THE ROLE OF CLIMATE INFORMATION IN TOURIST DESTINATION CHOICE DECISION-MAKING

This study examines if tourists actively inform themselves about the climate of their planned destination. In addition, we examine where they inform themselves and at what point in the holiday decision-making process. A self-administered questionnaire was distributed to tourists at the airport, international bus station, and the train station in Hamburg during July and August 2004. Of the 394 respondents, 73% stated that they informed themselves about the climate of their destination. Moreover, the majority of them informed themselves about climate before booking (42%). Nevertheless, a large percentage of the tourists sampled state that they informed themselves shortly before their trip. Interestingly, a significantly large share of the respondents said that they checked the weather at their destination in the week before their trip.Tourist decision-making, destination image, information search, climate, weather

O-MOORE-NICE!: new methodologies and algorithms for design and simulation of analog integrated circuits

No abstract

Robust and Efficient Uncertainty Quantification and Validation of RFIC Isolation

Modern communication and identification products impose demanding constraints on reliability of components. Due to this statistical constraints more and more enter optimization formulations of electronic products. Yield constraints often require efficient sampling techniques to obtain uncertainty quantification also at the tails of the distributions. These sampling techniques should outperform standard Monte Carlo techniques, since these latter ones are normally not efficient enough to deal with tail probabilities. One such a technique, Importance Sampling, has successfully been applied to optimize Static Random Access Memories (SRAMs) while guaranteeing very small failure probabilities, even going beyond 6-sigma variations of parameters involved. Apart from this, emerging uncertainty quantifications techniques offer expansions of the solution that serve as a response surface facility when doing statistics and optimization. To efficiently derive the coefficients in the expansions one either has to solve a large number of problems or a huge combined problem. Here parameterized Model Order Reduction (MOR) techniques can be used to reduce the work load. To also reduce the amount of parameters we identify those that only affect the variance in a minor way. These parameters can simply be set to a fixed value. The remaining parameters can be viewed as dominant. Preservation of the variation also allows to make statements about the approximation accuracy obtained by the parameter-reduced problem. This is illustrated on an RLC circuit. Additionally, the MOR technique used should not affect the variance significantly. Finally we consider a methodology for reliable RFIC isolation using floor-plan modeling and isolation grounding. Simulations show good comparison with measurements

Effect of temporal stimulus properties on the nociceptive detection probability using intra‑epidermal electrical stimulation

Chronic pain disorders can be initiated and maintained by malfunctioning of one or several mechanisms underlying the nociceptive function. Although several quantitative sensory testing methods exist to characterize the nociceptive function, it remains difficult to distinguish the contributions of individual mechanisms. Intra-epidermal electrical stimulation of nociceptive fibers allows defining stimuli with temporal properties within the timescale of these mechanisms. Here, we studied the effect of stimulus properties on the psychophysical detection probability. A psychophysical detection experiment was conducted including 30 healthy human participants. Participants were presented with electrical stimuli having various temporal properties. The pulse-width was varied for single pulse stimuli (either 420 or 840 μs), and the inter-pulse interval for double pulse stimuli (10, 50, or 100 ms). Generalized linear mixed models were used to obtain estimates of thresholds and slopes of the psychophysical function. The 840-μs single pulse resulted in a lower threshold and steeper slope of the psychophysical function than the 420-μs single pulse. Moreover, a double-pulse stimulus resulted in a lower threshold and steeper slope than single pulse stimuli. The slopes were similar between the double pulse stimuli, but thresholds slightly increased with increasing inter-pulse intervals. In the present study, it was demonstrated that varying the temporal properties of intra-epidermal electrical stimuli results in variations in nociceptive processing. The estimated thresholds and slopes corresponding to the selection of temporal properties suggest that contributions of peripheral and central nociceptive mechanisms can be reflected in psychophysical functions

Stress, Burnout, Compassion Satisfaction, And Compassion Fatigue Among Resident Assistants At The University Of Mississippi

The study explores the lived experience of Resident Assistants at the University of Mississippi regarding stress, burnout, compassion satisfaction, and compassion fatigue to help improve paraprofessional development. The study addresses a scarcity of research on the prevalence and severity of RA’s stress and burnout in their roles as caregivers. A qualitative design approach was designed for this study to investigate insightful perspectives and implications of the complexities of stress, burnout, compassion satisfaction, and compassion fatigue among RAs at the University of Mississippi. For this study, 15 RAs were selected to participate in semi-structured interviews to facilitate for further probing questions and ascertain more in-depth responses to open-ended questions. Furthermore, participants were required to have served as an RA for a minimum of one semester in order to participate in the study. Findings indicate that RAs’ abilities to cope with stress, burnout, compassion satisfaction, and compassion fatigue clearly correlate with residents\u27 successes that closely link to the rigors of RAs’ roles, duties, and job descriptions. Another finding suggests how building cohesiveness among RAs during staff training in early August was critical for duty and family crisis backup availability and readiness. Findings do not suggest that participants directly knew when they were experiencing compassion satisfaction and compassion fatigue; however, their responses infer that caring for residents exposed RAs to many facets associated with the factors. The findings further reveal a significant need to help RAs identify resources to engage in self-care take time away from their residence halls, and acquire the necessary sleep to meet goals and objectives from the university, Department of Student Housing, residents, and participants. In sum, results from the findings are underpinned by participant comments. Participants provided rich and informative information that will benefit professionals working in the Department of Student Housing to gain a better understanding of the unintended consequences for RAs as paraprofessionals, while simultaneously supporting the development of other students, as far as elevated risks of RAs to develop stress, burnout, compassion satisfaction, and compassion fatigue

DRK methods for time-domain oscillator simulation

This paper presents a new Runge-Kutta type integration method that is well-suited for time-domain simulation of oscillators. A unique property of the new method is that its damping characteristics can be controlled by a continuous parameter

Model order reduction for nonlinear IC models with POD

Due to refined modelling of semiconductor devices and increasing packing densities, reduced order modelling of large nonlinear systems is of great importance in the design of integrated circuits (ICs). Despite the linear case, methodologies for nonlinear problems are only beginning to develop. The most practical approaches rely either on linearisation, making techniques from linear model order reduction applicable, or on proper orthogonal decomposition (POD), preserving the nonlinear characteristic. In this paper we focus on POD. We demonstrate the missing point estimation and propose a new adaption of POD to reduce both dimension of the problemunder consideration and cost for evaluating the full nonlinear system

Sensitivity analysis of linear dynamical systems in uncertainty quantification

We consider linear dynamical systems including random parameters for uncertainty quantification. A sensitivity analysis of the stochastic model is applied to the input-output behaviour of the systems. Thus the parameters that contribute most to the variance are detected. Both intrusive and non-intrusive methods based on the polynomial chaos yield the required sensitivity coefficients. We use this approach to analyse a test example from electrical engineering