Shining light on the darkness. Placing tourists within North Korean tourism. Comment on: Desiring the dark: ‘A taste for the unusual’ in North Korean tourism?

Few studies exist of tourism in North Korea. Many passing references to tourism have been distanced from actual tourists. Visiting North Korea is a form of moral political tourism that has no relationship to dark tourism or fantasy, but represents tourist interest in seeking to discover a ‘real’ North Korea that is distinct from hegemonic political narratives from outside or inside the country. Tourism is associated with the need to evaluate and reconsider political orthodoxies and ideologies, and discover an everyday environment.     

Gender diversity and firm performance: evidence from Dutch and Danish boardrooms

Drawing on the business case for gender diversity, this article examines whether board gender diversity has a positive effect on firm performance, based on evidence from the Netherlands and Denmark. We use empirical data on 186 listed firms observed in 2007. Almost 40% have at least one woman in the boardroom. Within boards, the average share of women is only 5.4%. To investigate the impact of board gender diversity, two-stage least-squares estimation is applied, using Tobin’s Q as a measure of performance. Our findings indicate that on the basis of this data-set, there is no relation between board diversity and firm performance.     

THE EFFECT OF TRADING FUTURES ON SHORT SALE CONSTRAINTS

It is commonly believed that the trading of futures on a commodity enables the market to overcome short selling constraints on the spot commodity itself. This belief is embedded in the notion that trading strategies involving futures contracts enable traders to replicate the payoffs as if they were short the spot commodity. The purpose of this paper is to investigate this common belief in a general arbitrage‐free semimartingale financial model with trading in futures and a short selling prohibition on the spot commodity. We show via various examples that, in general, this common belief is incorrect. Furthermore, we provide a set of sufficient conditions, albeit very restrictive, under which the common belief is true.     

语义Web知识表示方法及应用

为满足网络环境下知识表示、发现和管理的需求,提出了基于语义Web的知识表示方案。以企业资源知识表示为例,利用Protégé工具实现了企业资源知识的语义Web表示。     

Representation of Cruise: Cruisers and Noncruisers Cross Views

The article demonstrates the interest in using social representations as a tool of analysis in the representation of cruise for cruisers and noncruisers. The main objective of this study is to identify and to compare social representations of cruise for these groups. The article is based on a review of the social representation theory literature. Using multiapproach methods focused on organizing principles, the results indicate some resemblance and many differences between both representations. Theoretical and managerial implications are discussed before the article concludes with limitations and directions for future research. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

基于语义网的协同供应链知识表示研究

在协同供应链环境下．跨部门、跨企业的知识共享十分频繁,也更加复杂。文章首先对协同供应链中知识共享特征进行分析,提出基于语义网的知识表示机制。并结合实例介绍了供应链中三类知识——描述、规则、案例知识及其表示结构,提高知识共享的效率,实现协同供应链的聚合作用。     

堆垛机故障诊断专家系统的知识获取与表示

堆垛机的可靠性和可维护性是提高作业效率、保证设备良好工况的重要因素。文中通过分析堆垛机故障发生的机理,结合故障树分析法,建立了系统的故障树,并用故障树表示故障原因及其故障传播逻辑关系,从故障树的顶事件至底事件形成故障分析支路,并进一步建立了堆垛机工作中可能发生的各种异常状态的知识库,故障诊断专家系统的知识获取采用人工获取的方式,知识表示使用产生式规则。     

Site accessibility and prioritization of nature reserves

Nature reserves not only protect habitat-stressed species but also provide recreation and welfare services to people. Therefore, site accessibility matters in reserve design. This study incorporates public accessibility, determined by urban populations and distances between urban areas and reserve sites, as an additional factor in conservation reserve design besides species representation and economic characteristics of individual sites. An optimization approach is introduced to determine a reserve network with maximum accessibility while satisfying specified representation targets under financial constraints. The paper also presents an empirical application of this approach to endangered/threatened birds in Illinois, USA, and analyzes the tradeoffs between ecological, economic, and social objectives of biological conservation. The results show that: i) the conventional minimal representation approach would result in a small reserve network, but this network would have poor accessibility; ii) public accessibility can be improved significantly by selecting alternative sites with the same amount of conservation budget; iii) further improvement in accessibility can be achieved by enlarging the network, but in this particular case the gains would be insignificant after the first few additional sites; and iv) a regionally integrated conservation plan, as opposed to decentralized conservation efforts, is beneficial for both species protection and social welfare.     

Collaborative conceptualisation: towards a conceptual foundation of interoperable electronic product catalogue system design

The maintenance of semantic consistency between numerous heterogeneous electronic product catalogues (EPC) that are distributed, autonomous, interdependent and emergent on the Internet is an unsolved issue for the existing heterogeneous EPC integration approaches. This article attempts to solve this issue by conceptually designing an interoperable EPC (IEPC) system through a proposed novel collaborative conceptualisation approach. This approach introduces collaboration into the heterogeneous EPC integration. It implies much potential for future e-marketplace research. It theoretically answers why real-world EPCs are so complex, how these complex EPCs can be explained and articulated in a product map theory for heterogeneous EPC integration, how a semantic consistency maintenance model can be created to satisfy the three heterogeneous EPC integration conditions and implemented by adopting a collaborative integration strategy on a collaborative concept exchange model, and how this collaborative integration strategy can be realised on a collaboration mechanism. This approach has been validated through a theoretical justification and its applicability has been demonstrated in two prototypical e-business applications.     

RISK MEASURES AND CAPITAL REQUIREMENTS FOR PROCESSES

In this paper we propose a generalization of the concepts of convex and coherent risk measures to a multiperiod setting, in which payoffs are spread over different dates. To this end, a careful examination of the axiom of translation invariance and the related concept of capital requirement in the one-period model is performed. These two issues are then suitably extended to the multiperiod case, in a way that makes their operative financial meaning clear. A characterization in terms of expected values is derived for this class of risk measures and some examples are presented.