Shaping the competitive advantages of travel agencies over online services in today’s environment

The object of the study is the modern tourism and hospitality industry, which has faced significant losses and transformations over the past few years. Changes in the service system, transition to new standards, introduction of digital and online technologies in operations, etc. are affecting both industry players and consumer preferences. While some consumers only use the services of professional travel organisers, others travel on their own, preferring independent tourism. The article examines major trends in the tourism industry, reviews the market and gives recommendations on what challenges and opportunities to create a competitive advantage over online resources, aggregators in the fight for the consumer should pay attention to travel agencies as one of the key players in the market of travel services.

Now you see it, now you don’t: dynamism amplifies the typicality effect

Some safety events do not stabilise in a coherent state, presenting with transient or intermittent features. Such dynamism may pose problems for human performance, especially if combined with non-typical stimuli that are rarely encountered in everyday work. This may explain undesirable pilot behaviour and could be an important cognitive factor in recent aircraft accidents. Sixty-five airline pilots tested a real-world typicality gradient, composed of two cockpit events, a typical event, and a non-typical event, across two different forms of dynamism, a stable, single system transition, and an unstable, intermittent system transition. We found that non-typical event stimuli elicited a greater number of response errors and incurred an increased response latency when compared to typical event stimuli, replicating the typicality effect. These performance deteriorations were amplified when a form of unstable system dynamism was introduced. Typical stimuli were unaffected by dynamism. This indicates that dynamic, non-typical events are problematic for pilots and may lead to poor event recognition and response. Typical is advantageous, even if dynamic. Manufacturers and airlines should evolve pilot training and crew procedures to take account of variety in event dynamics.

Historical trajectory and resilience in an agro-extractive settlement project in the Lower Tocantins River, Pará, Brazil

The São João Batista riverside community experienced a golden phase in the production of cachaça from sugar cane (Saccharum officinarum L.). It underwent a period of decay around 1975 and, in 2004, became an Agro-extractive Settlement Project (PAE), with an economic system based on the exploitation and commercialization of açaí (Euterpe oleracea Mart.). This study analyzes the resilience of PAE São João Batista, Abaetetuba, Pará, from the establishment of sugar cane mills to the transition of their economic system to the exploitation and commercialization of açaí. It was based on field research conducted with 141 riverside dwellers employing semi-structured interviews. The adaptive cycle was built up, from which resilience was analyzed. The growth of the açaí fruit market identifies the community's point of resilience. The sugar cane-açaí economic system transition enabled riparian populations to experience changes and to create conditions for reorganizing themselves as a settlement.

The Expectation for Pension Insurance in Funded Schemes: Theoretical Model and Global Implementation

In this study, we derive the financial position of pension actors in the market during pension system transition toward more funded capitalized scheme, mainly via an option benefit model. This is enabled by not considering the economy as a single earning cohort. We analytically demonstrate a socio-economic anomaly in funded pension system, which is in favor of high earning cohorts on the expense of low earning cohorts. This anomaly is realized by lack of insurance and exposure to financial and systemic risks. Furthermore, the anomaly might lead to pension re-reform back to unfunded scheme, mostly due to political pressure. We find that minimum pension guarantee is a rebalance mechanism to this anomaly, which increases the probability to sustainable pension scheme. Specifically, we argue that implementing the guarantee with an intra-generational, risk-sharing mechanism is the most efficient way to reduce the effect of this abnormality. Moreover, we exhibit the convergence process toward implementing minimum pension guarantee in many countries, which have capitalized their pension systems during the last three decades, particularly among Latin America and Central East Europe (CEE) countries. Received: 11 December 2020 / Accepted: 5 August 2021 / Published: 5 September 2021

Renewing Universities in Our Climate Emergency: Stewarding System Change and Transformation

This paper outlines climate emergencies facing universities and, by drawing on research on system transition, provides insights about how change to overcome the challenges might be stewarded. Climate change brings three interconnected and urgent emergencies for universities: (1) Manifest emergencies such as risks to operations and business models; (2) Conceptual emergencies that arise because assumptions, ideologies, systems, and structures cannot match the scale of the manifest challenges; and (3) Existential emergencies where current identities and sense of purpose are incapable of supporting the changes needed to overcome the conceptual challenges. To be viable leaders in the world, universities will need to renew their commitments to serving the public good, be dedicated to an unwavering challenge-orientation, create post-disciplinary structures, and be the change one seeks to see in the world. Importantly, universities will need to overcome the emergencies on the inside if they are to help society address the scale of the challenges on the outside, to which both universities and human capacity are seriously cognitively and emotionally ill-prepared. Fortunately, new insights from research on system transition provide helpful advice on how to steward transformational change. This work highlights that successful transformation requires strong adherence to transformational intent and, in the case of universities, working with all three emergencies simultaneously. Successful transformation will also require harnessing opportunities to disrupt the status quo; supporting an interplay of different forms of management and orientations to the future; developing appropriate infrastructure to support transformation; and rapidly accelerating the development of capacities for transformational change. By actively developing capacities for transformation on the inside universities will then be in a much better position to help and lead others beyond the halls of the academy.

An Improved Algorithm to Predict the Pose-dependent Cutting Stability in Robot Milling

Chattering is one of the most important factors affecting productivity of robot machining. This paper investigates the pose-dependent cutting stability of a 5-DOF hybrid robot. By merging the complete robot structural dynamics with the cutting force at TCP, an effective approach for stability analysis of the robot milling process is proposed using the full-discretization technique. The proposed method enables the computational efficiency to be significantly improved because the system transition matrix can be simply generated using a sparse matrix multiplication. Both simulation and experimental results on a full size prototype machine show that the stability lobes are highly pose-dependent and primarily dominated by the lower-order structural modes.