Happiness and freedom in direct action: critical mass bike rides as ecstatic ritual,play, and temporary autonomous zones

Most leisure research does not consider collective action and social change, while most social movement research overlooks carnivality and spontaneity. A counter-example is the alternative bicycling movement critical mass (CM), a rebellious, liberatory leisure and cultural event. CM is goal-oriented and a libidinal expression of participant desire. This paper investigates CM’s production of happiness and freedom via three heterodox theories. Ecstatic rituals are repetitive, cathartic collective events that people engage in to express joy and flaunt convention. Political theories of play interpret individual’s physically-embodied, creative, and performative actions. Temporary autonomous zones are spatial locations of resistance to authority that evade state detection and suppression. CM – unlike standard bike races or conventional movement protest – transcends the limitations of physical exercise, lackadaisical leisure, and militant direct action. Instead it is a hybrid form of collective action, combining premeditated ritual, rebellious play, and mobile freedom-seeking.     

Applying the counseling-learning approach to a tourism-related massive open online course

ABSTRACT

This study discusses how to apply counseling-learning (CL) principles to a particular e-learning solution for teaching a tourism-related subject via a massive open online course (MOOC). Several effective caring patterns in achieving learning-related goals and being part of a community according to the CL principles are presented and discussed using the MOOC “eTourism: Communication Perspectives” as a case study. The study underlines how the MOOC platform can act as a place for contents enjoinment and active learning. Moreover, the active role of social media for increasing the engagement of learners in the proposed activities and for developing a sense of the community is identified. In particular, Facebook and Twitter can act as places for community building and informal social interactions among learners that last beyond the completion of the course, which in turn can be a valid aid for continuing the relationships among instructors/learners and learners/learners, and for reaching new ones.     

A comparative study of eight COVID-19 protective measures and their impact on Swiss tourists’ travel intentions

A comparative vignette-based experimental survey design incorporating various socio-psychological factors, linked to the Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB), the Health Belief Model (HBM) and the Domain-Specific Risk-Taking scale (DOSPERT) was carried out to test variations in eight travel-related COVID-19 protective measures on Swiss tourists’ travel intentions. Among the tested measures, vaccination passports, surgical masks and quarantining are those that stand out the most, with surgical masks having the greatest acceptance and willingness to adopt while traveling. Quarantining, on the other hand, appears to have a deterrent influence on travel intentions, and vaccination passports have the lowest perceived barriers during travel, but the highest perceived benefits in mitigating the spread of the infection. The discussion of individual differences has specific implications for tourism management against the background of our empirical findings.     

Collaborative delay management towards demand-capacity balancing within User Driven Prioritisation Process

The concept of User Driven Prioritisation Process (UDPP) was introduced to give Airspace Users (AUs) more flexibility under demand-capacity imbalance. This paper presents two UDPP-DCB models, built on the UDPP principle, using the Selective Flight Protection (SFP) approach to minimize the total delay cost. AUs are enabled to adapt their operations in a more cost-efficient way in the presence of capacity constraints in airspace, optimizing their flights to keep the priorities track. Then, ATFM integrates the AUs’ decision to reassign the time slots and the preferred rerouting trajectories. Results suggest that the delay cost for AUs can be largely reduced through applying the UDPP-DCB models proposed in this paper, while allowing rerouting proves effective in reducing the system delay cost.     

TrAffic LIght system for systemic Stress: TALIS3

For the purposes of financial stability, identifying financial institutions that, when in distress, could have a significant adverse impact on financial markets is important. A TrAffic LIght System for Systemic Stress (TALIS-cube) is proposed that provides a comprehensive color-based classification for grouping companies according to both the stress reaction level of the system when the company is in distress and the company’s stress level. TALIS³ can integrate multiple signals from the interaction between different risk metrics. Starting from specific risk indicators, companies are classified by combining two loss functions—one for the system and one for each company—evaluated over time and as a cross section. An aggregated index is also obtained from the color-based classification of companies. TALIS³ can be used to enhance the performance and robustness of existing systemic risk measures. An empirical analysis of the U.S. market is also provided.     

Object detection based on visual memory: a feature learning and feature imagination process

ABSTRACT

Visual memory plays an important role for the human’s visual system to detect objects. The features of an object stored in the visual memory have much lower dimensions than the features contained within an image. We simulate the visual memory as a feature learning and feature imagination (FLFI) process to build an object detection algorithm. The method is constructed by a bottom-up feature learning and a top-down feature imagination. The proposed object detection method is tested using publicly available benchmark data sets, and the result indicates that it is fast and more robust.     

The non-linear impact of oil price on the oil demand

ABSTRACT

A panel smooth transition regression model was adopted to analyse the non-linear impact of oil prices on oil demand. Data for 42 countries was obtained from the International Energy Agency for the time period spanning from January 1990 to June 2017. The results indicate that a threshold value does exist. Furthermore, when the oil price was lower than this threshold value, a positive relationship between oil price and oil demand was observed. When the price of oil was higher than the threshold value, however, a negative relationship between price and demand was found.     

The Emergence of Proto-Institutions in the New Normal Business Landscape: Dialectic Institutional Work and the Dutch Drone Industry

In the current business landscape, in which technology-enabled entrepreneurship is part of the New Normal, regulatory institutional structures are in constant flux. Previous studies have framed the challenges facing entrepreneurs in mature organizational fields as avoiding the power of overbearing regulators long enough to establish the legitimacy of their ventures. In fields typified by New Normal conditions, however, regulatory frameworks for evaluating new technology-enabled ventures are often still lacking. Regulators may choose to actively reach out to entrepreneurs to arrive at a better understanding of the radical technological changes and high-frequency entrepreneurial behavioural adaptations that occur in these settings. To grasp how novel regulatory institutional structures come about in the New Normal business landscape, we conducted a processual study of the emergence of a new technology that is the Dutch remotely piloted aircraft systems (drone) industry between 2000 and 2018. Our findings show that regulatory proto-institutions result from dialectic institutional work in the form of structured interactions between entrepreneurs and regulators. Specifically, we present a process model that reveals how new regulatory structures evolve in contexts where high levels of technological and behavioural change induce systemic uncertainty, and enlarge the interdependence between entrepreneurs and regulators. We suggest that our process theory of proto-institutional emergence generalizes towards other organizational fields in which technology-enabled entrepreneurship has become the main driver of growth. Theoretically, our findings speak to the literatures on institutional work, proto-institutional emergence, and the New Normal business landscape.     

Application of evidential reasoning approach and OWA operator weights in road safety evaluation considering the best and worst practice frontiers

Data envelopment analysis (DEA) has recently become relatively popular with road safety experts. Therefore, various decision-making units (DMUs), such as EU countries, have been assessed in terms of road safety performance (RSP). However, the DEA has been criticized because it evaluates DMUs based only on the concept of self-assessment, and, therefore does not provide a unique ranking for DMUs. Therefore, cross efficiency method (CEM) was developed to overcome this shortcoming. Peer-evaluations in addition to self-evaluation have made the CEM to be recognized as an effective method for ranking DMUs. The traditional CEM is based only on the standard CCR (Charnes, Cooper and Rhodes) model, and it evaluates DMUs according to their position relative to the best practice frontier while neglecting the worst practice frontier. However, the DMUs can also be assessed based on their position relative to the worst practice frontier. In this regard, the present study aims to provide a double-frontier CEM for assessing RSP by taking into account the best and worst frontiers simultaneously. For this purpose, the cross efficiency and cross anti-efficiency matrices are generated.Even though a weighted average method (WAM) is most frequently used for cross efficiency aggregation, the decision maker's (DM) preference structure may not be reflected. For this reason, the present study mainly focuses on the evidential reasoning approach (ERA), as a nonlinear aggregation method, rather than the linear WAM. Equal weights are often used for cross efficiency aggregation; consequently, the effect of the DM's subjective judgments in obtaining the overall efficiency is ignored. In this respect, the minimax entropy approach (MEA) and the maximum disparity approach (MMDA) are applied for determining the ordered weighted averaging (OWA) operator weights for cross efficiency aggregation. The weighted cross efficiencies and cross anti-efficiencies are then aggregated using the ERA. Finally, the proposed method, called DF-CEM-ERA, is used to evaluate the RSP of EU countries as well as Serbian police departments (PDs).     

Public and private healthcare services: What drives the choice?

This paper has explored patients' propensity to consume private healthcare services. We based our analysis on the typical tangible and intangible (for instance, responsiveness, reliability, assurance and staff empathy) domains of the SERVQUAL and SERVPERF methods. These variables may influence patients' decision-making when they choose between the public and private sectors. We combined factor analysis (to obtain a set of latent factors related to perceived quality) and a partial proportional ordered logit model to estimate the probability that a patient would access private healthcare services. To test the main hypotheses, we used data from a stratified sample in Sardinia, a peripheral region of Italy. Findings revealed that private and public healthcare are substitutes, especially for primary/specialised services. Patients who used public healthcare frequently and had a low income were unlikely to change to private healthcare or to recommend private services. ‘Responsiveness’ and perceptions on ‘tangibles’ were key in determining the probability that a patient would choose and recommend private services. This paper offers a multifaceted framework that can be used in future research to generalise these findings, especially in insular regions that are constrained by mobility.