More bang for the buck: Getting the most from accident investigations

An Incident Investigation system based on a combination of Fault Tree Analysis logic and the Deming Principles of Systems and Quality was developed during a three-year period. The system was given an excellent test in the investigation of the explosion of a tank car filled with methacrylic acid. In this case, the Event Tree constructed during the investigation was easily converted into a Fault Tree. The Fault Tree so constructed was then used to evaluate the effectiveness of proposed corrective changes to the production, loading, and analytical systems before the changes were actually implemented. By making use of these tools to guide the addition of feedback loops (“And” Gates in fault Tree terminology), the intrinsic safety of the methacrylic acid production and shipping system was greatly enhanced at a relatively low cost.     

Host tourism aspirations as a point of departure for the sustainable livelihoods approach

The sustainable livelihoods (SL) approach offers a holistic framework and a practical toolkit to analyze tourism's impacts and interactions within a community. This study argues that the usefulness of the SL approach in tourism can be enhanced by ensuring that the approach is built on a genuine people-centered starting point. The exploration of the local community's representations of, and aspirations for, their roles in tourism as a future livelihood choice meets this need. To verify the value of this approach empirically, this study examined the case of Lhasa, Tibet, and local youth as the research respondents. The findings suggest that the young hosts in Lhasa urban area were heterogeneous in their responses to tourism as a future livelihood choice. They fell into four subgroups: in-betweeners, ambivalent supporters, alternative supporters, and lovers. Further, this study examined the profiles of these four subgroups and explored their responses. The study enhances the SL approach by taking tourism as an example and clearly defining the departure point for its adoption within the context of broader livelihoods portfolios. Additionally, it suggests some potential directions for tailored management strategies to meet youth and community perspectives.     

Consuming dark tourism: A Thanatological Perspective

Despite increasing academic attention paid to dark tourism, understanding of the concept remains limited, particularly from a consumption perspective. That is, the literature focuses primarily on the supply of dark tourism; less attention, however, has been paid to the demand for ‘dark’ touristic experiences. This theoretical paper seeks to address this gap in the literature. Drawing upon the contemporary sociology of death, it explores the relationship between socio-cultural perspectives on mortality and the potential of dark tourism as a means of confronting death in modern societies. In so doing, it proposes a model of dark tourism consumption within a thanatological framework as a basis for further theoretical and empirical analysis of dark tourism.     

An Indirect Test of Children's Influence on Efficiencies in Parental Consumer Behavior

A statistical test is applied to explore the possibility that children can affect the efficiency with which parents consume. Parents may receive some economic benefits from children in the form of reverse integenerational transfers that occur because of a positive influence children have on family behavior. Results show that not only do children have an influence on parental consumption, but also that the influence is beneficial. In fact, not accounting for such a benefit could cause an underestimate in such measures as the rate of return to education or the benefits from such governmental programs as Head Start.     

Anatomy of a flipped classroom

A well-designed flipped course requires a significant amount of planning and preparation, but has great benefit to both students and instructor. Using Bloom’s Taxonomy as a guide, one can design effective online and in-class components that maximize benefits to students. A flipped classroom allows students more time to interact with peers and their teacher, and collaborate with teams. This paper will describe how one tourism educator flipped an advanced marketing course, as well as the technology tools used in content creation.     

Performance of aqueous hazmat foams on selected hazardous materials

This exploratory research program represents a continuing commitment that was undertaken to provide, where possible, some solution to vapor control problems through the use of special foams, equipment and technical information.