Crowding standards at Petra Archaeological Park: a comparative study of McKercher's five types of heritage tourists

To achieve sustainability in heritage tourism, tourists should be placed at the heart of the management and planning processes. Indicators and standards-based frameworks were developed in the field of outdoor recreation management to manage and measure crowding and other problematic issues in parks and related areas. Using normative theory and visual research methods, this article aims to examine crowding standards of tourists at Petra Archaeological Park, and compare these standards between the types of heritage tourists suggested by a model developed by Bob McKercher. Results showed that tourists’ acceptability levels go down with an increasing number of tourists, and tourists who are highly motivated to visit heritage sites (i.e. purposeful and sightseeing heritage tourists) had the most restrictive acceptable number of tourists at the park. The normative standards formulated in this article provided a guidance to manage crowding at Petra.     

Inference for the two-parameter bathtub-shaped distribution based on record data

Here we consider the record data from the two-parameter of bathtub-shaped distribution. First, we develop simplified forms for the single moments, variances and covariance of records. These distributional properties are quite useful in obtaining the best linear unbiased estimators of the location and scale parameters which can be included in the model. The estimation of the unknown shape parameters and prediction of the future unobserved records based on some observed ones are discussed. Frequentist and Bayesian analyses are adopted for conducting the estimation and prediction problems. The likelihood method, moment based method, bootstrap methods as well as the Bayesian sampling techniques are applied for the inference problems. The point predictors and credible intervals of future record values based on an informative set of records can be developed. Monte Carlo simulations are performed to compare the so developed methods and one real data set is analyzed for illustrative purposes.     

TD-LTE抢占无线全新商机

如今,为了努力满足用户对移动数据日益增长的需求,大部分运营商的网络和频段都在满负荷运行。据相关数据显示,2010年用户每月使用的数据流量已经超过了5GB。由于数据增长的关键驱动因素——smartphone的普及率在全球仍低于20%,运营商预计用户每月使用的数据流量仍将继续增长。因此,如何充分利用自身的频谱资源、开发包括TD-LTE在内的不同技术选择的潜力,就成为运营商极为关注的重要课题。     

Underperformance of Actively Managed Portfolios: Some Behavioral Insights

Abstract

Two glaring anomalies in investment management are apparent: (1) after fees, active portfolio managers do worse than market indices, and (2) clients continue to pay for services they don’t receive. The purpose of this paper is to offer explanations of these anomalies from a behavioral perspective. We explore some of the cognitive biases that perpetuate active management and subsequent underperformance, including herding, disposition, and endowment effects, as well as conservatism and status quo biases, overconfidence, and agency problems. Investors’ continued use of active managers despite persistent disappointing returns is attributed to being victims of framing effect, hot-hand fallacy, lack of knowledge as well as intimidation or insecurity, and status quo bias. We propose some ways that portfolio managers and investors could improve their decision making.     

Credit constraints and smallholder dairy production in the East African highlands: application of a switching regression model

Accurate assessment of farmers' credit constraint condition is important in order to understand the circumstances under which credit would have its greatest impact. In this study a switching regression model was used to determine the impact of credit on smallholder dairy farms in the East African highlands using farm level data from Ethiopia and Kenya. Farmers were classified as credit constrained or credit non-constrained based on their responses from the farm level surveys. No consistent relationship was found between farmers' credit constraint condition and their borrowing status. Most of the variation in milk output per farm was explained by the number of crossbred milking cows in the dairy herd. As credit is likely to facilitate investment in crossbred dairy cows it will have substantial impacts on smallholder dairy farms especially if it is targeted to credit constrained farms.     

Examining Organic Food Purchases and Preferences Within Jordan

Continuing economic development in Jordan provides potential food marketing opportunities as a new group of prospective value-added food product consumers emerges. The growing demand for high-value foods such as organically produced items also provides a new potential value-added market for Jordanian farmers. No studies to our knowledge have examined consumer preferences toward organic food items within Jordan. This study provides an initial attempt to fill this knowledge gap by examining the market for organic food items from a demand perspective in order to increase the knowledge available to Jordanian farmers, food processors, and retailers.     

Industrialization in an age of globalization: some comparisons between East and South East Asia and Latin America

The contrast between industrial experience in East and South East Asia and Latin America is dramatic. Whilst a first generation of newly industrialized economies in East Asia grew rapidly on the basis of manufacturing expansion, the longer‐established industries of Latin America have performed relatively poorly by most indicators. This paper utilizes data from UN and World Bank databases to assess relative performance since the early 1980s. It shows that whilst there is some evidence of modest catch‐up in efficiency terms for Latin America in the 1990s, this is not enough to make serious inroads into the loss of international competitiveness experienced by the region in earlier decades.     

A fuzzy goal programming approach to analyse sustainable development goals of India

Energy policy, environmental planning and economic development play a key role in sustainable development. Sustainable development requires suitable and strategic policies satisfying multiple and conflicting objectives. Fuzzy goal programming (FGP) is a well-known approach in multi-criteria decision-making for its practical application. In this article, a FGP approach is proposed to analyse environmental, energy and sustainability goals of India by the year 2030 with reference to the key economic sectors of India. The presented model analyses the improvement opportunities, requirement of efforts and implementation of the sustainable development plans. Numerical illustration is also provided for validation and application of the proposed model.     

Leadership in Islam

Leadership is about knowledge, skills, and abilities for transformation. It is also increasingly about worldviews or visions of life—beliefs, values, and principles. But worldviews are also ways of life, for beliefs direct us, values guide us, and principles motivate us to certain kinds of action and behavior. How, then, do worldviews have an impact on leadership for transformation? If worldviews are glasses or filters by which we view the world, mental models of the bigger picture, frameworks by which we make sense of the world, and narratives by which we orient our lives, then how do they influence human thoughts, ideas, and behaviors when it comes to transformative leadership? This was the subject matter of an International Leadership Association Conference panel discussion held in November 2009 in Prague, entitled Leadership for Transformation: The Impact of Worldviews. It is also the subject matter of this issue's symposium, in which we bring you the four papers and the response presented at the conference. Members of the panel were characterized by gender, disciplinary, religious, and global diversity. Nathan Harter, organizational leadership professor at Purdue University in the United States, begins the discussion with some preliminary remarks about worldviews. Ali Mohammed Mir, medical doctor and director of programs of Population Council, Pakistan, speaks of leadership from an Islamic perspective. Michael Jones, accomplished composer, pianist, and leadership educator, writer, and speaker from Orillia, Canada, reflects on how a “marriage of mythos and logos” can transform leadership today. Lisa Ncube, originally from Zimbabwe and currently assistant professor of organizational leadership at Purdue University, speaks about Ubuntu as an alternative leadership philosophy emerging from Africa. John Valk, associate professor of worldview studies at Renaissance College, University of New Brunswick, Canada, speaks of leadership for transformation from a Christian worldview perspective. Jonathan Reams, associate professor in the Department of Education at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim, responds to all of the papers and opens a venue for further discussion. We hope that you will find this symposium engaging. We hope it will give food for thought and that it might stimulate further thinking regarding the role worldviews play in leadership for transformation.