Lauren Beasley, Elizabeth A. Taylor, Kelsie Saxe
et al.
Research has hinted at the effects organizational culture may have on sport employees and their families, but this relationship has primarily been explored through the experiences of the employees and has not considered the experiences of their families. Additionally, this relationship has not been directly examined from a biopsychosocial (i.e., biological, psychological, and social well-being) perspective. Thus, the purpose of this narrative inquiry was to explore the stories of collegiate sport administrators and their partners to construct their narratives of well-being within the context of sport. Nine dyads—a college athletic administrator and their partner—participated in narrative interviews. Following a two-step narrative analysis, two distinct narrative archetypes were constructed: organized life around sport and organized life around family. This suggests that, in contrast to much previous literature, there are some sport employees who are prioritizing nonwork life over career. The findings also suggest sport influences all domains of health though non-direct changeways, which has implications for the biopsychosocial model of health. Specifically, for both archetypes, work in sport both enhanced and diminished employees’ and their partners’ biopsychosocial health, but participants focused mostly on the everyday impacts on social health. Practical implications for sport organizations include systemic changes to allow for better work-life negotiations.
Recreation leadership. Administration of recreation services, Sports
Modern software architectures are characterized by their cloud-native, modular, and microservice-based designs. While these systems are known for their efficiency, they also face complex challenges in service optimization, especially in maintaining end-to-end quality of service across dynamically distributed services. This paper introduces a novel approach using the concept of Service Affinity to address this challenge. The proposed method, termed Service Affinity Graph-based Approach, employs a graph-based model to model the interactions among microservices. It formulates the service placement as a minimum-weight k-cut problem and utilizes an approximation algorithm for service clustering. This approach is realized through a conceptual framework that takes into account a wide range of optimization objectives, ranging from enhancing application performance and enforcing data privacy to optimizing operational costs. In addition to presenting the SAGA framework in details, this paper conducts an in-depth empirical evaluation using a prototype deployed on a Kubernetes cluster. The results demonstrate a mean latency improvement of 23.40%, validating the effectiveness of our approach. Finally, the paper comprehensively discusses various aspects of the proposed methods, including their implications, challenges, and benefits, providing a thorough analysis of the approach's impact.
The ever-increasing demand for generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) has motivated cloud-based GenAI services such as Azure OpenAI Service and Amazon Bedrock. Like any large-scale cloud service, failures are inevitable in cloud-based GenAI services, resulting in user dissatisfaction and significant monetary losses. However, GenAI cloud services, featured by their massive parameter scales, hardware demands, and usage patterns, present unique challenges, including generated content quality issues and privacy concerns, compared to traditional cloud services. To understand the production reliability of GenAI cloud services, we analyzed production incidents from a leading GenAI cloud service provider spanning in the past four years. Our study (1) presents the general characteristics of GenAI cloud service incidents at different stages of the incident life cycle; (2) identifies the symptoms and impacts of these incidents on GenAI cloud service quality and availability; (3) uncovers why these incidents occurred and how they were resolved; (4) discusses open research challenges in terms of incident detection, triage, and mitigation, and sheds light on potential solutions.
NCAA Division I team sport head coaches typically end their coaching roles by taking a more prestigious and lucrative position, or by being fired. These differences in the nature of the leadership change suggest differences in programmatic conditions at the time of change. How a leader leaves the program undoubtedly reverberates through the program resulting in coaches, players, administrators, and fans with varying levels of satisfaction. While literature is replete with the impact of leadership changes, there is little evidence to distinguish among nature of change, and strong evidence that a negative head coaching change precedes athletic and academic decline. Thus, this study investigated 414 NCAA Division I team–sport head coaching changes using a variety of athletic and academic variables to determine what best predicts specific types of coaching changes. Results indicated athletic success has the strongest relationship and is most predictive, as expected, particularly in revenue sports. Other noteworthy findings, however, revealed female coaches have less negative coaching changes than males, and that hiring an alum or having a high Academic Progress Rate predicted a negative change. These findings reveal there are variables beyond winning that influence the nature of change and establish patterns that could assist administrators in times of transition.
Recreation leadership. Administration of recreation services, Sports
Foundation model (FM) powered agent services are regarded as a promising solution to develop intelligent and personalized applications for advancing toward Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). To achieve high reliability and scalability in deploying these agent services, it is essential to collaboratively optimize computational and communication resources, thereby ensuring effective resource allocation and seamless service delivery. In pursuit of this vision, this paper proposes a unified framework aimed at providing a comprehensive survey on deploying FM-based agent services across heterogeneous devices, with the emphasis on the integration of model and resource optimization to establish a robust infrastructure for these services. Particularly, this paper begins with exploring various low-level optimization strategies during inference and studies approaches that enhance system scalability, such as parallelism techniques and resource scaling methods. The paper then discusses several prominent FMs and investigates research efforts focused on inference acceleration, including techniques such as model compression and token reduction. Moreover, the paper also investigates critical components for constructing agent services and highlights notable intelligent applications. Finally, the paper presents potential research directions for developing real-time agent services with high Quality of Service (QoS).
Ayyoub Akbari-Moghanjoughi, José Roberto de Almeida Amazonas, Germán Santos-Boada
et al.
Information and Communication Technology (ICT) is being provided to the variety of end-users demands, thereby providing a better and improved management of services is crucial. Therefore, Service Level Agreements (SLAs) are essential and play a key role to manage the provided services among the network entities. This survey identifies the state of the art covering concepts, approaches and open problems of the SLAs establishment, deployment and management. This paper is organised in a way that the reader can access a variety of proposed SLA methods and models addressed and provides an overview of the SLA actors and elements. It also describes SLAs' characteristics and objectives. SLAs' existing methodologies are explained and categorised followed by the Service Quality Categories (SQD) and Quality-Based Service Descriptions (QSD). SLA modelling and architectures are discussed, and open research problems and future research directions are introduced. The establishment of a reliable, safe and QoE-aware computer networking needs a group of services that goes beyond pure networking services. Therefore, within the paper this broader set of services are taken into consideration and for each Service Level Objective (SLO) the related services domains will be indicated. The purpose of this survey is to identify existing research gaps in utilising SLA elements to develop a generic methodology, considering all quality parameters beyond the Quality of Service (QoS) and what must or can be taken into account to define, establish and deploy an SLA. This study is still an active research on how to specify and develop an SLA to achieve the win-win agreements among all actors.
For companies developing web-based applications, the Dev and the Ops refer to different groups with either operational or development focus. Therefore, DevOps help these companies streamline software development and operations activities by emphasizing the collaboration between the two groups. However, for companies producing software-intensive products, the Ops would refer to customers who use and operate the product. In addition, companies producing software-intensive products do not only offer products to customers but rather Product Service Systems (PSS), where product-related services play a key role in ensuring customer satisfaction besides their significant revenue contribution. Thus, the context of product-oriented PSS is very different from web-based applications, making it difficult to apply DevOps without considering the role of the services. Therefore, based on a two years participant observation case study conducted at a multinational telecommunications systems provider, we propose a new and novel approach called Development-Services-Operations (DevServOps) which incorporates services as a key player facilitating an end-to-end software flow toward customers in one direction and feedback toward developers in the other direction. Services become the glue that connects the Dev and the Ops, achieved by providing internal services to increase the precision of the development organization and external services to increase the speed of deployment and new content adoption on the customers' side.
Paolo Ciancarini, Raffaele Giancarlo, Gennaro Grimaudo
Digital Transformation (DT) is the process of integrating digital technologies and solutions into the activities of an organization, whether public or private. This paper focuses on the DT of public sector organizations, where the targets of innovative digital solutions are either the citizens or the administrative bodies or both. This paper is a guided tour for Computer Scientists, as the digital transformation of the public sector involves more than just the use of technology. While technological innovation is a crucial component of any digital transformation, it is not sufficient on its own. Instead, DT requires a cultural, organizational, and technological shift in the way public sector organizations operate and relate to their users, creating the capabilities within the organization to take full advantage of any opportunity in the fastest, best, and most innovative manner in the ways they operate and relate to the citizens. Our tutorial is based on the results of a survey that we performed as an analysis of scientific literature available in some digital libraries well known to Computer Scientists. Such tutorial let us to identify four key pillars that sustain a successful DT: (open) data, ICT technologies, digital skills of citizens and public administrators, and agile processes for developing new digital services and products. The tutorial discusses the interaction of these pillars and highlights the importance of data as the first and foremost pillar of any DT. We have developed a conceptual map in the form of a graph model to show some basic relationships among these pillars. We discuss the relationships among the four pillars aiming at avoiding the potential negative bias that may arise from a rendering of DT restricted to technology only. We also provide illustrative examples and highlight relevant trends emerging from the current state of the art.
Edison Rubén Molina Velásquez, Pedro Andrés Villagrán Olivo, Franklin Raúl Guerrero Carvajal
et al.
En 2018 el Ministerio de Turismo del Ecuador (MINTUR) firma un convenio con la Secretaría de Turismo de México (SECTUR) para la implementación y desarrollo del Programa de Desarrollo de Localidades Pueblos Mágicos Ecuador – 4 Mundos. Luego de tres años de funcionamiento, y tomando en cuenta el impacto de la pandemia por COVID-19, se plantea como objetivo del presente trabajo analizar la oferta turística y la promoción para determinar el estado actual de la implementación del programa Pueblos Mágicos Ecuador. La investigación es de corte descriptivo y comparativo; de enfoque metodológico mixto; se complementa el estudio con el uso de sistemas de información geográfica SIG, para representar la distribución territorial y la concentración de los prestadores de servicios. Los principales resultados reflejan la tipología de atractivos turísticos, clasificación y concentración de prestadores de servicios, certificaciones y denominaciones, clasificación de áreas de conservación e información referente a la promoción turística por plataformas digitales. Pueblos Mágicos es un modelo de gestión que impulsa a la actividad turística, rescatando la identidad local y la revalorización del patrimonio. Depende directamente del compromiso de los actores vinculados al programa establecer estrategias promocionales.
Hospitality industry. Hotels, clubs, restaurants, etc. Food service, Recreation leadership. Administration of recreation services
Students’ perception regarding a career in sales has long been studied, especially in the US, but with fewer studies
in Europe. There is less research in Romania. The present paper questions students from five faculties within the Bucharest University of Economic Studies, the number of valid answers being 167. The main research results show that although they do not have a negative perception on the field, as it was generally indicated by the previous studies carried out in the Anglo-Saxon countries, students are not very attracted to a career in sales as a first professional option. The situation changes to some extent if there is a firm job offer that many more would accept. Another important aspect is the influence of socio-demographic variables on the decision to pursue a career in sales, with particular regard to differences between boys and girls and income levels. Although in general, they believe that the subjects studied in college would be of use for them in order to work in sales, most of the students do not intend to make this professional choice. The overall conclusion of the study is that students from Bucharest University of Economic Studies do not have a deepened knowledge of the field, and the lack of interest in a sales job is the result of the unawareness of this field rather than a negative perception
Recreation leadership. Administration of recreation services, Business
In the tourism industry, visiting tourists’ intentions have been the
subject of numerous investigations for decades. However, the factors
determining choices of specific tourist destinations have still not been
clearly defined. The country of origin’s culture has been widely
acknowledged to be a key element in variations in tourists’ behaviours.
This study evaluated the capacity of cultural distance between
countries of origin and Spain – as specified by Hofstede’s proposed
model – to influence intentions of visiting Spain in the near future.
These intentions were measured as a function of the theory of planned
behaviour. The results facilitate the identification of relevant issues
affecting potential tourists’ intention to visit Spain. Analyses of the
data’s validity and reliability yielded satisfactory solutions that allow
conclusions to be drawn about why behavioural intentions vary
significantly depending on tourists’ cultural distance from Spain. The
Hofstede model’s ability to explain intention to visit was, therefore,
confirmed.
Recreation leadership. Administration of recreation services
Francesco Malandrino, Carla Fabiana Chiasserini, Gil Einziger
et al.
Thanks to its computational and forwarding capabilities, the mobile network infrastructure can support several third-party ("vertical") services, each composed of a graph of virtual (network) functions (VNFs). Importantly, one or more VNFs are often common to multiple services, thus the services deployment cost could be reduced by letting the services share the same VNF instance instead of devoting a separate instance to each service. By doing that, however, it is critical that the target KPI (key performance indicators) of all services are met. To this end, we study the VNF sharing problem and make decisions on (i) when sharing VNFs among multiple services is possible, (ii) how to adapt the virtual machines running the shared VNFs to the combined load of the assigned services, and (iii) how to prioritize the services traffic within shared VNFs. All decisions aim to minimize the cost for the mobile operator, subject to requirements on end-to-end service performance, e.g., total delay. Notably, we show that the aforementioned priorities should be managed dynamically and vary across VNFs. We then propose the FlexShare algorithm to provide near-optimal VNF-sharing and priority assignment decisions in polynomial time. We prove that FlexShare is within a constant factor from the optimum and, using real-world VNF graphs, we show that it consistently outperforms baseline solutions.
Alissandra Nazareth de Carvalho, Luciana Araújo de Holanda, Patricia Cristina S. Martins
et al.
O presente artigo tem como objetivo avaliar o curso de bacharelado em Turismo no Brasil com base nos indicadores dos cursos no Exame Nacional de Desempenho dos Estudantes (Enade), no período de 2006 a 2012, bem como conhecer a visão que as Instituições de Ensino Superior (IES) e as associações/entidades profissionais da área de turismo têm a respeito do referido exame. Para construção deste trabalho foram realizadas pesquisas bibliográfica, documental e de campo, nas quais foram aplicados questionários a docentes e coordenadores de cursos, bem como a representantes de associações e entidades de classe. Foi possível observar que o Enade é um instrumento de avaliação relevante que impacta na formação do estudante, bem como na atuação de coordenadores e professores de IES, ainda que a relevância desse processo e a infinidade de possibilidades de aprimoramento educacionais apresentadas pelo referido exame não estejam totalmente claras para esses acadêmicos e profissionais.
Geography. Anthropology. Recreation, Recreation leadership. Administration of recreation services
This article surveys blockchain-based approaches for several security services. These services include authentication, confidentiality, privacy, and access control list (ACL), data and resource provenance, and integrity assurance. All these services are critical for the current distributed applications, especially due to the large amount of data being processed over the networks and the use of cloud computing. Authentication ensures that the user is who he/she claims to be. Confidentiality guarantees that data cannot be read by unauthorized users. Privacy provides the users the ability to control who can access their data. Provenance allows an efficient tracking of the data and resources along with their ownership and utilization over the network. Integrity helps in verifying that the data has not been modified or altered. These services are currently managed by centralized controllers, for example, a certificate authority. Therefore, the services are prone to attacks on the centralized controller. On the other hand, blockchain is a secured and distributed ledger that can help resolve many of the problems with centralization. The objectives of this paper are to give insights on the use of security services for current applications, to highlight the state of the art techniques that are currently used to provide these services, to describe their challenges, and to discuss how the blockchain technology can resolve these challenges. Further, several blockchain-based approaches providing such security services are compared thoroughly. Challenges associated with using blockchain-based security services are also discussed to spur further research in this area.
Este trabajo es un análisis de una serie de aspectos en torno al parque eco arqueológico de Xcaret, en la región turística de la Riviera Maya, en el estado de Quintana Roo, México. En primer lugar, la capacidad de reciclar y reconstruir un medio natural complejo adecuado para el turismo. En segundo lugar, el uso del patrimonio cultural de la zona como excusa temática. En tercer lugar, el modelo de negocio en si mismo y la trama empresarial que apunta a los valores de sostenibilidad y una política de comunicación como estrategias para la atracción de los visitantes al parque.
Recreation leadership. Administration of recreation services, The city as an economic factor. City promotion
O presente artigo tem a finalidade de aprofundar na discussão das relações entre cultura alimentar e turismo. Em um contexto de maior evidência comercial da gastronomia brasileira internacionalmente, haveria uma aliança entre ela e o turismo no país? Para responder à essa inquietação, trata-se, através de uma revisão teórica, da formação de cultura alimentar e como, a partir dos conceitos de cultura, identidade e memória, foram se construindo alguns dos aspectos das culturas alimentares brasileiras. A partir disso, discute-se a formação do turismo, sua relação com a cultura alimentar e o processo de construção de entendimento dessa relação no Brasil.
Recreation. Leisure, Recreation leadership. Administration of recreation services
Fernando Oliveira Tavares, Luís Pacheco, Miguel Rodrigues Pires
O objetivo deste artigo é analisar a perceção e sensibilidade ao risco das
“PME de excelência” portuguesas e constatar quais os benefícios que retiram
da gestão do risco. É também objetivo investigar se as empresas entendem a
gestão do risco como algo de positivo e se apresentam maturidade na
identificação e tratamento do risco. O método de análise utilizado é
quantitativo e exploratório. Numa primeira fase, foi efetuado um inquérito
às empresas e realizada uma análise descritiva dos resultados. Numa fase
posterior, foi efetuada a análise fatorial de componentes principais. Os
resultados apresentam quatro fatores com relevância na análise do risco
empresarial, nomeadamente, os fatores relacionados com os riscos de
funcionamento, competitividade, adaptação e mercado. As empresas
associam o risco de funcionamento a características internas, o risco de
competitividade a condições de diferenciação e concorrência, o risco de
adaptação ao ambiente que as rodeia e o risco de mercado a variáveis
financeiras.
Recreation leadership. Administration of recreation services
In conventional large-scale networks, creation and management of network services are costly and complex tasks that often consume a lot of resources, including time and manpower. Network softwarization and network function virtualization have been introduced to tackle these problems. They replace the hardware-based network service components and network control mechanisms with software components running on general-purpose hardware, aiming at decreasing costs and complexity of implementing new services, maintaining the implemented services, and managing available resources in service provisioning platforms and underlying infrastructures. To experience the full potential of these approaches, innovative development support tools and service provisioning environments are needed. To answer these needs, we introduce the SONATA architecture, a service programming, orchestration, and management framework. We present a development toolchain for virtualized network services, fully integrated with a service platform and orchestration system. We motivate the modular and flexible architecture of our system and discuss its main components and features, such as function- and service-specific managers that allow fine- grained service management, slicing support to facilitate multi-tenancy, recursiveness for improved scalability, and full-featured DevOps support.