bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Distribution channel in hospitality and tourism
Authors: Law Rob , Leung Rosanna , Lo Ada , Leung Daniel , Fong Lawrence Hoc Nang 
Published: April 2015

Purpose
– The purpose of this paper is to reexamine several issues about disintermediation from the perspectives of tourism product/service suppliers (hotels) and traditional intermediaries (travel agencies), considering the move of the current distribution landscape toward disintermediation. Internet and mobile technologies offer various tools for consumers to search and purchase products/services from suppliers directly. Consequently, the necessity and role of traditional intermediaries in the industry become questionable.

Design/methodology/approach
– In all, six focus group interviews were conducted to collect primary data from ten managers of three traditional travel agencies and 11 managers from three business hotels in Hong Kong, which is a major travel destination in Asia with many world-class hotels and tourism facilities.

Findings
– Despite their different business backgrounds, the interviewees agreed on the increasing importance of Internet technology in the distribution of tourism products. The interviewees also posited that traditional travel agencies are still needed to serve certain customer groups, albeit their role may have little importance.

Practical implications
– Practitioners should adapt to technologically induced changes to remain competitive in the e-business era.

Originality/value
– This paper provides several original contributions. First, this paper supplements the extant literature by revealing how modern practitioners perceive disintermediation in the tourism and hospitality industry. Second, this paper is the first to investigate the disintermediation issue from the perspectives of tourism product/service suppliers and intermediaries. Finally, this paper provides a reference for industry practitioners to establish adequate strategies that take advantage of Internet technology.
Sustainability issues and hospitality and tourism firms’ strategies
Authors: Aragon-Correa J. Alberto , Martin-Tapia Inmaculada , de la Torre-Ruiz Jose 
Published: April 2015

Purpose– This paper aims to review the main literature on the relationship between the natural environment and management in hospitality and tourism firms and uses strategic lenses to propose a general framework of previous works and a map for future research.Design/methodology/approach– A detailed collection of the most relevant literature on organizations and the natural environment in general is used, along with a specific compilation of the analysis in hospitality and tourism firms. The analytical comparison between the general studies and tourism literature provides opportunities for the discussion of research gaps.Findings– The growing volume of research on environmental management in the hospitality and tourism firms suggests increasing interest in the topic in the past decade. However, our analysis uses a strategic framework to identify multiple relevant topics that are due for exploration. The generation of more robust theoretical and empirical contributions should also be prioritized in the future.Research limitations/implications– The findings provide insight into the growing importance of environmental issues in multiple areas of hospitality and tourism firms, including corporate strategy (new green business and implications of the environmental issues on the attractiveness of traditional tourism activities), competitive business strategy (differentiation and reduction of costs through environmental management), functional strategy (eco-labels, certifications and environmental management systems), green marketing, responsible supply chain and training.Originality/value– While previous literature has emphasized the macro analysis of environmental challenges in the industry, this paper is one of the first to provide an analytical review of the literature on the natural environment and management of hospitality and tourism firms and will be particularly useful to better understand the organizational challenges.
Determinants of innovation outputs in developing countries
Authors: Ghazal Reza , Zulkhibri Muhamed 
Published: April 2015

Purpose
– The purpose of this paper is to examine the determinants of innovation outputs proxied by number of patent applications, trademarks and industrial designs in developing countries.

Design/methodology/approach
– The paper employs a panel data and Negative Binomial method to analyse the main determinants affecting the innovation outputs.

Findings
– The results implicitly suggest that providing a fertile ground to attract more foreign direct investment (FDI) can lead to much better innovation outputs. The study also strongly supports the role of institutions and governance for increasing innovation activities in developing economies as indicated by positive impacts of governance factors in the model. However, the impact of economic freedom indicators on improving innovation outputs is mixed.

Originality/value
– This paper contributes to the existing literature in two ways: it examines the effect of FDI and research and development on innovation of selected developing countries; and the study uses a panel data approach to increase the accuracy of the results through exploiting the significant variations of innovation outputs across countries, while controlling for a larger number of innovation outputs and product determinants. To the authors knowledge, this is the first empirical study on the behaviour of innovation outputs for developing countries.
Are there asymmetries in fiscal policy shocks?
Authors: Gogas Periklis , Pragidis Ioannis 
Published: April 2015

Purpose– The purpose of this paper is to test the effects of unanticipated fiscal policy shocks on the growth rate and the cyclical component of real private output and reveal different types of asymmetries in fiscal policy implementation.Design/methodology/approach– The authors use two alternative vector autoregressive systems in order to construct the fiscal policy shocks: one with the simple sum monetary aggregate MZM and one with the alternative CFS Divisia MZM aggregate. From each one of these systems we extracted four types of shocks: a negative and a positive government spending shock and a negative and a positive government revenue shock. These eight different types of unanticipated fiscal shocks were used next to empirically examine their effects on the growth rate and cyclical component of real private GNP in two sets of regressions: one that assumes only contemporaneous effects of the shocks on output and one that is augmented with four lags of each fiscal shock.Findings– The authors come up with three key findings: first, all fiscal multipliers are below unity but with signs as predicted by Keynesian theory. Second, government expenditures have a larger impact as compared to the tax policy and finally, positive government spending shocks are more significant than negative spending shocks. All these results are in line with previous studies and are robust through many tests using structural identification proposed by Blanchard and Perotti (2002).Practical implications– The empirical findings in this manuscript can be used for conducting a more efficient fiscal policy. The importance of government spending shocks is empirically verified along with the asymmetries related to price stickiness predicted by Keynesian theory. According to the results an efficient fiscal policy would: in terms of an expansionary policy, use government spending as a means to stimulate the economy instead of tax cuts and in the case of a contractionary policy use government revenue (higher taxes) so that the costs of this policy in terms of output lost are lower.Originality/value– In this study the authors introduce three main innovations: first, to the best of our knowledge the Divisia monetary aggregates have not yet been used to previous research pertaining to fiscal policy. Second, following Cover’s (1992) procedure of identifying monetary policy shocks we extract the unanticipated fiscal policy shocks on government spending and revenue. Finally, the authors explicitly test for the asymmetric effects on the growth rate and the cyclical component of real private GNP of a contractionary and expansionary fiscal policy.
An investigation of price discovery and volatility spillovers in India’s foreign exchange market
Authors: Sehgal Sanjay , Ahmad Wasim , Deisting Florent 
Published: April 2015

Purpose
– The purpose of this paper is to examine the price discovery and volatility spillovers in spot and futures prices of four currencies (namely, USD/INR, EURO/INR, GBP/INR and JPY/INR) and between futures prices of both stock exchanges namely, Multi-Commodity Stock Exchange (MCX-SX) and National Stock Exchange (NSE) in India.

Design/methodology/approach
– The study applies cointegration test of Johansen’s along with VECM to investigate the price discovery. GARCH-BEKK model is used to examine the volatility spillover between spot and futures and between futures prices. The other two models namely, constant conditional correlation and dynamic conditional correlation are used to demonstrate the constant and time-varying correlations. In order to confirm the volatility spillover results, the study also applies test of directional spillovers suggested by Diebold and Yilmaz (2009, 2012).

Findings
– The results of the study show that there is long-term equilibrium relationship between spot and futures and between futures markets. Between futures and spot prices, futures price appears to lead the spot price in the short-run. Volatility spillover results indicate that the movement of volatility spillover takes place from futures to spot in the short-run while spot to futures found in the long-run. However, the results of between futures markets exhibit the dominance of MCX-SX over NSE in terms of volatility spillovers. By and large, the findings of the study indicate the important role of futures market in price discovery as well as volatility spillovers in India’s currency market.

Practical implications
– The results highlight the role of futures market in the information transmission process as it appears to assimilate new information quicker than spot market. Hence, policymakers in emerging markets such as India should focus on the development of necessary institutional and fiscal architecture, as well as regulatory reforms, so that the currency market trading platforms can achieve greater liquidity and efficiency.

Originality/value
– Due to recent development of currency futures market, there is dearth of literature on this subject. With the apparent importance of currency market in recent time, this study attempts to study the efficient behavior of currency market by way of examining the price discovery and volatility spillovers between spot and futures and between futures prices of four currencies traded on two platforms. The study has strong implications for India’s stock market especially at the time when its currency is under great strain owing to the adverse impact of global financial crisis.
Facultative endosymbionts mediate dietary breadth in a polyphagous herbivore
Authors: Wagner Steven M. , Martinez Adam J. , Ruan Yong‐Ming , Kim Kyungsun L. , Lenhart Paul A. , Dehnel Allison C. , Oliver Kerry M. , White Jennifer A. 
Published: April 2015

Summary

Intraspecific variation in dietary breadth can influence important ecological and evolutionary processes, yet the mechanisms generating this variation are usually unknown. Maternally transmitted bacterial symbionts frequently infect insect herbivores, and many have been shown to mediate key ecological interactions. For polyphagous herbivores, infection with particular symbionts is often strongly correlated with feeding on particular plant species, suggesting that facultative symbionts might directly determine herbivore food plant specificity. However, previous tests of this hypothesis have returned inconsistent results, providing little empirical support for a causal relationship between facultative symbiont infection and dietary breadth.

Here, we investigate whether heritable facultative symbionts mediate dietary breadth in the polyphagous aphid, Aphis craccivora. We first determined that asexual clones of the aphid differ dramatically in performance across two leguminous food plants, locust and alfalfa, and could be considered biotypes with distinct ecological characteristics. The heritable symbiont Arsenophonus is strongly associated with locust‐origin aphids.

We created experimental lines that share aphid genotypes but differed with respect to Arsenophonus infection status, and compared performance across three food plant species. Naturally Arsenophonus‐infected clones performed 2–4× better on locust and up to 75% worse on two alternate plant species than uninfected controls, clearly demonstrating that Arsenophonus promotes specialization on locust. In both laboratory and field experiments, uninfected locust‐ and alfalfa‐origin clones exhibited similar and modest performance on locust, indicating that the ‘locust‐associated biotype’ would not exist without Arsenophonus.

We also hypothesized that moving Arsenophonus, via transinfection, to an alfalfa‐origin lineage would improve performance on locust and serve to expand dietary breadth. Indeed, transinfection doubled aphid performance on locust and halved aphid performance on alfalfa. However, because this aphid lineage naturally performs better on alfalfa, the transinfected symbiont functionally equalized aphid performance between locust and alfalfa, making the alfalfa biotype more generalized. Thus, the same symbiont can either reduce or expand dietary breadth, depending on host genotype.

Our results unequivocally demonstrate that symbiont gain or loss can instantaneously and substantially change the topology of food plant use in a polyphagous insect, modifying diet in ways that potentially influence the insect's ecological niche, evolutionary trajectory and pest status.
Action research for tourism planning in rural areas? Examining an experience from the Couto Mixto (Galicia, Spain)
Authors: Paül Valerià , Trillo‐Santamaría Juan‐Manuel , Pérez‐Costas Paula 
Published: April 2015

AbstractThis paper reviews a tourist planning experience developed for the Couto Mixto in 2007–2008. The Couto Mixto is a small territory of three hamlets situated in Galicia (Spain) and bordering Portugal that, until the end of the 19th century, used to be a virtually independent state of 25 km2. This tourism planning process is compared and contrasted with the well‐described Action Research (AR) approach. The paper begins by providing the conceptual foundations of tourism planning which were used as a framework for the research. Then, the tourism planning experience is introduced in detail, focussing on the results of the interviews conducted to identify the tourism resources of the area. Therefore, 23 resources were inventoried and further audited to determine their various degrees of potential for the purposes of tourism planning. Previous AR experiences and the tourism planning initiative developed for the Couto Mixto share a common objective to facilitate change in communities in trouble. However, the case‐study tourism planning experience was not fully compliant with genuine AR in several respects. We conclude by recommending AR as a worthy approach for tourism planning as a way to effectively put the local community in focus.
Nano‐Food Packaging: An Overview of Market, Migration Research, and Safety Regulations
Authors: Bumbudsanpharoke Nattinee , Ko Seonghyuk 
Published: April 2015

AbstractRecently, food packages produced with nanoparticles, “nano‐food packaging,” have become more available in the current market. However, although the use of nanomaterials is increasing in food packaging applications, concern over toxicity affects consumer perceptions and acceptance. Quite a number of commercialized forms of nano‐food packaging are coated or composited product with inorganic materials, for example, nanosilver and nanoclay as representative examples. Several studies have shown the possibility of nanomaterial migration from packaging or containers to foodstuff. The debate is still ongoing among researchers about the extent of migration and whether it is negligible and safe. Government agencies and stakeholders must hurry to determine use limitations and release conclusive legislation and regulations as soon as possible since nano‐food packaging may have great impacts on human health. This paper aims to review the availability of nano‐food packaging in the current market, report case studies on nanomaterial migration, and present the current status of safety regulations and management of nano‐food packaging in leading countries across regions. This review should enable governments and researchers to develop further nanomaterial risk assessment studies.
Characterization of uronate dehydrogenases catalysing the initial step in an oxidative pathway
Authors: Pick André , Schmid Jochen , Sieber Volker 
Published: April 2015

SummaryUronate dehydrogenases catalyse the oxidation of uronic acids to aldaric acids, which represent ‘top value‐added chemicals’ that have the potential to substitute petroleum‐derived chemicals. The identification and annotation of three uronate dehydrogenases derived from Fulvimarina pelagi HTCC2506, Streptomyces viridochromogenes DSM 40736 and Oceanicola granulosus DSM 15982 via sequence analysis is described. Characterization and comparison with two known uronate dehydrogenases in regard to substrate spectrum, catalytic activity and pH as well as temperature dependence was performed. The catalytic efficiency was investigated in two different buffer systems; potassium phosphate and Tris‐HCl. In addition to the typical and well available substrates glucuronate and galacturonate also mannuronate as part of many structural polysaccharides were tested. The uronate dehydrogenase of Agrobacterium tumefaciens and Pseudomonas syringae showed catalytic dependency on the buffer system resulting in an increased Km especially for glucuronate in potassium phosphate compared with Tris‐HCl buffer. Enzyme stability at 37°C of the different Udhs was in the order: P. syringae < S. viridochromogens < A. tumefaciens < F. pelagi < O. granulosus. All enzymes showed activity within a broad pH range from 7.0 to 9.5, only O. granulosus had a very narrow range around 7.0.
Biologic therapies in systemic lupus erythematosus
Authors: Bernal Christine B. , Zamora Leonid D. , Navarra Sandra V. 
Published: April 2015

AbstractSignificant progress has been made in the development of therapies for systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE). These include agents which target interferons, cytokines, T lymphocytes and co‐stimulatory molecules, B‐lymphocytes and B stimulatory molecules. The latter are of special interest having the most robust efficacy data to date, ranging from clinical experience to clinical trials, with belimumab as the first Food and Drug Administration‐approved biologic for the treatment of SLE. Given the wide disease heterogeneity, certain issues like clinical trial design and pharmacogenomics will continue to challenge drug development in SLE, there will always be a growing and compelling need for more of these drugs in order to alleviate the burden of illness in lupus patients.
Prognostic Significance of Premature Ventricular Contractions without Obvious Heart Diseases Determined by Standard 12‐Lead Electrocardiography Considering their Morphology
Authors: Haruta Daisuke , Akahoshi Masazumi , Hida Ayumi , Sera Nobuko , Imaizumi Misa , Ichimaru Shinichiro , Nakashima Eiji , Takahashi Ikuno , Ohishi Waka , Fukae Satoki , Maemura Koji 
Published: April 2015

BackgroundAlthough ventricular premature contraction (VPC) commonly arises in subjects with and without heart diseases, the prognosis of VPC has remained controversial and the effect of their morphology on mortality has not been fully determined in subjects without obvious heart diseases. The objective of this study was to assess the morphologic effect of VPC on mortality.MethodsJapanese atomic bomb survivors (n = 6685) underwent baseline health examinations and standard 12‐lead electrocardiogram (ECG) between January 1990 and December 1991. Of these, we extracted data from 5,685 (67.1% women) subjects who had neither heart diseases nor electrocardiographic abnormalities at baseline. Among them, we identified 131 VPC cases using standard 12‐lead ECG and classified them into left bundle branch block (LBBB) type (n = 74), right bundle branch block (RBBB) type (n = 21), and undetermined type (n = 36) according to their morphology. These subjects were followed up until December 2008; we compared all‐cause, cardiac and coronary heart disease (CHD) mortality rates using multivariate Cox regression analysis between those with and without VPC.ResultsNo VPCs were associated with all‐cause and cardiac mortality, but the LBBB type was significantly associated with CHD mortality (hazard ratio, 2.73; 95% confidence interval, 1.11–6.73) after controlling for age, sex, smoking status, alcohol consumption, and underlying diseases.ConclusionsAmong Japanese atomic bomb survivors without obvious heart diseases, LBBB‐type VPC was associated with increased CHD mortality. Larger studies are needed to confirm the effect of morphology as it might help to predict the risk.
Vitamin D and the risk of preeclampsia – a nested case–control study
Authors: Gidlöf Sebastian , Silva Aldo T. , Gustafsson Sven , Lindqvist Pelle G. 
Published: April 2015

AbstractWe aimed to determine the relation between vitamin D deficiency in early pregnancy and preeclampsia. In a nested case–control study of 2496 pregnant women, we identified 39 women who developed preeclampsia and 120 non‐preeclamptic controls. Blood was sampled in 12th gestational week and analyzed for serum vitamin D. Vitamin D levels were similar in women who developed preeclampsia, 52.2 ± 20.5 nmol/L, and controls, 48.6 ± 20.5 nmol/L, p = 0.3. In addition, vitamin D deficiency (<50 nmol/L) was found in a similar proportion of control group (51.7%) as those with severe preeclampsia (41.2%). Women with vitamin D deficiency were 3 cm shorter than those with normal vitamin D levels (p = 0.002). Our data do not support the hypothesis that vitamin D deficiency in early pregnancy is associated with preeclampsia, but we cannot rule out a relation later in gestation.
Physical activity decreased by a quarter in the 11‐ to 12‐year‐old Swedish boys between 2000 and 2013 but was stable in girls: a smartphone effect?
Authors: Raustorp Anders , Pagels Peter , Fröberg Andreas , Boldemann Cecilia 
Published: April 2015

AbstractAimThis study explored physical activity, body mass index (BMI) and overweight and obesity from 2000 to 2013 using a convenience sample of second‐ and fifth‐grade Swedish schoolchildren aged 8–9 years and 11–12 years, respectively.MethodsWe examined cross‐sectional cohorts of 126 second‐grade children in 2000, 84 in 2006 and 44 in 2013 and 105 fifth‐grade children in 2000 and 38 in 2013. No fifth graders were available in 2006. Physical activity data were collected based on pedometer readings over four consecutive weekdays, and height and weight were measured. Identical instruments and procedures were used in all three years.ResultsThere was an increase in physical activity in second‐grade girls from 2000 to 2006 (p < 0.01), which then stabilised between 2006 and 2013, but second‐grade boys and fifth‐grade girls were stable throughout the study period. Fifth‐grade boys decreased significantly (24%) from 16 670 to 12 704 steps per day (p < 0.01) from 2000 to 2013. Mean BMI scores remained stable over time.ConclusionTime trends in physical activity differed between boys and girls. Second‐grade boys and fifth‐grade girls were stable throughout, whereas second‐grade girls increased from 2000 to 2006 before stabilising. Fifth‐grade boys showed a significant 24% reduction from 2000 to 2013. Changes in recess and leisure time habits, such as smartphone use, may have influenced the result.