Search

This paper presents a mode choice model for bike-and-ride using the data combined with RP and SP surveys from the neighborhoods within the distance of 500 meters away from the public bike spots in Xi’an Economic and Technological Development Zone. Compared with the previous researches, this model adds the factors of the owning of vehicles or not and trip purpose besides of the socio-economic characters, trip features and the service and facility level. The significant factors which can influence the mode choice behaviors of the bike-and-ride are identified and the results show that the age, owning of bikes, trip distance and the convenience of the service and facility of bike-and-ride have large impacts on the mode choice of bike-and- ride. Besides, car available and the income per year can also influence the mode choice of bike-and-ride and trip purpose has a small effect on the mode choice of bike-and-ride. Finally, this paper provides the policy suggestions for well implementation of the public bike projects in Xi’an Economic and Technological Development Zone according to the model analysis results to encourage more people choosing this mode pattern, which includes: (1) simplifying the transfer procedures, shorten the distance between bus stops/rail stations and public bike spots, and generalize the using of the transport card (containing both of the transit service and public bike service); (2) increasing the number of the public bike sports in the large commercial, residential, office areas and bus stops/rail stations where is densely populated; (3) planning and designing bike lanes in the road reconstructions.

In the paper the results of scientific-theoretical research about influence of professional education on development of enterprise potential of young people are presented. In the conditions of performance of a strategic task to increase a share of small and medium business in Kazakhstan till 2020 year the important role its realization undoubtedly belongs to an education system. The researches of foreign scientists show that the system of professional education has a big importance on formation of business potential of students. Besides modern requirements of a labor market set a task for the graduates to have the knowledge and skills in the business sphere. The development of business potential of the student during training will lead to increase of its competitiveness in the market. The opinions of experts on existing problems in the course of training from the point of view of their focus on development at students of enterprise qualities are analyzed. The results of applied research of entrepreneurial orientation of students prove the existence by students the positive relation to business and desire to develop enterprise potential during study. Also, in the paper the main directions of improvement of system of formation and development of enterprise potential of students are formulated.

The extent to which human migration has grown over the last two decades partially reflects the strategic approach that some countries have taken to address shortages in skills and expertise. Evidence suggests that migrants are however often underutilised or underachieve, leading to a sub-optimal outcome and often a result of the human capital recognition deficit, both by the migrant and the country of destination. The deficit is partly driven by the range of difficulties associated with workplace integration and acculturation, arguably part of the extensive range of losses experienced by migrants. This paper postulates the argument that a timely and appropriate intervention in the workplace integration process will alleviate the human capital recognition deficit and allow migrants to make a more significant contribution to the workplace in a shorter period of time. This paper reflects on experiences reported by South African migrants in Australia. It focusses on the narrative of workplace exposure and identifies three major groupings. First there is the overall experience of ‘not knowing’, followed by a willingness to tackle the ‘new and difficult environment’. Finally respondents report a capability to ‘respond’, and in a sense outperform their perceived diminished human capital value. Overall the paper confirms that the experiences of South African migrants in Australia mirror experiences reported in other migration studies. Personal observations and comments in the study do however confirm the benefits that an employer based support system holds in minimizing the human capital deficit. In recent times human migration has assumed significant proportions, to the extent that by 2008 approximately three (3) per cent of the world population were considered migrants ( Enderwick et al., 2011 ). While many factors facilitate global migration those countries that recognised its potential as a source of economic growth and development have also fuelled it. Through a combination of pull factors, including prominent government migration policies, countries such as the United States of America, Canada, New Zealand and Australia have succeeded in attracting significant numbers of skilled migrants to their shores. It is now generally accepted that these countries have benefitted substantially from immigration.

The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the understanding of small medium enterprises (SMEs) and firm performances within the craft industry by drawing attention to the critical factors influencing its performance, and to further provide an integrated framework to examine SMEs performances. In this paper, an integrative framework of firm performance and factors influencing it is proposed that relies on resource-based view theory as well as combining insights from Porter's theory. The proposed framework allows the identification of the factors driving SMEs performances and the capture of holistic firm performance within the craft industry.

Coordination is reaching agreements through consistent operation of various parts of the system to achieve a particular purpose. Efficiency is one of the key concepts relating to the coordination of EU policies in the Member States of the EU. Although there are several tools to measure efficiency of coordination on domestic level, such as the scale of Metcalfe and benchmarks of the World Bank, there is no complex set of tools to measure the multifaceted efficiency of coordination. This paper consists of two main parts: 1/ analysis of efficiency of coordination of EU policies in the Polish government institutions using existing methods of evaluating efficiency and analysis of required improvements in the coordination system of Poland, 2/ analysis of possible improvements in measuring efficiency of coordination of EU policies, based on the paradigm of New Public Management and using theories typical for modeling business processes in private companies. The paper bases on qualitative research conducted in Polish ministries involved in domestic coordination. The research results show certain lacks in efficiency of coordination in Poland according to traditional tools of measuring efficiency. At the same time use of these tools does not allow for proper diagnosis and finding solutions to recent problems of coordination. Recommendations give some solutions to challenges of efficient coordination on domestic level using broader set of tools for measuring coordination efficiency.

With the increase of motor vehicle ownership and the traffic demand in Beijing, the road traffic management is becoming more important and complex. To build the intelligent traffic management system using the information technology is an effective measure to improve the traffic system ability and service level, and the road traffic law enforcement business is one of the key link. With IDEF method, this paper builds the business process model of Beijing road traffic law enforcement, carries out the business process diagnosis and analysis combined with the actual situation. The paper puts forward the optimization idea of Beijing road traffic law enforcement business process, and builds the optimized business procedural model, which provides reference to develop the traffic law enforcement business of the Beijing intelligent traffic management system.

The paper presents the correlation between a specific method for acquiring knowledge from external sources by companies i.e. partnership marketing and corporate innovation processes. The authors make the assumption that the use of customer relationships in the innovation process contributes to the implementation of this process. CRM systems are effective tools for acquiring information for innovation processes both at the stage of creating innovations and the stage of the diffusion of innovation. The effectiveness of individualised marketing is conditioned by such factors as close relationships with customers, continuous oversight, analyses, information technologies and databases. Customers’ participation in innovation creation is significant for another reason: customers who use products and services acquire knowledge that represents a great value for companies. The results of empirical research confirm the above hypothesis. The results of research presented in the paper indicate that Malopolska's companies do not make use of CRM methods in an effective way. It results from the deficiencies of IT infrastructure, the absence of knowledge management systems, cooperation traditions, difficulties in identifying customer needs in large target groups. Relationship marketing can be used as a tool for supporting corporate innovation processes with particular regard to tourism enterprises in order to more fully understand the tourists and visitors of a destination point of view.

In recent years, long-standing science, advanced technology, and complex management have come to a common ground that researchers and marketers are able to map science to marketing. Today, constant changes in consumer behavior and how they interact with the company in the world full of sophisticated technologies, alternative research methods are needed, fMRI could or could not be the right answer, but it is definitely a promising alternative research method. The purpose of this paper is to provide an integrative overview of neuromarketing using brain imaging techniques, particularly, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). This paper is also an attempt to investigate its potential implications for market research, based on the author's experiences as a subject study in high-end brands advertisings. The discussion of neuromarketing, focusing on fMRI, as the application within the scope of managerial practice is provided by means of a literature review for to discussion as well as the investigation of existing problems and exploring the future challenges. A personal experience in fMRI as a study subject in high-end brands advertisings is also presented. Because this is an emerging field of marketing research and still controversial, the rising ethical issues are a challenge. Yet, fMRI offers a new cutting edge method that is able to shed light on subconscious processes which has a potential to significantly improve the effectiveness of advertising messages. This paper is written based on marketing literature and from the author's experience as a subject study and an apprentice in the fMRI company.

The use of participatory sensing in health e-Research applications is rapidly becoming a possibility due to the adoption of mobile computing technologies and sensing platforms. Such a change will have important benefits in the access to near real- time, large- scale up to population-wide data collection and analysis. However, there are numerous issues implied. Primarily of concern is how to ensure anonymity and privacy within these methodologies, and further the related issue of how to incentivize participants and remove barriers/concerns over participation. To address these concerns, in this paper we introduce a novel system to capture aggregate population health research data via utilizing smartphone capabilities while fully maintaining the anonymity and privacy of each individual contributing such data. A key and novel capability of this system is the support for customizable data collection; without the need to know specific details about an individual. The customized collection rules can be deployed on the local device based on detailed local data, and the resultant collection can be measured by the anonymous data collection network. In this paper we provide a conceptual architecture and describe a method for local processing of aggregate e-Research health data utilizing adaptive privacy thresholds to create a multi-party flexible approach to participatory data submission to support this novel health e-Research capability.

This paper develops the integrated operation of rural transit routes in China based on the challenges rural transit systems face from the limitations of separate operation. Firstly the characteristics of routes spatial layout and passenger flow are analyzed as the basis for operation design. Secondly, integrated operation and implement conditions are discussed. The trunk routes operate similar to urban transit route, and the minibus and flexible service are suitable for branch routes. Because of low passenger flow, the branch routes should be interlined with the adjacent trunk route. In addition, multi trunk routes and branch routes of adjacent towns could be allied to obtain better optimization and maximize the utilization of vehicle capacity. Furthermore, the practical application of Pukou district is illustrated to show the advantages of integrated operation. The findings of this paper are therefore potentially helpful to rural transit operators and researchers in China and other developing countries.

Most vulnerability assessment is conducted by assessing geographical areas based on their vulnerability levels with the aim of using those results for applied public policies on disaster risk management (DRM). This assessment process has been criticised as an oversimplification and because it fails to integrate vulnerability with other DRM concepts. This paper discusses the limitations of current approaches to vulnerability assessment and identifies key directions for a future research agenda to support better assessment processes at the community scale. To date, vulnerability assessment has failed to recognise the dynamic and systemic character of community vulnerability and the importance of integrating concepts of vulnerability, resilience and adaptation within the assessment process. This means it is inadequate for the purpose of assessing future vulnerability using quantitative modelling. In consequence, public policy often relies solely on assessments of current vulnerability levels for decision-making. This paper argues the need for an assessment process using vulnerability modelling. Modelling is able to emphasise characteristics of community vulnerability, assess future vulnerability, and quantitatively evaluate adaptations for specific scenarios. It integrates vulnerability with the related concepts of resilience and adaptation. As a result, this type of assessment offers a better framework for supporting more proactive public policies to reduce community vulnerability to disaster.

This paper attempts to shed more light on destination management and marketing organisations (DMMOs) from the context of rural tourism. Moreover, where national tourism organisations established a liaison office at regional or state levels, their roles seems to have been limited. In this circumstance, they are merely information offices to the visitors rather than local DMMOs responsible for the management and marketing of rural destinations. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to identify the roles of DMMOs, and hence develop a suitable framework for DMMOs in the context of rural tourism. This paper finds that DMMOs has responsibilities for both management and marketing roles. These roles should be performed in collaboration with the rural tourism destination stakeholders in order to achieve mutual benefits which include management of resources, marketing of tourism products, positioning, host community well-being, brand building, and tourist loyalty to the rural destinations. © 2014 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. Selection and peer-review under responsibility of the Organizing Committee of Asia Euro Conference 2014.

Rapid advancement of information and communication technologies enables to produce more mobile devices. Most of distance education students need access to study materials, communications tools and further learning means not only at home and in their working place, but for example on business trips. The aim of this paper is to present possibilities of mobile technology in teaching informatics and programming. According to the results of surveys carried out in primary, secondary schools and universities. We can say that mobile devices are increasingly used in learning. Results of surveys and experiments show that mobile devices can enhance the teaching of Computer Science, Programming and Algorithms. The paper describes the experience of teaching and the development of mobile applications, applications for teaching and for users with special needs.

This paper presents a microsimulation-based evaluation of an exact solution approach for the soft time windows variant of the Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP) that also considers penalties on the late arrival. The exact solution approach of the Dynamic Vehicle Routing and scheduling Problem with Soft Time Windows (D-VRPSTW) is based on the column generation (Dantzig-Wolfe decomposition) scheme; whereas VISSIM has been used to simulate the traffic network under normal as well as under traffic incident conditions. Evaluations shows that the D-VRPSTW helps in avoiding additional cost as well as lateness for the freight carriers, caused due to an unexpected change in travel times along the roads., Seventh International Conference on City Logistics which was held on June 7- 9, 2011, Mallorca, Spain

The purpose of this paper is to explore the environmental management accounting practices, specifically the environmental management accounting activities within Malaysian organizations as well as to shed some light on environmental management accounting activities compliance with Shariah principles. An online questionnaire for data collection was deployed to all ISO 14001 certified Malaysian organizations registered with the Federation of Malaysian Manufacturing (FMM). The survey revealed that these organizations to a great extent, have implemented environmental management accounting practices. The implementation of environmental management accounting practices might be beneficial to overcome the problem of traditional management accounting which fails to incorporate environmental hidden costs.

Successful new product development is a basis for economic growth and exporting ability. It is also a guarantee of survival for enterprises. As products have to be attractive for customers, the main role in new product development is on the customer-needs analysis. Conjoint analysis is one of the most used methods in mapping of consumer preferences. Nowadays consumers are mainly satisfying higher-order needs and therefore the role of emotions and thus visual design of product package in buying decisions has increased. Conjoint analysis in the same time presumes that consumers are rational in their decisions and are maximizing their utility functions. In this paper we combined conjoint analysis method with psycho physiological measurements. Usually in conjoint analysis respondents have to rank conception cards based on their preferences. We ranked pictures of product versions based on the measured strength of the positive emotions these pictures created to respondents. In the study we manipulated with the visual elements of apple juice carton and conducted an “emotion based conjoint analysis” with 107 persons. Results indicate that with the help of our combined method it is possible to detect how important are different visual factors on the package in generating positive emotions to buyers.

This paper describes a web application called E-Commerce According to Hobby. In this application, E-Commerce According to Hobby application contains some different technologies such as RSS so as to be able to get the news of products from an e- commerce web site, LINQ to SQL and Ado.Net in order to make a connection with SQL Server Database System and compare these two technologies. Thanks to this study, we hope that people who use this application can reach the desired news more easily. Therefore, they can get a chance to get rid of the unrelated news for them. This study aims to increase the user-friendliness to do shopping from a specific e-commerce web site such as EBAY without spending a lot of time in a fast way.

The concept of cultural management is linked to modular planning as it connects people via an organizational and cultural net and directs them to predetermined cultural goals (Mendis, 2007). The Museum of School Life in the Municipality of Chania is a cultural organization that interconnects the local society, volunteers, local authorities, museum professionals and the educational community towards the accomplishment of its mission and the promotion of its vision. It comprises a case of a new Greek Museum as it opened its doors to the public under the responsibility of the Prefecture Government of Chania in 2006. The paper underlines the necessity for scientific management principles applied to cases of cultural management such as the above and the centrality of the role, which professional culture administrators can play in the development and sustainability of similar projects.

Extreme weather events related to climate change in the future are likely to increase a number and scale of disasters. In order to prepare for these changes and the impacts they will have on natural systems and human communities, it is need “climate change adaptation”. Understandably, much attention has been focused to date on “climate change mitigation,” or efforts to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in the atmosphere and help slow the rate of climate change. Climate change adaptation and mitigation are related, and both are important for local government because adaptation to climate change needs to be on going. Successful adaptation will require not only good information about climate change, and prioritization of actions, but also the ability to implement responses and modify hose responses over time. This paper summarizes some literatures to demonstrate that there are some different inclusive partnership approaches that have been taken to conduct mitigation and adaptation planning in East Kalimantan. Those approaches of climate change mitigation and adaptation planning provide better understanding on the usage of planning in any different levels of mitigation and adaptation and its limitation.

Modeling the pedestrian's evacuation behaviour in danger is an interesting and challenging work. In this paper, pedestrian's microscopic psychological characteristics and movement characteristics of evacuation behaviour are discussed and analysed. A modified social force model is proposed to describe the movement behaviour affected by dangerous source. In this model, the concept of most possible detouring directions is proposed, and an algorithm of calculating the directions is introduced. The self-driven force and repulsive force are reformulated. The spreading dynamics of dangerous source and coefficient of risk are integrated into this model. Simulations in a room with a single exit have been implemented. According to simulations, the influence of the factors, such as exit width, risk coefficient, scale of crowd is discussed in detail. The simulation results show that our model can reproduce the ‘fast- is-slow’ effect in dangerous situation. A large risk coefficient may reduce the evacuation time in some extent.

Several studies have shown that consumers perceive higher risks buying online than in conventional way. Perceived risks affect all purchase decisions and consumers’ behavior, by deterring them to buy. These risks come from the lack of trust of shoppers toward online vendors’ credibility. The main field of research in this paper is to investigate how trust is affecting the consumers engagement to e-commerce, in order to conclude in which security measures should be taken in order to mitigate perceived risks. A framework for a field research is also given in order to identify the causal relationships between electronic service quality and e-loyalty, e-satisfaction and e-trust.

The paper presents the experience from Tempus Joint Projects aim to modernize higher education courses and institutions from Kazakhstan, Moldova, Russian Federation, Ukraine. Both projects were designed with a focus on the development of curricula in social sciences: social work and social psychology. Main activities were related with the developing new study programs on bachelor and master degree levels. In addition to this, for each beneficiary region was developed an important number of continuing education study modules. Our main objective is to offer an example for use of competence based approach in identifying educational needs for initially and continuing education.

This paper attempts to analyze the impact of host country competitive environment on the level of FDI that the host country receives. Specifically, we consider two features of the competitive environment: buyers’ sophistication and firms’ degree of customer orientation. Using a large set of panel data and controlling for economic causes along with sources of risk, we find that FDI stocks in a country decreases with the degree of buyer sophistication and increases with the degree of customer orientation of firms. These results suggest that target country competitive environment is an important factor that determines where FDI goes.

Digital libraries offer a massive set of digital services to geographically distributed library patrons. The digital services are commonly sourced from third-party service providers for charge. As externally sourced digital services are becoming prevalence, issues regarding their quality assessment are gaining critical importance. Unfortunately, sourcing digital services from external providers has brought with it stringent quality of service (QoS) demand from the library service users. Currently, there is no way for ensuring QoS between the digital service providers and the library management. In this paper, we propose service level agreements (SLAs) to capture the QoS requirements of the digital service users and the commitments, as well as adherence of the digital service providers.

Teaching algorithmization and programming has been recently going through big changes trying to react to the dynamic development of software industry. Previously used methodical process, development models, or programming languages do not conform to current requirements. The results of the surveys in primary and secondary schools, we can say that the teaching of programming and algorithms are not sufficiently exploited. The aim of this paper is to present practical experience of the author teaching programming and the possibilities of using design patterns in the teaching of programming. According to the performed analyzes the procedures and methodologies of teaching programming shows that Design Patterns are used only marginally. For these reasons, students learn to improper practices that subsequently applied in practical solutions programs. According to the experiments show that the correct use of the teaching of design patterns can improve student performance in programming

Communicative city leads to the understanding of enhancing urban development performance by encouraging better interactive communication among development actors. This idea not only tries to provide better planning management in terms of governance system, but also planning engagement among development actors in terms of people centered development. This paper learns the preparedness of local governmental officials as forefront in planning decision making process, especially to utilize mobile technology in order to perform better planning performance. By emphasizing to the context of coordination in spatial planning process, appropriate technology in terms of mobile phone and internet connection have significant role in metropolitan's spatial planning process.Survey has been done to the governmental planning employees throughout regencies and autonomous cities within metropolitan Bandung, and found out that appropriate technology like mobile phone and internet connection plays as spatial planning support system and still can not be implemented to resolve spatial planning conflict in the spatial planning process that combine local and metropolitan governance concerns.

The traffic dynamics are very complex around the weaving section, which is a typical and primary bottleneck on urban expressway. Many simulation models have been established to investigate the dynamics and the operational capacity around the weaving section. However, those models mainly focus on the homogeneous condition, which is different from the real traffic condition. In fact, there are many slow vehicles, such as buses or trucks, with larger size and slower velocity. The mutual interference among different types of vehicles leads to much slower operational capacity comparison with that under homogeneous condition. This paper takes into account mixed traffic condition including small fast and large slow vehicles. The two kinds of vehicles are different in the maximum velocity and vehicle length. A cellular automata model is proposed to simulate the dynamics around the weaving section. Then the traffic dynamics and the operational capacity of weaving section are investigated by analyzing simulation results. The influencing factors considered in the simulation include the proportion of large slow vehicle, and the inflow rate of weaving vehicle. The simulation results show that, the larger the proportion of large slow vehicle, the lower the operational capacity. And the traffic flow fluctuates stochastically with larger proportion of large slow vehicle. Such results are meaningful to understand the traffic flow evolution mechanism around weaving section and helpful to design the traffic control methods.

This paper discusses the processes and actors involved in the business models emerging in digital document publishing to reflect on their implications to access academic publications.

This research paper examines one of the usual business strategies of the outsourcing concept. Objective is a thorough examination of this strategy from the perspective of the economic reality. The main goal is to investigate whether the financial figures advocate the choice of outsourcing activities from a maritime company to external collaborators, which is able to create competitive advantage in the shipping industry

Financial situation of non-governmental non-profit organisations is analysed in different way in comparison with profit organisations, particularly in their financial sources. The aim of the paper is to determine the applicability of the Boston matrix in a financial analysis of NGOs. The theoretical part of the Boston matrix approached from the perspective of marketing is modified for use by NGOs. For the application of modified Boston matrix are used publicly available information and inside ones too. This analytical tool was applied on fives model NGOs, graphically illustrating their financial sources. Based on the application and discovered advantages and disadvantages, the work contains proposals to improve the matrix to its higher explanatory power.

The research examines the behaviour aspect of LUTI (land use transport integration) in relation with the public transport extension emerged in the area by the Mandurah Line in Perth Metropolitan Area. The question on the contribution of the station precincts along the Mandurah line to increase public transport patronage has been considered for more than seven years now. The LUTI is examined by considering mode choice, as well as incorporating property value capitalization and public transport accessibility enhancement post rail opening. By incorporating the behavioural aspect in the LUTI analysis, i.e. we are able to quantify the relationships between land-use modifications, accessibility, and mobility. This paper discusses on the first finding at the preliminary stage of analysis. The correlation between property value and increased accesssibility post public transport extension is weak. Simple regression analysis shown 5-7% contribution of accessibility on property value capitalization; however, capitalization mostly emerged due to spilover outside the Mandurah rail line catchment, implied unobservatory factors other than accessibility improvement have more influence on capitalization of property value.

This paper describes the implementation and application of an integrated and cross-disciplinary curriculum, as integrant part of the school curriculum, its aim being the curricular decentralization and adapted curriculum to the specific needs of personal development, to the demands of workforce on the labour market and of each community. Mechatronics as engineering education, a philosophy of education, comes to complete this approach, leading to a change in the way of thinking and action to those who practise it – the teachers, and also to those who learn it – the students. Mechatronics is based on thinking, intuition, logic and precise action, which makes the solving several themes, in parallel, possible, develops creativity and leads to higher sense of responsibility. The reality creates problems and new and major difficulties in the design and implementation of training programs in schools, in the appropriate ways of teaching, of active teaching methods and strategies centred on problem solving, but the solution comes to life through the cross-curricular mechatronics, an engineering approach at the secondary level.

Standardisation plays an important role in many areas of human activity. Well-organized information system supports standardisation and increases interest in it. This paper presents electronic information sources about standards, created in the European Union. The author compares search engines created by the National Standards Bodies of the 27 European Union countries and European Standards Organisations (the European Committee for Standardization CEN, European Committee for Electrotechnical Standardization CENELEC, European Telecommunications Standards Institute ETSI). The investigation of the user interfaces, usage of information languages and presentation of results was carried in order to choose the most effective and usable search engine.

One of the biggest challenges that Higher Education Institutions (HEI) faces is to improve the quality of their educational processes. Thus, it is crucial for the administration of the institutions to set new strategies and plans for a better management of the current processes. Furthermore, the managerial decision is becoming more difficult as the complexity of educational entities increase. The purpose of this study is to suggest a way to support the administration of a HEI by providing new knowledge related to the educational processes using data mining techniques. This knowledge can be extracted among other from educational data that derive from the evaluation processes that each department of a HEI conducts. These data can be found in educational databases, in students’ questionnaires or in faculty members’ records. This paper presents the capabilities of data mining in the context of a Higher Education Institute and tries to discover new explicit knowledge by applying data mining techniques to educational data of Technological Educational Institute of Athens. The data used for this study come from students’ questionnaires distributed in the classes within the evaluation process of each department of the Institute.

The paper “Development of a communication system for capitalizing cultural diversity” centers on concrete, practical dimension, on the coordinates of development of an efficient communication system necessary to affirm the cultural diversity within the educational space, which intensifies the generation of a capital value of Romanian society. Development of an educational communication system must be related to the dynamic changes that characterize the educational reality of Romania and allow ensuring respect for cultural differences, recognizing them in the new dimensions of assertion of cultural pluralism. Historical Maramures is the context chosen for the foundation of a good cultural/ethnic experience streamlined at social level, which led to the variance of manifestations by redefining the meanings of “local” in the affirmation of cultural diversity at the level of educational space. Through an efficient communication system, appropriate to this context, intercultural education exceeded the state of manifestation of intercultural relations under the influence of ethnocentrism and develops under the auspices of trans- cultural values in a common supra-cultural space.

The purpose of this study has to discover if differences in tourists’ perceptions of sustainable tourism development in Melaka existed between three stakeholder groups: government, local residents and private entrepreneurs. The paper analyzes based on the primary data which is collected through interviews among 735 respondents. The findings indicate that the government, private and local community has played a major role for satisfying the tourists’ in shaping the development of sustainable tourism in Melaka. The study emphasizes on scale methods in analyzing and reviewing the role of government, private and local communities. To the distinct stakeholders’ facilities, the majority of tourists’ generally were welcoming of sustainable tourism.

One of the most common definitions of Service-Learning (S-L) programs refers to the use of community-based projects to supplement traditional curricula of the students and to enrich “by doing” the subjects covered in the teaching environment. The aim of this paper is to present a review of the international S-L programs in higher education system (European and international Universities) and to analyze those ideas that could be implemented in Romania. While in most of the SL international programs, the agents involved in the delivery of the SL programs are the teachers, we will especially discuss those SL programs in which the agents are not the teachers, but specific categories of students. Specifically, we performed a case study of the Faculty of Psychology and Sciences of Education (“Babes-Bolyai” University, Romania), which, since 1992, has one of the most active Student Associations in Romania, i.e. Romanian Association of Psychology Students (RAPS). Also, the Faculty has several successful distance learning programs in Psychology, Special Education and Pedagogy. Thus, the Faculty has these two student-based categories of driving forces in terms of offering themselves SL activities: (1) a very active Association of students and (2) a large number of mature students from the distance learning study programs – most of these students are currently employed and/or have graduated another Faculty (some of them are also holders of PhD titles). Based on the literature review, we discuss here the possibilities to include these two categories of students in the Quality Assurance program of the Faculty, in terms of establishing their role as active agents of the QA process. These strategies should be based on the facts that: (1) the members of the Student Association have the potential to develop themselves as a culture with standards and values in the area QA at Faculty level, and (2) the category of mature (adult) students could bring, in a structured manner, an important insight to the other types of students at levels of career orientation, work-related expectations and humane-abilities development. Most important, the ideas of S-L programs implementation are analyzed from the perspective of internalization strategies of the European standards for internal quality assurance within Romanian higher education system.

Competitiveness, innovation and performance are the key words that best define the goals of the present business environment. Under the given circumstances concepts such as quality and continuous improvement become important actors in achieving these goals. Regarded as a whole, higher education plays various roles such as: training the students and preparing them for the economic environment by involving them in the teaching-learning and research processes and offering the example of a system whose outcomes meet the organizational goals by implementing Six Sigma. The paper focuses on the way Six Sigma is applied to higher education and on integrating Six Sigma with one of the quality management systems, namely the model ISO 9000, for the development and continuous improvement of universities. A synergetic approach created by analyzing and simultaneously using the benefits of Six Sigma and ISO 9000 plays an important role in the development and success of a higher education institution.

The aim of this paper is to show that which are the most significantly individual and organizational factors affecting Professional Ethics among Bushehr Custom Staff, so two standardized questionnaires were applied to measure their view. Data was collected from 234 using Cadozier's questionnaire (2002) about Professional Ethics. Descriptive and inferential statistics were used to analyse the collected data. Findings show that there is a significant difference between Staffs’ Professional ethics and their employment type and experiences. Also, there is a significant difference among responsibility, loyalty, equity and justice, Hegemony, respecting, respecting values and norms with professional ethics.

This paper describes a case study in exploring the potential on capturing designers’ creative behaviours whilst engaged in Computer-aided Design (CAD) activity. The protocol analysis approach was undertaken to collect data in one of the CAD designing session of the participants. The Creative Behaviours Framework was used as a tool to capture the emergence of designers’ creative behaviours. The video data were analysed using “Transana” software, and the findings were clarified through post-interviews with the participants. From the analysis and findings, the study suggests link between the emergence of creative behaviours and the use of CAD in designing.

This paper investigates obstacles that teachers encounter in teaching English language in secondary schools of Iran. A questionnaire was designed and administered to sample groups for eliciting data. There were 180 EFL teachers from 150 secondary schools that responded to the survey questions. The findings showed that apart from external limitations such as insufficient teaching times and limited teaching resources, English language teachers are disappointed by their low proficiency in speaking English and using technology during teaching times. Teachers showed willingness to receive training in how to plan and perform their teaching more effective and motivate students’ engagement in class activity; also teachers seek effective approach for teaching English.

The need for modern enterprises to seamlessly interoperate, exchange resources and co-create with other enterprises poses significant challenges on the management of cross-enterprise information flows. This paper aims to introduce new ways for managing: a) information flow (re-)configurations; b) equilibrium state transitions in evolving collaboration networks. Our research effort was focused on the development of an adaptability model that helps entities in a collaboration network manage inter-enterprise information flows, in the presence of dynamic re-configurations of the network. A number of software tools were developed or are currently under development and new avenues are explored for automating the model's adaptability algorithm (e.g. be using Gordijn's e3-value framework). Overall, this research has advanced current thinking in dynamic cross-enterprise information management by providing: a) a model for selecting the desired configuration of a collaboration network, based on a value assessment of corresponding information flows; b) a set of software tools for practically engaging in such a decision- making process.

The tourism industry, especially rural tourism, is largely dominated by small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) and is often considered less innovative than other industries. The aim of the paper is to give a picture of the innovativeness in the Romanian rural tourism industry. The study analyses product/service and marketing innovation implemented in rural tourism companies. The definitions and the types of innovation considered in the present study are those used in the Community Innovation Survey, conducted by Eurostat. In order to survive in an increasingly competitive and global environment, tourism companies, especially the small ones, must differentiate from the competitors using innovation tools. Innovation in tourism must be seen as a permanent, global and dynamic process.

The route-flow-nonuniqueness problem is a well-known limitation of user-equilibrium (UE) traffic assignment. The concerned maximum entropy user equilibrium solution is stable and repeatable that could make a plausible reference point, but is not sufficient in many cases. It is an improvement of exploring all solutions by constructing the range of UE route flow solutions. In this paper, based on the range of UE route flow solutions (ROUE), all route flow solutions can be divided into several ranges according to their constitutions. We provide two new ways to analyze the range of UE route flow solutions, which are then used in different practical applications. By dividing the range of UE route flow solutions, sensitivity of the equilibrium traffic network is analyzed in different ranges. Solutions from the same range have the same effect on sensitivity analysis. So the traditional constraints for route flow solution in sensitivity analysis can be promoted to conditions for route constitutions, and finally define a domain for all feasible solutions. In addition, the range of UE route flow solutions is used to construct an optimization model for identifying the best reference route flow for bus line configuration. We also get the unique route flow solution can be obtained according to our model. From the numerical experiment, we found bus frequency on each line should refer to the route flows. The acquired route flow solution may also be useful for locations of other traffic facilities or implementation of overall traffic management.

The cultural heritage artifacts Conservation Documentation format is not universally agreed upon nor has it always been considered an important aspect of the conservation profession. Conservation records present major drawbacks, which are the fragmentary and incomplete description of the contained information and related processes. On the other hand, as strict regulations prohibit invasive testing in the conservation of art works and monuments of great historical value, new type of examination methods such as Non-Destructive Testing and Evaluation (NDT&E) techniques have become essential and are widely used by scientists. In this context, the present paper presents the DOC-CULTURE project approach to standardize the documentation of the NDT methods and their output data through CIDOC-CRM exploitation.

The schools are organizations submitted to the knowledge process. This process is characterized by specific activities that finalizes with the development of understanding and learning competences, of forming and developing of cognitive and behavioral models according to the society needs and demands. The following considerations refers to a general perspective on the learning process, regarded in its complexity on study levels, but pointing out the necessity of developing new competences of “media learning “for the “learning school”. This paper includes a point of view regarding the changes that takes place from traditional pedagogical model to the new one of the “self- service” model ( Moeglin, 2003 ). The self-service model represents also an ideal that regards new perspectives as the one that the student chooses his own menu, exploring new systems of validation for his knowledge and abilities, creating a new “learning space”.

Communication between doctor and patient is the most important tool to generate, access, and exchange relevant health information. In order to argue for the need of revising medical communication, we aimed at evaluating in this paper – by analysing 60 doctor-patient interactions - a possible relationship between certain patient-patterns (as education, gender and age) and the quality of interaction with the physician.