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This chapter focuses on how alternative data can change the nature of financial forecasting through improved short-term forecasting techniques and decreased informativeness from longer term sources. Increased use of social media data leads the charge in transforming this transition. Alternative data are data not from standard financial statements or formal reports. This chapter looks at alternative data from new sources (e.g., social media, Internet of Things [IoT], and digital footprints) and alternative data from new collection methods like web scraping for textual analysis, image analysis, and vocal analysis). It first discusses standard data in financial forecasting. Next, this chapter examines alternative data in financial forecasting. Finally, it discusses alternative data used in studying finance more broadly.

As the tourism industry recovers from the devastating effects of the global pandemic, meeting the targets of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) remains to be a global “deadline” where tourism is seen as a major contributor. While disruptions to business-as-usual practices such as COVID-19 present unprecedented challenges, they can also provide opportunities for strategic innovation to change behavior toward sustainable tourism experiences. Active transport for low-carbon tourism such as walking or cycling tours have risen in popularity in recent years, and especially postpandemic, as they provide opportunities for a more personalized experience while health and safety protocols can still be implemented. They also present health benefits for the individuals while contributing to environmental sustainability and climate mitigation strategies of the tourism industry. This book chapter presents cases of various forms of tourism activities that use active transport, focusing on walking tours and cycling tours. Various companies offering tours under these modes are discussed and presented. These two modes promote authentic cultural and heritage tourism experiences through the local experts that provide the services.

While government is known to provide political guidance and exercising its executive function, it is also has regulatory powers through laws it enacts. In fostering sustainability, it is important to inquire how government's role can be innovated to facilitate sustainability, particularly in the travel and tourism industry. By reviewing tourism governance literature and mapping governance roles in the travel and tourism industry, this chapter creates a policy framework that underscores a new approach to tourism governance. We underscore that government's role must pivot toward being more developmental than regulatory so that it can effectively stimulate the market to sustainability by fostering value creation, supporting manpower capacitation, ensuring health and safety, and protecting the environment. This can be done if government will not fix the market and promote free market policymaking.

The COVID-19 pandemic resulted in significant declines in international tourist arrivals and receipts. It has also influenced destination preference, tourist demographic, travel motivation, and behavior. Recognizing health and safety as the new considerations in pursuing tourism activities in the better normal, this necessitated a reassessment of the current tourism industry by directing the attention from the usual destination-centric perspective to a value chain perspective. This chapter proposes a new paradigm for the better normal value chain by deconstructing the concepts of travel, tourism, and travel sectors and revisiting the concept of the tourism value chain (TVC) by mapping out the chain and its functional levels and integrating travel, tourism, and hospitality sectors in one value chain. Policymaking approaches such as reorganizing the value chain, empowering stakeholder involvement through coopetition, and resilience building in the face of possible adversities in the future should be adapted to achieve this suggested paradigm's goals. This analysis provides stakeholders with a broader understanding of the needed interventions in future-proofing the industry backed by industry trends in the better normal while fostering collaboration and offering flexibility to cope better in other possible shocks in the future.

The COVID-19 pandemic has reduced much of the complexities of human life, which has affected the multifaceted socioeconomic dimensions and sectors around the world. One of the main consequences of the pandemic is the reduction in physical mobility and shifting toward a more digitally enhanced platform, where activities may be continued given the imposed physical limitations. Global supply chains were broken down into regional and even local ones and travel has been reduced significantly across leisure and nonleisure reasons, among others. While we recognize that these changes would require substantial capital and financial investments, these will not be put to waste given that emerging models, practices, and trends are the “silver linings” of the pandemic onto the tourism sector. Given that one emerging advocacy is the sustainability of tourism destinations under the backdrop of environmental awareness, care, and sustainable use, we also look at how tourism goods and services are put on sale given the adoption of new models. Finally, we envelope the pandemic experience and the induced iterations of local tourism initiatives as an opportunity to look for new and revitalized tourism innovations toward the “next normal.”

Fairy tales were first transmitted orally to teach the community to adapt and engage with their surroundings (Zipes, 1987, p. 1). Nonetheless, they have also contributed to reproduce traditional gender roles and stereotypes (Meland, 2020, p. 912). Indeed, they encourage ‘females to become passive self-denying, obedient, and self-sacrificial’, and males to ‘be competitive, authoritarian, and power-hungry as well as rational, abstract, and principled’ (Zipes, 1987, p. 3). Likewise, Western fairy tales are characterised by a racial dichotomy manifested through the uses of colour: purity is usually associated with white, while black is related to death. This binary opposition suggests that ‘[w]hiteness is often the invisible, privileged state, whereas any other skin colour is marked and laden with ideological judgments’ (Jorgensen, 2013, p. 56).

Carnival Row (2019–2023) is a neo-Victorian TV series created for Amazon Studios that rewrites Western fairy tales through the lens of postcolonial and gender studies. It is set in a fantastically reimagined Victorian England, where mythological creatures – e.g. fairies or centaurs – are allegorical representations of the ethnic Other. The male protagonist of this series, Philo, is a ‘half-breed’ – half human, half fairy – who passes as human to avoid racial discrimination. However, he evolves from being a male character who rejects his ethnic identity to a heroic figure who eventually embraces his racial origins at the end of Season 1. As I demonstrate in this chapter, Philo's nuanced development arguably subverts traditional depictions of white male heroes in fairy-tale narratives, where they tend to be portrayed as strong, principled and non-complex characters.

Education tends to colonize. Established authorities (teachers, curricula, and examinations) instruct newcomers, extending conditional membership. This presents a dilemma for teachers seeking to instill in their students habits of critical, creative, and lateral thinking. In Australia as elsewhere, blueprint educational documents embody lofty aspirational statements of inclusion and investment in people and their potential. Yoked to this is a regime routinely imposing high-stakes basic-skills testing on school students, with increasingly constrictive ways of doing, while privileging competition over collaboration. This chapter explores more informal, organic learning. This self-study narrative inquiry explores my career in terms of a struggle to be my most evolved, enlightened self, as opposed to a small-minded, small-hearted mini-me. To balance this, I examine responsible autonomy (including my own), rather than freedom. This chapter also explores investment in humans, with the reasonable expectation of a return on that investment. It draws and reflects upon events in or impacting my hometown, Sydney, Australia, focusing largely on WorldPride, the Women's World Cup, and a referendum on an Indigenous voice to parliament, all of which took place as I compiled this chapter. Accordingly, the narrative focuses primarily on sexuality, gender, and race. I explore the capacity of my surroundings to teach me and my capacity to learn from my surroundings. The findings and discussion comprise diary-type entries of significant events and their implications for (my) excessive entitlement. The final section of this chapter reviews what and how I have learned.