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Over the past decades, many health authorities and public policy experts have traditionally relied on indicators that are dependent on a nation's economy, its health-care infrastructure advancements, and superiority in biomedical sciences and technology to predict potential infection rates should a health pandemic occur. One such commonly relied-upon indicator was that of the Global Health Security (GHS) Index. However, the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has shown how such variables prove to be inaccurate in predicting the infection rates during a global health pandemic. Hence, this paper proposes the utilization of socio-cultural behavioral traits to predict a country's COVID-19 infection rates.

This is achieved by proposing a model involving the classification and regression tree (CART) algorithm and a Poisson regression against the six selected cultural behavioral predictors consisting of individualism, power distance, masculinity, uncertainty avoidance, long-term orientation, and indulgence.

The results show that all the selected cultural behavioral predictors are significant in impacting COVID-19 infection rates. Furthermore, the model outperforms the conventional GHS Index model based on a means squared error comparison.

The authors hope that this study would continue promoting the use of cultures and behaviors in modeling the spread of health diseases.

The authors hope that their works could prove beneficial to public office holders, as well as health experts working in health facilities, in better predicting potential outcomes during a health pandemic, thus allowing them to plan and allocate resources efficiently.

The results are a testament to the fact that sociocultural behavioral traits are more reliant predictors in modeling cross-national infection rates of global health pandemics, like that of COVID-19, as compared to economic-centric indicators.

A well-funded, four-year integrated care programme was implemented in south London. The programme attempted to integrate care across primary, acute, community, mental health and social care. The purpose of this paper is to reduce hospital admissions and nursing home placements. Programme evaluation aimed to identify what worked well and what did not; lessons learnt; the value of integrated care investment.

Qualitative data were obtained from documentary analysis, stakeholder interviews, focus groups and observational data from programme meetings. Framework analysis was applied to stakeholder interview and focus group data in order to generate themes.

The integrated care project had not delivered expected radical reductions in hospital or nursing home utilisation. In response, the scheme was reformulated to focus on feasible service integration. Other benefits emerged, particularly system transformation. Nine themes emerged: shared vision/case for change; interventions; leadership; relationships; organisational structures and governance; citizens and patients; evaluation and monitoring; macro level. Each theme was interpreted in terms of “successes”, “challenges” and “lessons learnt”.

Evaluation was hampered by lack of a clear evaluation strategy from programme inception to conclusion, and of the evidence required to corroborate claims of benefit.

Key lessons learnt included: importance of strong clinical leadership, shared ownership and inbuilt evaluation.

Primary care was a key player in the integrated care programme. Initial resistance delayed implementation and related to concerns about vertical integration and scepticism about unrealistic goals. A focus on clinical care and shared ownership contributed to eventual system transformation.

This study aims to examine the underlying statements with regard to strategic directions and action programmes on tourism found in the state-of-the-nation address (SONA) speeches of six Philippine presidents – from 1987 to 2019. The researchers believe that president SONAs are usually reflective of their plans and are strong indicators of their interest, which could particularly influence the Philippine tourism planning and development. Currently, the lack of guidance in the theoretical framework and research discussion in exploring the Philippine tourism policy and development priorities using presidents’ SONA speeches are found wanting. Scenario planning approach was used as a framework.

Scenario planning approach requires inputs from an advisory group to create scenario drivers. As inputs, the presidents’ SONA speeches were used in this study while the researchers assumed the role of scenario thinkers. The speeches were downloaded and imported into a qualitative data software. Through a series of text search with regard to strategic directions and action programmes on tourism, underlying statements were subjected to content analysis to create nodes. The nodes were used as the basis in creating scenario drivers, which became the basis in creating the model. The models underwent the following validation procedures: researcher, concept and literature review.

Based on the data, there are three identified major drivers of the present and future of Philippine tourism; these are tourism policy, tourism development and prospects for the future (temporal element). It also indicates tourism development and temporal element as dominant, with very few on tourism policies. By combining the tourism policy and tourism development, the development of the tourism policy and development confluence model was created. Meanwhile, the addition of the temporal element provided a third scenario driver that led to the creation of the dimensions of tourism policy and development scenarios.

The developed model can be adapted to many contexts that extend even outside of tourism. The public tourism offices, such as the department of tourism and the regional, provincial, city and municipal tourism offices, can use the model to help them prioritise tourism development programmes and lobby for tourism policy creation.

The model will significantly assist decision-makers and policymakers to be conscious in crafting and enacting their tourism plans and programmes. It presents tourism policy and tourism development as scenario drivers that are interrelated; hence, a mutual relationship between the executive and legislative sectors of the government can be expected.

The study positions its originality and value in three areas: scenario planning, tourism future and president’s interest in tourism. In terms of scenario planning, the study was able to present interaction among three scenario drivers compared to most models that only have two. In the area of tourism future studies, this study claims that qualitative historical data can also be used to predict future scenarios. Despite the limited literature examining the tourism interest of the top-level administration, using speeches made by head of state is found plausible to predict the future of Philippine tourism.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the potential and durability of arts practice as research through developing a new approach to arts research that challenges the conventional association between dominant constructions of community and dominant modes of research.

A co-design approach, situated in arts practice, has been used to generate a conceptual framework that offers potential to open up the workings of communities by examining them from the standpoint of those who have everyday experience of these communities.

The paper argues that there can no longer be clearly demarcated boundaries between “academics” and “community partners” in a genuinely co-designed arts research process. Rather, there are “research partners” who share mutual recognition of skills and experiences that allow them to commit to a durable “new creative scholarship” that reflects their collective identities.

The conceptual framework celebrates the life stories of individuals at the expense of the grand metanarratives favoured by empirical sociology and mainstream humanities. The framework reflects the commitment of the authors to create accounts of communities that do justice to their collective wisdom, dynamism and connectivity, as well as their transience, their needs to transform and their responses to change, in ways that reflect the lives of those involved rather than the needs of externally imposed disciplinary regimes.

The conceptual framework is a new approach to qualitative research; its value lies in putting the participants at the heart of the research process where they not only generate narrative, but also situate, mediate and remediate it in ways that extend conventional participative research practices.

The purpose of this paper is to determine the future of the tourism industry in Haiti. More specifically, the paper answers the following question: will Haiti be able to reclaim a positive image and leading position in the Caribbean as a tourist destination?

Within the paradigm of theory building and exploratory approach, this conceptual study is based on a narrative literature review.

The turning point in the development of the tourism industry in Haiti has been the 2010 earthquake which has triggered a will to provide quality products and service specifically in the hospitality sector, the most dynamic sector of the tourism industry. With the diaspora, Haiti has the potential to reclaim a positive image and a leading position in the Caribbean. That said, before performing at this level, the destination must first and foremost contribute to the wellbeing of its people as a sine qua non condition for the success of its tourism industry.

The findings of this research may help potential investors to decide whether or not they want to invest in Haiti. The findings of the paper may also assist the DMO in its branding and marketing strategy.

The alleviation of poverty using tourism as a tool in a post-colonial, post-conflict and post-disaster context should be analysed, understood and approached from a human aspect point of view and perspective. Resilience is what better describes the tourism industry and the locals in Haiti. The locals are neither passive nor powerless.

Although first rank symptoms focus on positive symptoms of psychosis they are shared by a number of psychiatric conditions. The difficulty in differentiating bipolar disorder from schizophrenia with affective features has led to a third category of patients often loosely labeled as schizoaffective. Research in schizophrenia has attempted to render the presence or absence of negative symptoms and their relation to etiology and prognosis more explicit. A dichotomous population is a recurring theme in experimental paradigms. Thus, schizophrenia is defined as process or reactive, deficit or non-deficit and by the presence or absence of affective symptoms. Laboratory tests confirm the clinical impression showing conflicting responses to dexamethasone suppression and clearly defined differences in autonomic responsiveness, but their patho-physiological significance eludes mainstream theory. Added to this is the difficulty in agreeing to what exactly constitutes useful clinical features differentiating, for example, negative symptoms of a true deficit syndrome from features of depression. Two recent papers proposed that the general and specific cognitive features of schizophrenia and major depression result from a monoamine-cholinergic imbalance, the former due to a relative muscarinic receptor hypofunction and the latter, in contrast, to a muscarinic hypersensitivity exacerbated by monoamine depletion. Further development of these ideas will provide pharmacological principles for what is currently an incomplete and largely, descriptive nosology of psychosis. It will propose a dimensional view of affective and negative symptoms based on relative muscarinic integrity and is supported by several exciting intracellular signaling and gene expression studies. Bipolar disorder manifests both muscarinic and dopaminergic hypersensitivity. The greater the imbalance between these two receptor signaling systems, the more the clinical picture will resemble schizophrenia with bizarre, incongruent delusions and increasingly disorganized thought. The capacity for affective expression, by definition a non-deficit syndrome, will remain contingent on the degree of preservation of muscarinic signaling, which itself may be unstable and vary between trait and state examinations. At the extreme end of muscarinic impairment, a deficit schizophrenia subpopulation is proposed with a primary and fixed muscarinic receptor hypofunction.

The genomic profile of bipolar disorder and schizophrenia overlap and both have a common dopaminergic intracellular signaling which is hypersensitive to various stressors. It is proposed that the concomitant muscarinic receptor upregulation differentiates the syndromes, being marked in bipolar disorder and rather less so in schizophrenia. From a behavioral point of view non-deficit syndromes and bipolar disorder appear most proximate and could be reclassified as a spectrum of affective psychosis or schizoaffective disorders. Because of a profound malfunction of the muscarinic receptor, the deficit subgroup cannot express a comparable stress response. None -theless, a convergent principle of psychotic features across psychiatric disorders is a relative monoaminergic-muscarinic imbalance in signal transduction.

Sleep disturbances, present in more than 90% of major depressive disorder (MDD) patients, are moderated by sex in adult MDD. In particular, slow-wave electroencephalographic activity (SWA; 0.5-4 Hz) accumulation is low and dissipation impaired. This SWA abnormality in depressed adult males does not change with age, suggesting that SWA abnormality appears at early ages. The present study evaluated sex differences in SWA in adolescents with MDD compared to healthy controls. We evaluated regularized sleep-wake schedules at home for 5-7 days, followed by two consecutive nights of sleep EEG recording. The study included 104 participants, 52 symptomatic and depressed subjects (MDD: 20 males and 32 females) and 52 healthy controls (HC: 20 males and 32 females), aged 13-18 years. SWA power and dissipation, and duration and latencies to each Non-Rapid Eye Movement (NREM) sleep period were calculated for each group. Results showed that SWA accumulation in the first NREM period was lower and its dissipation across the night more irregular in MDD males compared to HC males (P<0.009). By contrast, SWA was equivalent in MDD and HC females. In conclusion, as reported in adult MDD, the accumulation and dissipation of SWA was abnormal in depressed adolescents, but only in males. SWA abnormalities in adolescent MDD may relate to different depressive symptoms in females and males. These results underscore the need to develop sex-specific therapies to enhance and restore SWA in depressed adolescents.

This study is an attempt to apply the techniques of semiotics in conjunction with quantitative analysis to decode and interpret an advertisement which promotes the South Australian Barossa Valley as a tourist destination.

A survey was submitted to a Southeast Asian student and postgraduate sample. Regression analysis and qualitative analysis were carried out, which suggested that the advertisement was engaging the majority of the audience.

Most respondents expressed a desire to visit the location and used language which was evocative and connective. Those who did not or who were turned off by the advertisement's content expressed themselves in language which terminated further engagement.

The sample was a non-target group, but this is an advantage because it provides a base level of unconditioned response.

A better understanding of semiotics may reinforce other areas of marketing endeavour such as social marketing approaches which are gaining more importance in the still developing COVID-19 economy. This methodology can be extended to other marketing communication contexts.

Once campaigns have been aimed at target audiences, there may be potential to orientate another campaign at non-target audiences using the same advertisement. In terms of global marketing, this is extension rather than adaptation.

This study provides an example of how marketing could use semiotics in conjunction with quantitative methods to determine an audience's response and the intention to purchase a product or service.

The purpose of this study was to examine the latent part of geographic information systems in inclusive sustainable rural tourism, community-based natural resource management (CBNRM) and community development and empowerment in Southern Africa, Africa generally and many rural areas elsewhere worldwide.

The viewpoint utilizes literature and document reviews to assess African and worldwide agricultural, environmental and tourism resources management scenarios. It thus liaises with CBNRM and geographic information systems in sustainable tourism and local community development applications.

This review viewpoint uncovers a better potential synergetic relationship between tourism and rural (agricultural) activities that geographic information systems along a concept of CBNRM can amplify. Hence, it has poised a need for a decent and integrated tourism strategy to develop and empower the pertinent communities in many rural and marginalized areas within the continent.

Many rural communities in Southern Africa and Africa broadly dwell in low-income areas. Such milieus are rich in natural biodiversity, including tourism destination areas. Geographic information systems, sustainable tourism and CBNRM can form a gestalt of local community development projects within their environs.