Leisure Spaces,Community, and Third Places

ABSTRACT

After decades of highlighting the decline of social networks, leisure spaces as third places constitute a welcomed approach to mediate this loss. Third places are defined as public gathering places that ultimately contribute to the strength of community. We appreciate the concept and believe that it has and will continue to influence scholars in the field of leisure. For this reason, this research reflection argues Oldenburg's conceptualization of third places requires reconsideration. Specifically, we address the increasing prevalence of technology and question Oldenburg's claim that technology contributes to the isolation of individuals. We also encourage a more complex understanding of third places—one that is beyond the idealized notion of public places. Oldenburg's social dimensions of third places (enjoyment, regularity, pure sociability/social leveler, and diversity) are offered as a useful framework. More specifically, we argue that diversity is the most relevant characteristic when exploring third places as a platform for community.     

A Study of Environmental Reporting: International Japanese Airlines

Economists are of the view that tourism leads to economic development just like human and physical capital and exports. A few studies have discussed this issue empirically. The current study aims to estimate the long-run relationship between income from tourism and the economic growth of Pakistan by using the annual time series data of 1971–2008, and by employing the Johansen Juselius cointegration, autoregressive distributed lag model and rolling windows bounds testing approach to check the stability of the model. The results confirm the long-run relationship between income from tourism and economic growth and explain that income from tourism has led economic growth in Pakistan except in the years 2006, 2007, and 2008.     

Web-based service of a visualization package “Amira” for the geosciences

Amira is a powerful three-dimensional visualization package that has been employed recently by the science and engineering communities to gain insight into their data. We discuss a new paradigm for the use of Amira in the Earth sciences that relies on the client-server paradigm. We have developed a module called WEB-IS2, which provides web-based access to Amira. This tool allows Earth scientists to manipulate Amira controls remotely and to analyze, render and view large datasets through the Internet without regard for time or location. This could have important ramifications for GRID computing.     

Interactive Statistical Analysis of Complex Mantle Flows with the Web

Up to now, all of the figures in mantle convection literature have been presented in a static manner, where the fields at one scale are shown on a printed page . This is no longer possible with the spatial resolution increasing at an ever rising clip and the appearance of the issue of multi-scale structures. Because of the onslaught of data-flooding and the growing complexity of strongly time-varying physical fields from compressible mantle convection, such as the adiabaticity, and other thermo dynamical heating functions, we can no longer afford to display and look at the results in the same static way as in a book. We have developed a new approach for interrogating data coming out from numerical simulations. This is based on an interactive two-dimensional map which is used over the WEB with a client-server paradigm. We have applied this to investigate mantle convection flows in both two-and three-dimensional situations. The distributions of thermal anomalies found are no longer Gaussian but sometimes have long tails, especially near the edges of plume heads. The same is also found for the distribution of mechanical heating, which can be quite skewed. Our experiences with this new interactive mode of data-query have shown both the educational and scientific importance of using the world wide web media to quiz handily the data taken from large-scale numerical simulations.     

Revealing the Nature of Contemporary Tourism Research: Extracting Common Subject Areas through Bibliographic Coupling

This study aims at identifying recent subject areas and citation patterns of tourism research by applying a bibliometric tool to analyze over 2000 publications since 2008 from 10 tourism journals. Twelve subject areas were identified, and interesting citation patterns were revealed. From this analysis, the tourism research was found to be quite dynamic but at the same time very much focused on marketing and management aspects. This article contributes to ongoing efforts to reveal the nature of tourism research and its knowledge bases by applying the methodology of bibliographic coupling. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Pricing Asian Options and Equity-Indexed Annuities with Regime Switching by the Trinomial Tree Method

Abstract

Equity-indexed annuities (EIAs) provide investors with a minimum rate of return and at the same time the opportunity of gaining a profit that is linked to the performance of an equity index. These properties make EIAs a popular product in the market. For modeling the equity index process and calculating the price of EIAs, as the maturity of EIAs usually is long, it is more reasonable to assume that the interest rate and the volatility of the equity index are stochastic processes. One simple way is to apply the regime-switching model, which allows these parameters depending on the market situation. However, the valuation of derivatives in such models is challenging, especially for the strong path-dependent options such as Asian options. A trinomial tree model is introduced to provide an efficient way to solve this problem. The valuation of Asian options is studied and extended to Asian-option-related EIAs.     

THE SUITABILITY OF A GREATER CHINA CURRENCY UNION

Abstract. The study assesses the level of integration among the three Greater China economies (China, Hong Kong and Taiwan) and examines the suitability of a Greater China currency union. The three economies already have extensive trade and investment linkages. Our analyses show that they share common long‐run and short‐run cyclical variations. We also estimate the output costs of relinquishing policy autonomy to form a currency union. The estimated output losses, which depend on, e.g., the method used to generate shock estimates, seem to be moderate and are likely to be less than the efficient gains derived from a currency union.