The tourism sector and the global economic crisis: development implicatins for the Caribbean

Over the past two years the global economy has experienced substantial economic turmoil, resulting in severe economic contraction. While there has been a recent return to growth, this situation has impacted all economic sectors worldwide. In the highly tourism-dependent region of the Caribbean, the impact of the global economic crisis has been most notable on the tourism sector, which, from the early 1990s, became the key driver of economic growth for the region. The eventual emergence of this sector reflects an economic development history which was previously underpinned by the export of agricultural commodities, and subsequently by the adoption of the import substitution industrialization model as promulgated by Arthur Lewis. This was further stimulated by spectacular economic contraction in Caribbean economies during the 1980s as a result of changes in the global terms of trade for commodities, generally low levels of competitiveness for manufactured goods, as well as weak institutional and governance frameworks. Ultimately, many economies began to reflect fiscal and balance of payments constraints. By the end of the 1990s, too, evidence of declining competitiveness even in the tourism sector began to become apparent particularly when evaluated under the framework of the Butler Tourism Area Life- Cycle (TALC) model. The recent economic crisis, therefore, provides an opportunity to reflect on the overall approach to economic development in the Caribbean, and to assess the implications of the region’s response to the crisis. This analysis makes the case for the future development of the sector to be based on two broad strategies. The first is to deepen the integration of the tourism sector into the broader economy through the diversification of the regional tourism product, as well as the enhancement of linkages with other sectors, while the second is to expand the tourism sector into a total service economy through the introduction of new services. Considering linkages, the development of clusters and value chains to support the tourism sector is identified with respect to agriculture and food, handicraft, and furnishings. Among the new services identified are education, wellness, yachting and boating, financial services, and information and communications technologies (ICT). This overall strategy is deemed to be better suited to the macroeconomic realities of the Caribbean, where high labour costs and other structural rigidities require a high-valued specialty tourism product in order to sustain the sector’s global competitiveness.

Working paper on the eLAC 2018 Digital Agenda in consideration of Caribbean priorities for technology-supported development

eLAC 2018 will coordinate the implementation of programmes to support the use of information and communications technologies (ICTs) in achieving social and economic development goals for Latin America in the Caribbean during the 2015-2018 timeframe. The conceptual framework for this programme of work is described by the eLAC 2018 Digital Agenda, which is anticipated to be ratified by the fifth Ministerial Conference on the Information Society in Latin America and the Caribbean, to be held in August 2015 in Mexico City. There is a need for broader input from Caribbean countries to the eLAC 2018 Digital Agenda. Accordingly, this working paper reviews the document’s current draft, considering each of its objectives in the context of Caribbean development needs. Amendments are recommended to 12 of the objectives. Two additional objectives are also proposed, in the areas of regional coordination on universal service funds, and the establishment of a spatial data infrastructure to support the use of geographic information systems. Representatives of Caribbean countries are invited to use the contents of this document as an input to the development of their own proposed amendments for inclusion in the final version of the eLAC 2018 Digital Agenda.

Regional implementation meeting on access rights and sustainable development in the Caribbean. Workshop on enhancing access to information on climate change, natural disasters and coastal vulnerability: leaving no one behind

This document summarizes the regional implementation meeting on access rights and sustainable development in the Caribbean and the workshop on enhancing access to information on climate change, natural disasters and coastal vulnerability: leaving no one behind held in Rodney’s Bay, Saint Lucia, from 24 to 26 August 2015.

Genomic selection and assisted reproduction technologies to foster cattle breeding

Genomics has been propagated as a paradigm shifting innovation in livestock during the last decade. The possibility of predicting breeding values using genomic information has revolutionized the dairy cattle industry and is now being implemented in beef cattle. In this paper we discuss how genomics is changing cattle breeding through genomic selection, and how this change is creating new ways to articulate assisted reproduction technologies with animal breeding. We also debate that the scientific community is still starting the long journey to reveal the functional aspects of the cattle genome, and that knowledge in this field is the frontier to a whole new venue for the development of novel applications in the livestock sector.

Agricultural production and sustainable development in a Brazilian region (Southwest, Sao Paulo State): motivations and barriers to adopting sustainable and ecologically friendly practices

The objective of this study is to identify the adoption level of practices associated with more sustainable agriculture and environmentally friendly practices. Additionally, the motivations for and barriers to the adoption of these practices by farmers are investigated. Data were collected through closed questionnaires taken by a random sample of farmers in the Southwest, Sao Paulo, Brazil, during the second half of 2013. Overall, sustainable agricultural practices recommended in the literature and analysed in this study are being not fully adopted by farmers of the studied area. The results showed that financial motivation is associated with farmers adopting new, more sustainable technology, whereas the lack of information on and lack of technical support for these technologies are significant barriers. Other results, research implications, limitations and suggestions for future research are presented.

Entropy effect in quantum computing and information: an open-source environment simulation

The technologies are rapidly developing, but some of them present in the computers, as for instance their processing capacity, are reaching their physical limits. It is up to quantum computation offer solutions to these limitations and issues that may arise. In the field of information security, encryption is of paramount importance, being then the development of quantum methods instead of the classics, given the computational power offered by quantum computing. In the quantum world, the physical states are interrelated, thus occurring phenomenon called entanglement. This study presents both a theoretical essay on the merits of quantum mechanics, computing, information, cryptography and quantum entropy, and some simulations, implementing in C language the effects of entropy of entanglement of photons in a data transmission, using Von Neumann entropy and Tsallis entropy.

New readers, new reading skills and meaning: challenges for media and information literacy

Recognizing the importance of developing the information and media literacy in contemporary society, this article discusses the scenario of hybrid languages born on cyberspace, hypertext and the new types of readers who interact with information, now disseminated by digital media. As theoretical references authors such as Lucia Santaella, we develop arguments that present the headquarters of language and thought within a semiotic support. Matrices help to understand the phenomenon of hybrid language in hypertext. Therefore, we emphasize that the development of skills associated with the new reading environments propitiated by the virtual environment requires the understanding of language, which is one of the concepts used within the media and information literacy (MIL) proposal of Unesco, which combines the two concepts and skills of information and media literacy. It is hoped that this article motivate scholars and practitioners of education and information to take responsibility to educate for information environments that arise with new media and technologies, emphasizing the issue of reading and language.

Development of technologies and methods for monitoring the spatial variability of air temperature in greenhouse environment

Climatic factors directly influence growth and productivity of plants inside greenhouses, where temperature can be considered one of the major parameter in this context. Thus, the aim of this research was to develop a low cost device for thermal sensing and data acquisition, and use it in data collection and analysis of spatial variability of temperature inside a greenhouse with tropical climate. The developed equipment for thermal measurements showed a high degree of accuracy and fast responses in measurements, proving its efficiency. The data analysis interpretations were made from the elaborations of variograms and of tridimensional maps generated by a geostatistical software. The processed data analysis presented that a greenhouse without thermal control has spatial variations of air temperature, both in the sampled horizontals layers as in the three analyzed vertical columns, presenting variations of up to 3.6 ºC in certain times.

Working Experience and Librarians' Knowledge of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) in Nigerian University Libraries

This paper discuses the influence of librarians' years of working experience and sources of acquisition of ICTs' knowledge and skills. The study is based on 169 librarians working in thirteen university libraries in the universities of six states located in the South-South zone of Nigeria. The purpose of the paper is to find out if years of working experience has an effect on librarians' sources/means of acquisition of ICT knowledge and skills. The questionnaires used were answered by two categories of librarians. Those with longer years of experience – 16 years and above and those with fewer years of working experience. It was concluded that librarians with fewer years of working experience explore means of acquiring ICTs knowledge and skills more than librarians with more years of working experience. It was recommended that librarians with longer years of working experience develop more interest in sources through which they can acquire ICT knowledge and skills.

Information Acceptance and ICT Resistance: Promoting the Role of Information in Rural Community Development

Rural community development is a major issue for developing countries. Much attention has been given Information and Communication Technology (ICT) projects to connect rural communities with the global network. However, ICT resistance is a deterring factor in addressing the digital divide in developing countries. It is postulated that reversing the resistance to to ICT can be strategizedthrough "information acceptance." ICT can be accepted by rural communities by creating demand for information. The paper calls for the refocusing on the role of information in rural community development and ICT as a tool for change agent. Initiatives for rural community development must emphasize the importance of information in rural communities.

Development of Software Tools for the Test of Ultra Wide Band Receivers

In the last years, the importance of locating people and objects and communicating with them in real time has become a common occurrence in every day life. Nowadays, the state of the art of location systems for indoor environments has not a dominant technology as instead occurs in location systems for outdoor environments, where GPS is the dominant technology. In fact, each location technology for indoor environments presents a set of features that do not allow their use in the overall application scenarios, but due its characteristics, it can well coexist with other similar technologies, without being dominant and more adopted than the others indoor location systems. In this context, the European project SELECT studies the opportunity of collecting all these different features in an innovative system which can be used in a large number of application scenarios. The goal of this project is to realize a wireless system, where a network of fixed readers able to query one or more tags attached to objects to be located. The SELECT consortium is composed of European institutions and companies, including Datalogic S.p.A. and CNIT, which deal with software and firmware development of the baseband receiving section of the readers, whose function is to acquire and process the information received from generic tagged objects. Since the SELECT project has an highly innovative content, one of the key stages of the system design is represented by the debug phase. This work aims to study and develop tools and techniques that allow to perform the debug phase of the firmware of the baseband receiving section of the readers.

Development of instrumental and sensory analytical methods of food obtained by traditional and emerging technologies

The consumer demand for natural, minimally processed, fresh like and functional food has lead to an increasing interest in emerging technologies. The aim of this PhD project was to study three innovative food processing technologies currently used in the food sector. Ultrasound-assisted freezing, vacuum impregnation and pulsed electric field have been investigated through laboratory scale systems and semi-industrial pilot plants. Furthermore, analytical and sensory techniques have been developed to evaluate the quality of food and vegetable matrix obtained by traditional and emerging processes. Ultrasound was found to be a valuable technique to improve the freezing process of potatoes, anticipating the beginning of the nucleation process, mainly when applied during the supercooling phase. A study of the effects of pulsed electric fields on phenol and enzymatic profile of melon juice has been realized and the statistical treatment of data was carried out through a response surface method. Next, flavour enrichment of apple sticks has been realized applying different techniques, as atmospheric, vacuum, ultrasound technologies and their combinations. The second section of the thesis deals with the development of analytical methods for the discrimination and quantification of phenol compounds in vegetable matrix, as chestnut bark extracts and olive mill waste water. The management of waste disposal in mill sector has been approached with the aim of reducing the amount of waste, and at the same time recovering valuable by-products, to be used in different industrial sectors. Finally, the sensory analysis of boiled potatoes has been carried out through the development of a quantitative descriptive procedure for the study of Italian and Mexican potato varieties. An update on flavour development in fresh and cooked potatoes has been realized and a sensory glossary, including general and specific definitions related to organic products, used in the European project Ecropolis, has been drafted.

Development of advanced tools and methods for the assessment and management of risk due to atypical major accident scenarios

Proper hazard identification has become progressively more difficult to achieve, as witnessed by several major accidents that took place in Europe, such as the Ammonium Nitrate explosion at Toulouse (2001) and the vapour cloud explosion at Buncefield (2005), whose accident scenarios were not considered by their site safety case. Furthermore, the rapid renewal in the industrial technology has brought about the need to upgrade hazard identification methodologies. Accident scenarios of emerging technologies, which are not still properly identified, may remain unidentified until they take place for the first time. The consideration of atypical scenarios deviating from normal expectations of unwanted events or worst case reference scenarios is thus extremely challenging. A specific method named Dynamic Procedure for Atypical Scenarios Identification (DyPASI) was developed as a complementary tool to bow-tie identification techniques. The main aim of the methodology is to provide an easier but comprehensive hazard identification of the industrial process analysed, by systematizing information from early signals of risk related to past events, near misses and inherent studies. DyPASI was validated on the two examples of new and emerging technologies: Liquefied Natural Gas regasification and Carbon Capture and Storage. The study broadened the knowledge on the related emerging risks and, at the same time, demonstrated that DyPASI is a valuable tool to obtain a complete and updated overview of potential hazards. Moreover, in order to tackle underlying accident causes of atypical events, three methods for the development of early warning indicators were assessed: the Resilience-based Early Warning Indicator (REWI) method, the Dual Assurance method and the Emerging Risk Key Performance Indicator method. REWI was found to be the most complementary and effective of the three, demonstrating that its synergy with DyPASI would be an adequate strategy to improve hazard identification methodologies towards the capture of atypical accident scenarios.

Engineering Agent-Oriented Technologies and Programming Languages for Computer Programming and Software Development

Mainstream hardware is becoming parallel, heterogeneous, and distributed on every desk, every home and in every pocket. As a consequence, in the last years software is having an epochal turn toward concurrency, distribution, interaction which is pushed by the evolution of hardware architectures and the growing of network availability. This calls for introducing further abstraction layers on top of those provided by classical mainstream programming paradigms, to tackle more effectively the new complexities that developers have to face in everyday programming. A convergence it is recognizable in the mainstream toward the adoption of the actor paradigm as a mean to unite object-oriented programming and concurrency. Nevertheless, we argue that the actor paradigm can only be considered a good starting point to provide a more comprehensive response to such a fundamental and radical change in software development. Accordingly, the main objective of this thesis is to propose Agent-Oriented Programming (AOP) as a high-level general purpose programming paradigm, natural evolution of actors and objects, introducing a further level of human-inspired concepts for programming software systems, meant to simplify the design and programming of concurrent, distributed, reactive/interactive programs. To this end, in the dissertation first we construct the required background by studying the state-of-the-art of both actor-oriented and agent-oriented programming, and then we focus on the engineering of integrated programming technologies for developing agent-based systems in their classical application domains: artificial intelligence and distributed artificial intelligence. Then, we shift the perspective moving from the development of intelligent software systems, toward general purpose software development. Using the expertise maturated during the phase of background construction, we introduce a general-purpose programming language named simpAL, which founds its roots on general principles and practices of software development, and at the same time provides an agent-oriented level of abstraction for the engineering of general purpose software systems.