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Profile of world tourism today S. Medlik gives in his publication “Trends in World Tourism” a good picture of world tourism today. This publication, together with the WTO‐publication “Tourism Compendium”, allows us to formulate a profile of world tourism today.

Looks at consumer research in Greater China including Mainland China, Hong Kong and Taiwan. Maps out the contributions within this area and guides future research. Examines the state of the art over the 1979‐97 period, with particular emphasis on the topics that have been researched, the extent of the theory development in the field and the methodologies used in conducting research. Uses content analysis to review 75 relevant articles. Suggests that, while a considerable breadth of topics have been researched, there remains much to be done, there is further room for theoretical development in Chinese consumer behaviour studies; and the methodologies used need improvement and further refinement.

The purpose of this study is to examine the influence of virtual currency (VC) development on financial stocks’ value in selected Asian equity markets and the moderating role of investor attention on this relationship.

The pooled ordinary least squares regression is used on a sample of 138 listed financial firms from four emerging Asian countries for the period 2016–2020.

This study finds that changes in VC values have greater spillover effects on the values of financial stocks in countries which do not recognize the legitimacy of VCs than in countries which do, due to the lack of breadth and depth of the former markets. Moreover, this paper also reports evidence of the greater moderating role of investor attention on this relationship in countries which do not recognize the legitimacy of VCs than in countries which do.

Although numerous studies have been conducted on the influence of VCs on stock performance, majority of these studies did not distinguish whether the sample countries being studied actually recognize the legitimacy of VC transactions or not. Moreover, extant literature has not considered the moderating role of investor attention on this relationship. It is the aim of this study to address these research voids by using a refined three-factor theory model of capital asset pricing model incorporating VCs to better represent stock performance in the digital economy era.

‐ One of the consequences of the present long period of economic depression, which has been felt with particular severity by most Third World countries, has been a necessary critical reassessement of many development strategies. Especially in Africa, the balance sheet between efforts and results has not been very encouraging. The massive industrialization programmes and the large projects of the last three decades have neither helped to achieve a more competitive production nor have introduced widespread prosperity, as hoped. Gradually the accent is now shifting toward new “soft options”, one of which is tourism. We remember that only 15–20 years ago many African governments or international development agencies were still considering tourism as a marginal economic activity, to be left to poor nations without much prospects for industrialization. Since then much has changed and ‐ especially in the present post‐industrial economies ‐ tourism and the whole gamut of other leisure industries have become one of the most dynamic fields of expansion, even in the developing world.

In the 21st century, multilingual tools are gaining importance as increasingly diverse user groups from different cultural and linguistic backgrounds seek access to equally diverse pieces of information. The authors of this paper believe that most current forms of multilingual information access are inadequate for this role, and that a new form of multilingual thesaurus is required. The core of this paper introduces their pilot thesaurus InfoDEFT as a possible model for new online thesauri, which are semantically structured, encyclopedic and multilingual. The authors conclude that while the manual construction of such thesauri is labour intensive and hence costly, pilot thesauri can be used as training sets for artificial learning programmes, thus increasing their volume considerably at relatively little extra cost.

We describe the development and various implementations of a reading comprehension instruction program called Concept-Oriented Reading Instruction (CORI). CORI was designed to enhance students’ reading motivation and reading comprehension, and has been implemented at both elementary and middle school, with a particular focus on science information text reading.

We overview Guthrie and Wigfield’s (2000) reading engagement model, which provides CORI’s theoretical framework. Then we present the major implementation of CORI at elementary school and middle school.

CORI teachers in elementary school focused on five teaching practices to foster motivation: (1) providing thematic content goals; (2) optimizing choice; (3) hands-on activities connected to reading; (4) providing interesting texts; and (5) fostering collaboration. Teachers also taught six reading strategies recommended by the National Reading Panel. Results of several studies showed that CORI students had higher reading motivation and better reading comprehension than students receiving only strategy instruction or traditional reading instruction. We next describe three implementations of CORI at middle school. The motivational instructional practices at this level included (1) thematic contact goals; (2) emphasizing the importance of reading; (3) showing how reading is relevant to student lives; (4) fostering collaboration; (5) optimizing choice; and (6) enabling success. Results of several studies again documented CORI’s success at boosting students’ motivation and comprehension.

The studies carried out show the success of CORI and the paper closes with suggestions about the next steps for the program.

This study seeks to find an interactive effect between ethical leadership (EL) and corporate governance (CG) variables and investigate whether they would affect employee organizational citizenship behavior (EOCB) in a Malaysian organizational setting. The collected data from the 300 accounting/finance department employees were analyzed using Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) and Partial Least Square–Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM; SmartPLS 3.0). Several primary results confirmed a coherent significant relationship between EL and ethical climate (EC), EL and EOCB, EL and CG, and CG and organizational success. Theoretically, it implies a more enhanced EOCB literature on how it can be infused in an organization. It also offers valuable knowledge by providing organizations with several insights concerning the improvement of EOCB, enabling the organization to achieve its desired success and, more importantly, how the findings could contribute directly and indirectly to emerging markets in terms of their industrial and financial performance.

Purpose: The issue of whether participation in online peer-support communities has positive or negative impacts on the psychological adjustment of cancer patients warrants further explorations from new perspectives. This research investigates the role of personality traits in moderating the impact of online participation on the psychological adjustment of cancer patients in terms of their general psychological well-being and cancer-specific well-being.

Methodology: Study participants consisted of adults diagnosed with leukemia. Questionnaires were collected from 111 participants in two leukemia-related forums in China, Baidu Leukemia Community and Bloodbbs. Information regarding the personality traits, online participation, and psychological adjustment were collected using an online questionnaire. A linear regression model was used to test the moderation effect of personality traits on the relationship between online participation and psychological adjustment.

Findings: The main effect of participation in online support communities on psychological adjustment was not statistically significant. Importantly, two personality traits (i.e., emotional stability and openness to experience) moderated the relationship between online participation and psychological adjustment to cancer. Leukemia patients with high emotional stability and high openness to experience reported better psychological adjustment as they participated more in the online community. However, this was not the case for patients with low stability and low openness, who reported worse psychological adjustment as their participation in the online support community increased.

Value: This study introduces two personality moderators into the discussion of how participation in online support communities influences the lives of cancer patients. The moderation effects help to explain why there have been contradictions in the findings of previous studies. In addition, this study adds to the current literature on online support communities as little research on this topic has been conducted outside of the US and Europe. Practically, this study not only highlights the need to evaluate the personality traits of patients who are recommended to participate in online communities, but also underlines the necessity of intervention in these communities.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the potential challenges in developing numerical methodologies for inverse problems and optimizations.

Summarizing previous research results mainly contributed by two research groups of Zhejiang University and Hong Kong Polytechnic University.

Computational intelligence plays an essential role in studying inverse problems and optimizations.

An up-to-date review on the current status of numerical methodologies, especially computational intelligences, for inverse problems and optimizations contributed by Chinese researchers.

A core challenge in background subtraction (BGS) is handling videos with sudden illumination changes in consecutive frames. In our pilot study published in, Sakkos:SKIMA 2019, we tackle the problem from a data point-of-view using data augmentation. Our method performs data augmentation that not only creates endless data on the fly but also features semantic transformations of illumination which enhance the generalisation of the model.

In our pilot study published in SKIMA 2019, the proposed framework successfully simulates flashes and shadows by applying the Euclidean distance transform over a binary mask generated randomly. In this paper, we further enhance the data augmentation framework by proposing new variations in image appearance both locally and globally.

Experimental results demonstrate the contribution of the synthetics in the ability of the models to perform BGS even when significant illumination changes take place.

Such data augmentation allows us to effectively train an illumination-invariant deep learning model for BGS. We further propose a post-processing method that removes noise from the output binary map of segmentation, resulting in a cleaner, more accurate segmentation map that can generalise to multiple scenes of different conditions. We show that it is possible to train deep learning models even with very limited training samples. The source code of the project is made publicly available at https://github.com/dksakkos/illumination_augmentation