier debate. At crucial points Locke draws on More and Cudworth to argue against Hobbes and other materialists. Nevertheless, Locke did a good deal to reveal how materialism was a genuinely possible view, by showing how one could develop a detailed account of the human mind without presuming it was an immaterial substance.

Exploring Communities of Faith

Many researchers focus primarily on the frequency of church attendance when they study the religion-and-health relationship. The many shortcomings of this strategy are discussed in this chapter. A plea is made for focusing on communities of faith instead. Four issues involving communities of faith are examined: (1) a preliminary working definition of communities of faith is provided; (2) because communities of faith constitute a vast conceptual domain, a good deal of this chapter is spent on identifying the key characteristics of communities of faith and explaining how they arise and are maintained; (3) in an effort to move the literature forward, a detailed research plan for devising measures of communities of faith is presented; and (4) a submodel is provided that further illuminates the relationship between religious identities and communities of faith.

Proverbs and African Modernity: Defining an Ethics of Becoming

African proverbs have, for good reason, attracted considerable attention from scholars, both African and non-African. One notable testimony to such attention is the international conference in South Africa from which came a monumental collection of scholarly articles now available on CD and in print. Another evidence of the interest the subject has enjoyed among African scholars is the wealth of publications they have produced in recent years, for example, Adeleke Adeeko’s monograph Proverbs, Textuality, and Nativism in African Literature; Ambrose Adikamkwu Monye’s Proverbs in African Orature: The Aniocha-Igbo Experience; Kwesi Yankah’s The Proverb in the Context of Akan Rhetoric: A Theory of Proverb Praxis; and my Yoruba Proverbs. In addition, there have been influential articles by Ayo Bamgbose, Lawrence. A. Boadi, Romanus N. Egudu, Kwame Gyekye, Yisa Yusuf, and a host of others whose omission from this rather abbreviated list is not meant as a slight. In a recent conversation, the preeminent paremiologist, Wolfgang Mieder, called my attention to the lineup of articles in the most recent issue of Proverbium [23: 2006], in which four of the five lead articles are by Nigerian scholars (Abimbola Adesoji, Bode Agbaje, George Olusola Ajibade, and Akinola Akintunde Asinyanbola) and on African proverbs, an indication, he said of the present effervescence of, and future potential for, proverb studies and publications on them on African soil. Because of these efforts we now know a good deal about proverbs as a cultural resource, their functionality and the protocols for their usage, but also their artistry-structure, wordplay, imagery, and so forth, especially after calls such as Isidore Okpewho’s (1992) that scholars pay due attention to the aesthetic dimensions of traditional oral forms.

Effects of temperature on melt electrospinning with auxiliary heating: experiment and simulation study

In this study, the effect of the heating temperature of the spinneret on the melt electrospinning process under the condition of application of auxiliary heating was investigated, in a systematical and comprehensive way. The temperature distribution of the melt jet during the melt electrospinning process was simulated by finite element software in order to provide a good deal of insight into the experimental results. In addition, high-speed photography was adopted to capture images of jet formation and jet motion during the melt electrospinning process. The experimental results indicated that the cooling rate of the polypropylene jet decreases obviously under the condition of auxiliary heating; in addition, the higher spinneret temperature leads to greater drafting force, a drawing fiber drafting rate, and greater jet whipping motion, which is conducive to secondary drawing and refinement of the jet.

On BIM Interoperability via the IFC Standard: An Assessment from the Structural Engineering and Design Viewpoint

Building information modelling (BIM) plays a prominent role in a good deal of architecture, engineering and construction (AEC) works, envisaging a full transition to digitalization for the construction industry. This is also due to a number of national and international regulations regarding the design, erection, and management of civil engineering constructions. For this reason, full interoperability of software environments such as computer-aided design (CAD) and computer-aided engineering (CAE) is a necessary requirement, particularly when the exchange of information comes from different disciplines. Users, throughout the years, have faced CAD–CAE interoperability issues despite following the IFC neutral open file format. This inability to share data (CAD to CAD, CAD to CAE) often generates model-interpretation problems as well as a lack of parametric information and a disconnection of elements. This paper addresses issues and mapping mechanisms in the exchange of data for the purpose of defining a baseline for the current status of bidirectional data exchange between AEC CAD/CAE software via the IFC format. A benchmark study, covering three years of software releases is illustrated; the assessment of the software performance was made with reference to criteria associated with the software’s level of suitability for use of the structural models. Four classes of performance, depending on the accuracy of the data transfer and on the associated corrective actions to be taken, were adopted. This confirmed that at the moment, the implementation of the IFC standard by software manufacturers is geared towards an expert class of users. Further efforts are needed in order to ensure its application is adopted by a wider class, thus extending and regulating its use by national, regional, and local authorities.

Consensus Statement Regarding the Application of Biogen to Health Canada for Approval of Aducanumab

Alzheimer’s disease is a major cause of morbidity and mortality. Currently, there are no disease-modifying pharmacotherapies for this condition. Aducanumab, an amyloid beta-directed monoclonal antibody that targets aggregated forms of amyloid-beta in the brains of people with Alzheimer’s disease, has raised hopes that such a therapy has been discovered, but its approval by the US Food and Drug Administration has engendered a good deal of controversy. A similar application for approval has been submitted to Health Canada. In response to this, a group of Canadian clinical dementia experts representing a number of organizations, including the Canadian Geriatrics Society, was convened by the Canadian Consortium on Neurodegeneration in Aging (CCNA) to discuss the evidence currently available on this agent and seek consensus on what advice they would offer Health Canada on the application. There was wide-spread agreement that it would be premature for aducanumab to receive approval for the treatment of Alzheimer’s disease. It was also noted that the Canadian health-care system is poorly prepared at this time to deal with a disease-modifying therapeutic with targeting, administration, and monitoring characteristics like aducanumab. In this paper, the consensus reached is presented along with its underlying rationale.

Rewards for Being a Senior Public Servant: Principles and Issues

Governments must decide how much to pay their civil servants as well as what sorts of other rewards they should provide to those employees. These governments are faced with the need to attract high-quality personnel to government while also maintaining some frugality for political as well as fiscal reasons. The amount and manner in which public servants are rewarded varies markedly across countries. Some of these differences are a function of economic factors, but a number of other factors such as political cultures and the centrality of the public service to economic management of the country are also important. Public servants receive their pay and benefits while employed, but in many instances a good deal of their lifetime income is received after they leave government and are employed in the private or the quasi-public sector. Further, in some political systems public sector pensions are generous and consume a significant proportion of the public budget. The question of rewards for being a public servant is both empirical and normative. A number of contending principles can be used to guide decision makers when choosing patterns of regards, but politics is often the dominant factor.

Disiplin Asketisme dan Harmoni Kontribusi Disiplin Diri bagi Pengembangan Pendidikan Kristen

Until the mid of 20 century, a holistic understanding of reality was merely expressed in the language of theology dan religion. In this article, I shall present some reflections, structured around the theme of wisdom, on the classical, biblical, and patristical vision of education. The pursuit of wisdom is not just an intellectual exercise but also requires a good deal of ascetic effort: philosophy is not worthy of the name if it is not supported by ascetic endeavor. The Biblical depiction of wisdom pointed to something more than just human attainment or divine attribute. It was, rather, a way of expressing the nature of the relationship between God and man in terms of ‘paideia’