Foreign tour operators and travel agents knowledge of a potential tourism destination

Vojvodina is an autonomous region of Serbia, and has the potential to become a successful tourism destination. Twenty years of changes have elapsed since the disintegration of Yugoslavia, and destination planners in Vojvodina are now looking to accommodate visitors and generate service related jobs. The method for collecting data was through survey responses from those in the travel industry. The objective for conducting this research is to analyze the knowledge and awareness of the developing destination of Vojvodina. From here, it is possible to get a sense of the regionʼs awareness, and role tour operators and travel agents act as opinion makers in promoting destinations to their clientele. Results suggest that Vojvodina is not known as a tourism destination among foreign travel expertsfurthermore, this would suggest that their clientele base is not informed of this region of Serbia as a tourism destination. Although not known, this is better than having a negative image. With a non-image, tour operators and travel agents then have the ability to creatively market and promote an image that will generate further awareness of the Vojvodina region as an emerging tourism destination

Aesthetic Awareness and Spectacle: Communicated Images of Novi Sad, the Exit Festival and the Event Venue Petrovaradin Fortress

More research and discussion is needed to understand how destination image and awareness links to aesthetic portrayals. Representations of image, awareness, and aesthetics are embedded in textual content, and the narratives portrayed offer valuable meaning that is open to interpretation. Newspaper articles and websites play a crucial role in creating and presenting new images of places to international audiences. While image is certain, what is often overlooked in textual sources are discussions addressing the importance of aesthetics, which also link to destination image and awareness. The city of Novi Sad, Serbia represents a unique case given the location of the city's popular music event, the Exit Festival, which attracts youths from across the former Yugoslavia, Europe and the world and has contributed to a new image of Serbia. Moreover, the event's unique setting, held in the Petrovaradin Fortress on the banks of the Danube River overlooking Novi Sad, is described in relation to historical/cultural ambiance, and aesthetic attributes. Sources analyzed stressed the beauty of Novi Sad and the festival venue, but mere notions of spectacle could not be ignored. Discussions of image, awareness, and aesthetic dimensions presented in newspaper content and websites are analyzed in this article to understand how the festival textual content challenges us to re-create place meanings of Serbia. Copyright © 2015 Cognizant, LLC

Towards a new local tourism economy: Understanding sense of community, social impacts and potential enterprise opportunities in Podgrađe Bač, Vojvodina, Serbia

Serbia’s Vojvodina Region has been discussed in recent research as a region with much tourism potential. Numerous studies have assessed different tourism opportunities in Vojvodina, but there is a need to understand how local residents perceive tourism to address how they see their destination developing. This paper focuses on the rural community of Podgrađe Bač. The reason for focusing on this micro-community is directly adjacent is the Bač Fortress, which is currently under review with UNESCO to be recognised (and protected) as a World Heritage Site. There is a need to consider how social impacts and social change are about altering peoples’ outlook and attitude, as well as gaining support to encourage cohesive involvement among members of the community. Data were collected for this study through a Likert Scale survey with associated open-ended questions. Given the micro-locale case study focus, 29 surveys were collected from one participant in each household. The results and analysis are based on understanding sense of community in Podgrađe Bač, assessing the attractiveness of Bač Fortress and subsequent local tourism developments, and assessing resident perceptions of tourism, by considering social impacts, enterprise opportunities and overall potential

DNA Sampling: a method for probing protein binding at specific loci on bacterial chromosomes

We describe a protocol, DNA sampling, for the rapid isolation of specific segments of DNA, together with bound proteins, from Escherichia coli K-12. The DNA to be sampled is generated as a discrete fragment within cells by the yeast I-SceI meganuclease, and is purified using FLAG-tagged LacI repressor and beads carrying anti-FLAG antibody. We illustrate the method by investigating the proteins bound to the colicin K gene regulatory region, either before or after induction of the colicin K gene promoter

A connection between stress and development in the multicelular prokaryote Streptomyces coelicolor

Morphological changes leading to aerial mycelium formation and sporulation in the mycelial bacterium Streptomyces coelicolor rely on establishing distinct patterns of gene expression in separate regions of the colony. sH was identified previously as one of three paralogous sigma factors associated with stress responses in S. coelicolor. Here, we show that sigH and the upstream gene prsH (encoding a putative antisigma factor of sH) form an operon transcribed from two developmentally regulated promoters, sigHp1 and sigHp2. While sigHp1 activity is confined to the early phase of growth, transcription of sigHp2 is dramatically induced at the time of aerial hyphae formation. Localization of sigHp2 activity using a transcriptional fusion to the green fluorescent protein reporter gene (sigHp2–egfp) showed that sigHp2 transcription is spatially restricted to sporulating aerial hyphae in wild-type S. coelicolor. However, analysis of mutants unable to form aerial hyphae (bld mutants) showed that sigHp2 transcription and sH protein levels are dramatically upregulated in a bldD mutant, and that the sigHp2–egfp fusion was expressed ectopically in the substrate mycelium in the bldD background. Finally, a protein possessing sigHp2 promoter-binding activity was purified to homogeneity from crude mycelial extracts of S. coelicolor and shown to be BldD. The BldD binding site in the sigHp2 promoter was defined by DNase I footprinting. These data show that expression of sH is subject to temporal and spatial regulation during colony development, that this tissue-specific regulation is mediated directly by the developmental transcription factor BldD and suggest that stress and developmental programmes may be intimately connected in Streptomyces morphogenesis

Periodicities in the coronal rotation and sunspot numbers

The present study is an attempt to investigate the long term variations in coronal rotation by analyzing the time series of the solar radio emission data at 2.8 GHz frequency for the period 1947 - 2009. Here, daily adjusted radio flux (known as Penticton flux) data are used. The autocorrelation analysis shows that the rotation period varies between 19.0 to 29.5 sidereal days (mean sidereal rotation period is 24.3 days). This variation in the coronal rotation period shows evidence of two components in the variation; (1) 22-years component which may be related to the solar magnetic field reversal cycle or Hale's cycle, and (3) a component which is irregular in nature, but dominates over the other components. The crosscorrelation analysis between the annual average sunspots number and the coronal rotation period also shows evidence of its correlation with the 22-years Hale's cycle. The 22-years component is found to be almost in phase with the corresponding periodicities in the variation of the sunspots number.Comment: 9 pages, 5 figures, Accepted for publication in MNRA

Karstology in the Classical Karst

“Karstology in the Classical Karst” is the first book that presents a selected karst area from different perspectives, supported by interdisciplinary methods, including monitoring and data analysis from geographical, geological, geomorphological, speleological, hydrogeological, biological and microbiological viewpoints. It seems that only a holistic approach to study karst fits this particular and peculiar landscape. &nbsp

17th International Symposium on Microbial Ecology - ISME 17

 ISME meetings have been organ­ized regularly since 1977, and in 1986 the 4th ISME was hosted by Ljubljana. The 17th ISME was in Leipzig, Germa­ny, where 2250 delegates from 60 countries met. Dur­ing the symposium eight plenary lectures, 26 different sections and three days of poster presentations were or­ganized. A participant could choose one of six or seven simultaneously running sections daily which covered an extremely wide set of microbial ecology from evo­lution, modeling of microbial interactions, review on new and existing metabolic pathways, (meta)genomics, interactions between microbes and hosts, biogeochemi­cal cycles, bioinformatics, new methods and innovative bioremediation procedures. It became clearly evident that microbial ecology can offer some answers to many urgent global issues. Some interesting highlights from the symposium are given below