Motivating Sustainable Recycling Practices Through Persuasive Technologies

Despite the importance of recycling in the current and pressing context of preserving the environment, it is still not adopted by all of us. Several mobile tools have become available with the aim of sensitizing and motivating the population towards sustainable behaviours, with limitations in information availability and in integration with formal as well as informal sources. Moreover, persuasive characteristics, such as the use of gamification also need improvement towards raising competitiveness (and awareness) in the targeted community. The authors thus propose a mobile responsive gamified application for motivating recycling attitudes centred around an interactive map, supported by the curated data of one of the reference companies of the environmental sector in the region. The app includes collaborative persuasive elements as well as validation processes for crowdsourced content proposed by the community. The results of an evaluation process, with promising results, are described.

Enhancing the Information Availability of Indonesia's Tourism Destinations Through A Travel App

<p>Despite of Indonesia has many packages on offer to tourists, including cultural, culinary and natural attractions, UNWTO’s (2018) research revealed that Indonesia is in the 9th position in terms of the number of international tourist arrivals compared to other Asia countries in 2017. Hence, the main objective of this project is to respond the lack of information availability of Indonesia’s tourism destinations worldwide (Cholik, 2017; Petriana, 2017; Wijaya, 2017) by proposing a travel app called Extra. The utilization of an ICT tool has been preferred as it proved to be effective to support the dissemination of tourism products, services, and information (Buhalis & Law, 2008; Hyde, 2008, Caraivan, 2017). In particular, Extra aims to give tourists a local experience while visiting Indonesia, as well as to boost more exposure of Indonesia’s tourism destinations in the global market by providing tourism information, products and services derived from trusted locals. Through using a mixed method research design, feedback from tourism stakeholders, tourists and the online questionnaire’s respondents are collected and analyzed. Main findings that were emerged from this study suggested desired features of potential users to use Extra, which are local recommendations of local tours and activities, online/offline route planning, self-designed itinerary, and ratings/reviews from other travelers. From the tourism service providers’ perspectives, Extra will be advantageous if it can provide more approachable contact to their customers, accommodate the lack of skill, time or resource to update tourism information or social media regularly, and encourage more efficient business operation by providing a single platform to manage all of tourism products and services. Due to the short nature of this study, limitations on the amount of research conducted have constrained the ability to examine certain subjects, such as the type of preferred communication channel to enable effective and more amicable interaction between tourist and tourism service providers, as well as the significance of a customer service feature in a travel app to encourage a better traveling experience. Following the data collection and analysis, a business case projection was created to propose the development and commercialization of Extra. It includes the recommendation of the business model design, market and product validation evaluation, as well as resource requirements of Extra development project. Reflecting on the research findings and business case recommendations, taking into an acknowledgement of the necessary future research that will be discussed, the initiation step of developing Extra will be started by seeking potential project partners such as Ministry of Tourism and angel investors, as well as consulting with legal advisor to process the necessary business permits to commence a travel app business in Indonesia. Later on, in a case of successful implementation of Extra, the lean startup methodology (Ries, 2011) will be applied consistently to allow continued adjustments in order to improve the app’s service. This includes conducting further research on aspects that need further validation. Without the implementation of Extra, it is difficult to identify the actual value propositions that are needed by both tourists and tourism stakeholders to make them use Extra or purchase it. Therefore, future research is required after the implementation of Extra in order to identify to what extent the app’s values could entice its users to pay more for the service, and what features will be likely to be altered to improve Extra’s perceived values to its users.</p>

Enhancing the Information Availability of Indonesia's Tourism Destinations Through A Travel App

<p>Despite of Indonesia has many packages on offer to tourists, including cultural, culinary and natural attractions, UNWTO’s (2018) research revealed that Indonesia is in the 9th position in terms of the number of international tourist arrivals compared to other Asia countries in 2017. Hence, the main objective of this project is to respond the lack of information availability of Indonesia’s tourism destinations worldwide (Cholik, 2017; Petriana, 2017; Wijaya, 2017) by proposing a travel app called Extra. The utilization of an ICT tool has been preferred as it proved to be effective to support the dissemination of tourism products, services, and information (Buhalis & Law, 2008; Hyde, 2008, Caraivan, 2017). In particular, Extra aims to give tourists a local experience while visiting Indonesia, as well as to boost more exposure of Indonesia’s tourism destinations in the global market by providing tourism information, products and services derived from trusted locals. Through using a mixed method research design, feedback from tourism stakeholders, tourists and the online questionnaire’s respondents are collected and analyzed. Main findings that were emerged from this study suggested desired features of potential users to use Extra, which are local recommendations of local tours and activities, online/offline route planning, self-designed itinerary, and ratings/reviews from other travelers. From the tourism service providers’ perspectives, Extra will be advantageous if it can provide more approachable contact to their customers, accommodate the lack of skill, time or resource to update tourism information or social media regularly, and encourage more efficient business operation by providing a single platform to manage all of tourism products and services. Due to the short nature of this study, limitations on the amount of research conducted have constrained the ability to examine certain subjects, such as the type of preferred communication channel to enable effective and more amicable interaction between tourist and tourism service providers, as well as the significance of a customer service feature in a travel app to encourage a better traveling experience. Following the data collection and analysis, a business case projection was created to propose the development and commercialization of Extra. It includes the recommendation of the business model design, market and product validation evaluation, as well as resource requirements of Extra development project. Reflecting on the research findings and business case recommendations, taking into an acknowledgement of the necessary future research that will be discussed, the initiation step of developing Extra will be started by seeking potential project partners such as Ministry of Tourism and angel investors, as well as consulting with legal advisor to process the necessary business permits to commence a travel app business in Indonesia. Later on, in a case of successful implementation of Extra, the lean startup methodology (Ries, 2011) will be applied consistently to allow continued adjustments in order to improve the app’s service. This includes conducting further research on aspects that need further validation. Without the implementation of Extra, it is difficult to identify the actual value propositions that are needed by both tourists and tourism stakeholders to make them use Extra or purchase it. Therefore, future research is required after the implementation of Extra in order to identify to what extent the app’s values could entice its users to pay more for the service, and what features will be likely to be altered to improve Extra’s perceived values to its users.</p>

Parental control: ecology drives plasticity in parental response to offspring signals

Different bird species have completely different parent-offspring interactions. When food is plentiful, the chicks that are begging the loudest are fed the most. When food is scarce, bird species instead feed the largest offspring. While this variation could be due to parents responding to signalling differently based on food availability, it could equally be due to offspring adjusting their behaviour, or to variation in information availability. We tested between these competing explanations experimentally, by manipulating food availability in a population of wild great tits, Parus major, while standardising offspring behaviour and size. We found that when food was more plentiful, parents were: (1) more likely to preferentially feed the chicks that were begging the most; and (2) less likely to preferentially feed larger chicks. In addition, we consistently found these same patterns, in a meta-analysis across 57 bird species. Overall, our results suggest that parents have more control over food distribution than offspring do, and that they flexibly adjust how they respond to both offspring signals and cues of offspring quality in response to food availability. Consequently, depending upon environmental conditions, predictably different signalling systems are favoured.

Thank you for sharing! How knowledge sharing and information availability affect public employees’ job satisfaction

PurposeThis study aims to examine the impact of job-related knowledge sharing on information availability and job satisfaction for information-receiving employees in the public sector. Following self-determination theory, the study suggests that job satisfaction is only partly affected by knowledge sharing itself, but particularly through the availability of job-related information enabling the information receiver to work effectively.Design/methodology/approachThe hypotheses are tested with data from the US Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey from 2018. Additionally, results are replicated with earlier waves of the survey.FindingsResults show the positive impact of job-related knowledge sharing on job satisfaction, whereby the availability of job-relevant information mediates this relationship partially.Practical implicationsThis study confirms that managers should provide room for social interactions when introducing knowledge management practices.Originality/valueThe results emphasize that knowledge sharing is a highly social process in which support and relatedness play a significant role in success in addition to the diffusion of information itself.

Optimizing Lock Operations and Ship Arrivals through Multiple Locks on Inland Waterways

Locks are important components of a waterway system. To improve the efficiency of inland waterway transport, it is important to ensure ships passing locks without having to spend unnecessary waiting times at lock entrances. Meanwhile, with the trends towards digitalized and smart waterways, it is also worth investigating how the information availability could contribute to optimizing lock operations and ship arrivals on inland waterways. Therefore, this paper proposes an optimization method to schedule ships’ arrivals and their placements in locks on inland waterways, based on a mixed-integer programming model, and solves the optimization problem with large neighborhood search based heuristics. The optimization objective is threefold: first, optimizing the arrival sequence of ships at the locks; second, maximize the utilization of each lockage operation; and third, reducing the overall time that each ship spends from entering the waterway area till leaving the last lock on the waterway. Simulations are carried out to evaluate the performance of the proposed method.