Hasil untuk "Recreation leadership. Administration of recreation services"

Emanuele Giorgi, Claudio Fronterre, Peter J. Diggle

Prevalence surveys are routinely used to monitor the effectiveness of mass drug administration (MDA) programmes for controlling neglected tropical diseases (NTDs). We propose a decay-adjusted spatio-temporal (DAST) model that explicitly accounts for the time-varying impact of MDA on NTD prevalence, providing a flexible and interpretable framework for estimating intervention effects from sparse survey data. Using case studies on soil-transmitted helminths and lymphatic filariasis, we show that DAST offers a practical alternative to standard geostatistical models when the objective includes quantifying MDA impact and supporting short-term programmatic forecasting. We also discuss extensions and identifiability challenges, advocating for data-driven parsimony over complexity in settings where the available data are too sparse to support the estimation of highly parameterised models.

David Wölfle, Kevin Förderer, Tobias Riedel et al.

This article aims at facilitating the widespread application of Energy Management Systems (EMSs), especially on buildings and cities, in order to support the realization of future carbon-neutral energy systems. We claim that economic viability is a severe issue for the utilization of EMSs at scale and that the provisioning of forecasting and optimization algorithms as a service can make a major contribution to achieve it. To this end, we present the \emph{Energy Service Generics} software framework that allows the derivation of fully functional services from existing forecasting or optimization code with ease. This work documents the strictly systematic development of the framework, beginning with a requirement analysis, from which a sophisticated design concept is derived, followed by a description of the implementation of the framework. Furthermore, we present the concept of the \emph{Open Energy Service} community, our effort to continuously maintain the service framework but also provide ready-to-use forecasting and optimization services. Finally, an evaluation of our framework and community concept, as well as a demarcation between our work and the current state of the art, is presented.

Swamynathan Sanjaykumar, Navaraj Chelliah Jesus Rajkumar, Ponnusamy Yoga Lakshmi et al.

Background and purpose Oligomenorrhea (infrequent menstrual periods), can significantly impact women's reproductive health and quality of life. This study explores the potential connection between exercise timing and menstrual regularity, aiming to provide insights for tailored exercise interventions in women with such irregularity.  Material and methods A 12-week pretest-posttest design with multiple experimental groups was conducted with fifteen participants aged 18-23, each with a history of consistent menstruation for at least six months and without hormonal contraceptive usage. Participants were allocated to morning, afternoon, and evening exercise sessions, engaging in a personalized exercise regimen that combined cardiovascular and strength training activities thrice weekly. Pre- and post-intervention assessments were employed to comprehensively assess menstrual regularity, focusing on cycle length and characteristics. Analysis of Covariance (ANOVA) tests were utilized to scrutinize the potential impacts of exercise timing on menstrual regularity.  Results The results showed noteworthy changes in cycle lengths after the training sessions, indicating the potential effectiveness of such interventions for individuals experiencing menstrual irregularity. Regarding Oligomenorrhea, morning sessions demonstrated the most considerable reduction in cycle length, while afternoon and evening sessions had less pronounced effects.  Conclusion This study confirms the significant impact of exercise timing on menstrual cycle length and characteristics for women with Oligomenorrhea. Varied responses emphasize the importance of tailored interventions considering distinct times of the day.

Q Misell

Tor Onion Services are a way to host websites and other internet services anonymously. Onion Services are often used to bypass internet censorship and provide information services to users in oppressive regimes. This paper presents an analysis of the security defences deployed on these Onion Services. Onion Services tend to have better security policy than sites on the clear web. However they lag behind in the deployment of HTTPS, a key defence to ensuring the security of users of such services.

Paula Antón Maraña , Julio César Puche Regaliza , Pablo Arranz Val et al.

Although the Internet and e-commerce have contributed positively to the tourism sector, there is not much empirical research on the transformation of distribution channels or that considers the use of the Internet in travel planning as an antecedent of tourist satisfaction and loyalty. This paper aims to test the influence of online distribution channels in trip planning by tourists on their general satisfaction level and their loyalty towards the destination and to differentiate the profile of digital and traditional tourists. Quantitative research techniques are used to analyse the dataset of 1,387 surveys of tourists visiting the province of Burgos, Spain. Among those surveyed, 65% search for information online and 54% book or pay for services online. According to ordinal regression analysis, the use of online channels does not significantly influence the level of satisfaction, but according to binary logistic regression, it does significantly influence loyalty. The findings provide valuable information for developing marketing strategies in tourism organisations and support decision-makers in creating competitive tourism destinations that are resilient to the demographic challenge of depopulation.

Mingyi Liu, Zhiying Tu, Xiaofei Xu et al.

The prosperity of services and the frequent interaction between services contribute to the formation of the service ecosystem. Service ecosystem is a complex dynamic system with continuous evolution. Service providers voluntarily or compulsorily participate in this evolutionary process and face great opportunities and challenges. Existing studies on service ecosystem evolution are more about facilitating programmers to use services and have achieved remarkable results. However, the exploration of service ecosystem evolution from the business level is still insufficient. To make up this deficiency, in this paper, we present a method for analyzing service ecosystem evolution patterns from the perspective of the service community. Firstly, we train a service community evolution prediction model based on the community evolution sequences. Secondly, we explain the prediction model, showing how different factors affect the evolution of the service community. Finally, using the interpretable predictions and prior knowledge, we present how to assist service providers in making business decisions. Experiments on real-world data show that this work can indeed provide business-level insights into service ecosystem evolution. Additionally, all the data and well-documented code used in this paper have been fully open source.

Wazen M. Shbair, Thibault Cholez, Jerome Francois et al.

Traffic monitoring is essential for network management tasks that ensure security and QoS. However, the continuous increase of HTTPS traffic undermines the effectiveness of current service-level monitoring that can only rely on unreliable parameters from the TLS handshake (X.509 certificate, SNI) or must decrypt the traffic. We propose a new machine learning-based method to identify HTTPS services without decryption. By extracting statistical features on TLS handshake packets and on a small number of application data packets, we can identify HTTPS services very early in the session. Extensive experiments performed over a significant and open dataset show that our method offers a good accuracy and a prototype implementation confirms that the early identification of HTTPS services is satisfied.

Luke Hsiao, Hudson Ayers

As Internet streaming of live content has gained on traditional cable TV viewership, we have also seen significant growth of free live streaming services which illegally provide free access to copyrighted content over the Internet. Some of these services draw millions of viewers each month. Moreover, this viewership has continued to increase, despite the consistent coupling of this free content with deceptive advertisements and user-hostile tracking. In this paper, we explore the ecosystem of free illegal live streaming services by collecting and examining the behavior of a large corpus of illegal sports streaming websites. We explore and quantify evidence of user tracking via third-party HTTP requests, cookies, and fingerprinting techniques on more than $27,303$ unique video streams provided by $467$ unique illegal live streaming domains. We compare the behavior of illegal live streaming services with legitimate services and find that the illegal services go to much greater lengths to track users than most legitimate services, and use more obscure tracking services. Similarly, we find that moderated sites that aggregate links to illegal live streaming content fail to moderate out sites that go to significant lengths to track users. In addition, we perform several case studies which highlight deceptive behavior and modern techniques used by some domains to avoid detection, monetize traffic, or otherwise exploit their viewers. Overall, we find that despite recent improvements in mechanisms for detecting malicious browser extensions, ad-blocking, and browser warnings, users of free illegal live streaming services are still exposed to deceptive ads, malicious browser extensions, scams, and extensive tracking. We conclude with insights into the ecosystem and recommendations for addressing the challenges highlighted by this study.

Vanessa GB Gowreesunkar, Seraphin Hugues, Mustafeed Zaman

There is growing evidence that tourism entrepreneurs not only contribute in the socio-economic development of a nation but also in the overall attractiveness of a destination. In fact, numerous studies on the topic have led researchers to conclude that local entrepreneurs are important stakeholders and their supportiveness and/or non-supportiveness has a considerable impact on overall tourism development of a nation. Mauritius, as a small beach destination, is not exempt from this phenomenon. The island, which is popular for its sea, sun and sand, is dependent on its tourism enterprises to promote local resources and sustain tourism businesses. As a result, understanding the exact factors that account for local entrepreneurs’ support and/or non-support for tourism is important, failing which it might be difficult to develop tourism in a sustainable and socially compatible manner. At present, there is a dearth of research in the field of tourism entrepreneurship in Mauritius whereas this sector continues to be an important pillar of the local tourism industry. To address this knowledge gap, the present study analyses local entrepreneurs’ support for tourism development in a specific region of Mauritius. Methodologically, the study takes place using the mixed mode. The quantitative part of the study related to the administration of questionnaires and these were followed by the development of a hypotheses meant to be tested in a logistic regression model. The qualitative data was derived from semi-structured interviews conducted with formal and informal tourism entrepreneurs. The findings culminate into a Logit Model which statistically explains the factors that account for entrepreneurs’ supportiveness towards tourism. The uniqueness of this study lies in the fact that it is the first to propose a Logit Model on local entrepreneurs’ support for tourism development. Findings derived from the study generate important information on factors motivating entrepreneurs to support tourism and are helpful to tourism planners and promoters as well as policy makers. The study winds up with some discussions and proposes avenues for future research.

Carles Sanabre, Sara Vinyals-Mirabent, Rafael Pedraza-Jiménez

Este trabajo presenta una propuesta para la evaluación integral de la calidad de un sitio web turístico. En él se aborda el estado de la cuestión sobre la calidad web, tanto en general como en el contexto especializado del turismo. Tiene como objetivo demostrar que la calidad de un sitio web turístico no puede ser evaluada utilizando un único sistema de análisis, procedimiento seguido y propuesto habitualmente tanto por la industria como por la academia. Tomando en consideración el sitio web oficial de la ciudad de Barcelona, esta investigación demuestra que para la evaluación integral de su calidad es necesario utilizar dos sistemas de análisis: uno de ellos centrado en los aspectos estratégicos del sitio web y otro focalizado en sus aspectos técnicos. Con el fin de validar esta hipótesis se han utilizado dos sistemas de análisis actualmente en uso: el sistema SAST (para la evaluación técnica del sitio) y el sistema WSCM (para su evaluación estratégica). Los resultados alcanzados tras la aplicación de ambos sistemas demuestran que su utilización conjunta e interrelacionada ofrece una evaluación completa y precisa del sitio web. Además, se constata que la utilización individual de un único sistema podría propiciar una evaluación parcial e inexacta del sitio web.

Zhaoming Dai

This paper proposes a model of ubiquitous video services and management systems for solving current issues of video surveillance services and management in the smart city. The author presents the Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) based methods of integrating and using existing video resources in civil defense emergency commanding by providing a use case "Civil Defense Emergency Command Center in Huai-An City", focusing on ubiquitous video services and management. Furthermore, this paper presents the differentiated services (DiffServ) scheduling algorithm for realizing the coordination of multitasking load from the prospective of providing various services aims at accelerating emergency responding, providing solutions to meet the needs of various clients for the video services, and making useful attempt to make contribution to the information construction of smart city in the future.

Zheng Li, He Zhang, Liam O'Brien et al.

Background: Cloud Computing is increasingly booming in industry with many competing providers and services. Accordingly, evaluation of commercial Cloud services is necessary. However, the existing evaluation studies are relatively chaotic. There exists tremendous confusion and gap between practices and theory about Cloud services evaluation. Aim: To facilitate relieving the aforementioned chaos, this work aims to synthesize the existing evaluation implementations to outline the state-of-the-practice and also identify research opportunities in Cloud services evaluation. Method: Based on a conceptual evaluation model comprising six steps, the Systematic Literature Review (SLR) method was employed to collect relevant evidence to investigate the Cloud services evaluation step by step. Results: This SLR identified 82 relevant evaluation studies. The overall data collected from these studies essentially represent the current practical landscape of implementing Cloud services evaluation, and in turn can be reused to facilitate future evaluation work. Conclusions: Evaluation of commercial Cloud services has become a world-wide research topic. Some of the findings of this SLR identify several research gaps in the area of Cloud services evaluation (e.g., the Elasticity and Security evaluation of commercial Cloud services could be a long-term challenge), while some other findings suggest the trend of applying commercial Cloud services (e.g., compared with PaaS, IaaS seems more suitable for customers and is particularly important in industry). This SLR study itself also confirms some previous experiences and reveals new Evidence-Based Software Engineering (EBSE) lessons.

Lino Briguglio

El presente artículo versa sobre el delicado equilibrio entre el beneficio económico y el daño medioambiental del turismo, con especial referencia a las jurisdicciones de islas pequeñas. La mayoría de actividades económicas tienen un impacto negativo en el ambiente y muy a menudo este daño medioambiental repercute de forma indeseable en la economía. Esto es especialmente cierto en el caso de la industria turística que depende fuertemente de los servicios medioambientales. El artículo trata de las dependencias del turismo en las jurisdicciones de islas pequeñas y evalúa los impactos medioambientales y económicos del turismo en Malta. El artículo asimismo sugiere medidas preventivas y correctoras para la promoción de turismo sostenible. El artículo finaliza con la nota optimista que el propio turismo está aguzando nuestra conciencia sobre los males de la degradación medioambiental, y esto podría conducir a la adopción de políticas y medidas de turismo sostenible. 

М.В. Ковалева

<p>Movable and elements of sports games belong to the mass forms of physical fitness and are one of the means of therapeutic physical training. Most often they are used during recovery and at the same time they are used not only with medical and rehabilitation, but also with preventive purposes. This article presents the opinions of the leading specialists in the field of therapeutic physical culture about the possibility of using mobile and sports games with people who have undergone diseases and who have violations of the respiratory and cardiovascular systems of the body. The opinion of leading authors testifies to the wide application of mobile and sports games for the purposes of treatment and prevention of diseases, as well as rehabilitation after illness. The article explored in detail the possibility of using mobile and sports games in classes with students of a special educational department. The generalization of the information presented in the sources studied makes it possible to determine the recommendations that are necessary to effectively influence the use of mobile and sports games on the organism of people with disabilities in the state of health.</p>

José Manuel Enrique Marsano Delgado

Karolina Matias Ferreira, Rodrigo Amado dos Santos, Mirian Picinini Méxas et al.

As plataformas on-line de aluguel por temporada vêm ganhando destaque nos últimos anos por representarem uma inovação na prestação do serviço turístico, bem como por afetarem negativamente os resultados dos meios de hospedagem tradicionais. Dito isso, o presente artigo teve por objetivo investigar a percepção de gestores de meios de hospedagem em cinco municípios do Estado do Rio de Janeiro sobre economia compartilhada, consumo colaborativo e plataformas on-line de aluguel por temporada. De caráter exploratório, a pesquisa qualitativa foi realizada por meio de questionários semiestruturados distribuídos pela SurveyMonkey. Seus resultados indicaram uma necessidade de adaptação por parte dessas empresas a esse novo cenário: serviços de hospedagem distribuídos por plataformas on-line a preços inferiores ao do mercado. Pondera-se, portanto, a necessidade de esses gestores estabelecerem estratégias de segmentação ou de diferenciação mercadológica que lhes agreguem um valor superior aos seus empreendimentos de modo que sejam minimizados os efeitos causados por esse novo nicho de mercado.

Johannes Raabe, Rebecca A. Zakrajsek

Teammates and coaches might be considered two of the most significant sources of social interactions for athletes. Deci and Ryan’s (2000) self-determination theory offers a motivational framework that can be used to understand the quality of relationships within sport. Given the positive outcomes associated with fostering basic psychological need satisfaction (e.g., optimal social functioning, well-being, and self-development) researchers have been interested in understanding how athletes’ perceptions of competence, autonomy, and relatedness can be nurtured. The purpose of the current study was to assess: (a) if there was a difference between participants’ perceptions of their coaches’ and teammates’ influence on their basic psychological need satisfaction, (b) potential differences between participants’ perceptions regarding the impact of coaches and teammates on their basic psychological need satisfaction in interactive and coactive sports, and (c) whether coaches’ and teammates’ influence on athletes’ basic psychological need fulfillment affected participants’ perception of, and satisfaction with, individual and team performance. 362 National Collegiate Athletic Association Division I student-athletes (226 female and 136 male; Mage = 19.36; SD = 2.65) from four different sports (i.e., track and field/cross country, soccer, basketball, and tennis) participated in the study. Results showed that while peers had a significantly more positive influence on individuals’ basic psychological need satisfaction than coaches, it was the need fulfillment from coaches that predicted athletes’ perceptions of, and satisfaction with, performance.

Miao Du

Service virtualisation is a method to create virtual service models that can mimic interaction behaviors between a system under test and the target system. With service virtualisation, the development team can get access to the production-like conditions whenever and however many times they need, enabling frequent and comprehensive testing. Previous techniques for service virtualisation have relied on explicitly modelling the target services by a service expert and require detailed knowledge of message protocol and structure. However, neither of these are necessarily available. In this thesis, we introduce our novel opaque response generation approach. This approach enables services to be virtualised automatically without any expert knowledge or documentation of system protocol and interaction behaviours. Given a collection of interactions exchanged between a system under test and a target real service, our approach can 1) organise the same type of interactions into the same cluster and derive a cluster prototype for each cluster; 2) search a given incoming request for its the most similar request in the interaction library; 3) learn knowledge from the incoming request and the recorded interaction; and 4) generate a response. A framework and proof-of-concept implementation of our opaque response generation approach is described. Experimental results show our opaque response generation approach is able to automatically generate accurate responses in real time with an accuracy rate over 99% on average.

M Swamidas, A Govardhan, D Vijayalakshmi

Web services are expected to play significant role for message communications over internet applications. Most of the future work is web security. Online shopping and web services are increasing at rapid rate. In this paper we presented the fundamental concepts related to Network security, web security threats. QoS web service security intrusion detection is important concern in network communications and firewalls security; we discussed various issues and challenges related to web security. The fundamental concepts network security XML firewall, XML networks. We proposed a novel Dynamic Intruder Detection System (DIDA) is safe guard against SSL secured transactions over message communications in intermediate routers that enable services to sender and receiver use Secured Session Layer protocol messages. This can be into three stages 1. Sensor 2. Analyzer and 3.User Interface.

Manuel Ángel Fernández-Gámez, Ana José Cisneros-Ruiz, Ángela Callejón-Gil

Using a probabilistic neural network and a set of financial and nonfinancial variables, this study seeks to improve the ability of the existing bankruptcy prediction models in the hotel industry. Our aim is to construct a hotel bankruptcy prediction model that provides high accuracy, using information sufficiently distant from the bankruptcy situation, and which is able to determine the sensitivity of the explanatory variables. Based on a sample of Spanish hotels that went bankrupt between 2005 and 2012, empirical results indicate that using information nearer to bankruptcy (one and two years prior), the most relevant variable is EBITDA to current liabilities, but using information further from bankruptcy (three years prior), return on assets is the best predictor of bankruptcy.