Trust perceptions of online travel information by different content creators: Some social and legal implications

Consumers are increasingly turning to the online environment to provide information to assist them in making purchase decisions related to travel products. They often rely on travel recommendations from different sources, such as sellers, independent experts and, increasingly, other consumers. A new type of online content, user-generated content (UGC), provides a number of legal and social challenges to providers and users of that content, especially in relation to areas such as defamation, misrepresentation and social embarrassment. This paper reports research that examined the level of trustworthiness of online travel information from these different sources. The study used a survey of Australian travel consumers (n = 12,000) and results support the notion that there are differences in the level of trust for online travel information from different sources. Respondents ‘tended to agree’ that they trusted information provided by travel agents, information from commercial operators and comments made by travellers on third party websites. However, the highest level of trust was afforded to information provided on State government tourism websites. These results suggest that greater trust is placed in online travel comments when they are on a specific travel website than when they are on a more generic social networking website. However, respondents were ‘not sure’ that they trusted comments made by travellers on weblogs and on social networking sites. Some 88% of respondents that had not visited UGC websites (or were unsure if they had) indicated that they thought that UGC would be useful in the future – suggesting that they feel that any concerns they may have in relation to legal and social problems resulting from its use will be resolved.     

Development in lipid analysis: Some new extraction techniques and in situ transesterification

The development of methods for analyzing fatty acids that provide rapid and reliable results is currently in great demand. Recently, different lipid extraction procedures such as microwave or supercritical fluid extraction have been researched. Both procedures avoid the use of large volumes of solvents and provide rapid lipid isolations. Only a few papers have reported work on microwave extraction, but many studies about supercritical fluid extraction have been carried out and have been gaining acceptance within the scientific community. Avoiding the lipid isolation step, by synthesizing fatty acid esters by simultaneous lipid extraction and derivatization through in situ reactions, has also been proposed. The saving of time and reagents is significant. Owing to the differences among the procedures, some knowledge of their characteristics is essential in order to improve methods and achieve reliable and accurate results. Clearly, results depend on factors such as the type of catalysis selected, the use of nonpolar solvents, heating applied during the synthesis, and the degree of suitability of the procedure chosen for the particular features of each sample.     

Lectin-binding pattern of the Senegalese sole Solea senegalensis oogenesis

The glycoconjugate pattern of developing ovarian follicles in wild and cultured Senegalese sole Solea senegalensis was investigated by means of lectin histochemistry. Ovaries from cultured fish contained oocytes up to the late vitellogenic stage, whereas they reached the hydration stage in wild specimens. The follicular cells bound MAL II, SBA, HPA, DBA, Con A, KOH-sialidase (K-s)-WGA, GSA I-B(4) in the late vitellogenic stage, and in wild fish also SNA and K-s-PNA, whereas in the hydration stage SBA, HPA, DBA, and GSA I-B(4) only. The zona radiata reacted with SBA, HPA, DBA, Con A, and GSA I B(4) in the late vitellogenic stage and in cultured fish also with UEA I, whereas in the hydration stage it stained with SBA only. The cortical alveoli bound SBA, HPA, RCA(120) during the late vitellogenic stage, also SNA, PNA, K-s-PNA, GSA I-B(4) in cultured fish, DBA, and K-s-WGA in wild ones which stained with SBA, HPA, and GSA I-B(4) in the hydrated stage. The yolk reacted with Con A in the late vitellogenic oocytes, and also with MAL II, SNA, K-s-PNA, SBA, HPA, K-s-WGA, GSA I-B(4), UEA I in the hydrated ones. From perinucleolus to late vitellogenic stages, the oocyte nucleoplasm bound Con A, GSA I-B(4), GSA II, UEA I, and in wild fish also MAL II, SNA, LTA but only GSA I-B(4) reactivity in the early maturation stage. These findings demonstrate that the glycan pattern of fish ovarian follicles changes during the maturative stages and that it is affected by culture-rearing conditions.     

Real-Time Operation of Reservoir System by Genetic Programming

Reservoir operation policy depends on specific values of deterministic variables and predictable actions as well as stochastic variables, in which small differences affect water release and reservoir operation efficiency. Operational rule curves of reservoir are policies which relate water release to the deterministic and stochastic variables such as storage volume and inflow. To operate a reservoir system in real time, a prediction model may be coupled with rule curves to estimate inflow as a stochastic variable. Inappropriate selection of this prediction model increases calculations and impacts the reservoir operation efficiency. Thus, extraction of an operational policy simultaneously with inflow prediction helps the operator to make an appropriate decision to calculate how much water to release from the reservoir without employing a prediction model. This paper addresses the use of genetic programming (GP) to develop a reservoir operation policy simultaneously with inflow prediction. To determine a water release policy, two operational rule curves are considered in each period by using (1) inflow and storage volume at the beginning of each period and (2) inflow of the 1^st, 2^nd, 12^th previous periods and storage volume at the beginning of each period. The obtained objective functions of those rules have only 4.86 and 0.44?% difference in the training and testing data sets. These results indicate that the proposed rule based on deterministic variables is effective in determining optimal rule curves simultaneously with inflow prediction for reservoirs.     

Semantic speech recognition in the Basque context Part I: cross-lingual approaches

This work, divided into Part I and II, describes the development of GorUP a Semantic Speech Recognition System in the Basque context. Part I analyses cross-lingual approaches oriented to under-resourced languages and Part II the development of the Language Identification system. During the development, data optimization methods and Soft Computing methodologies oriented to complex environment are used in order to overcome the lack of resources. Moreover, in this context three languages coexist: French, Spanish and Basque. Indeed our main goal is the development of robust Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems for Basque, but all language variability has to be analyzed. In this regard, Basque speakers mix during the speech not only sounds but also words of the three languages which results in a strong presence of cross-lingual elements. Besides, Basque is an agglutinative language with a special morpho-syntactic structure inside the words that may lead to intractable vocabularies. Nowadays, our work is oriented to Information Retrieval and mainly to small internet mass-media. In these cases the available resources for Basque in general, and for this task in particular, are very few and complex to process because of the noisy environment. Thus, the methods employed in this development (ontology-based approach or cross-lingual methodologies oriented to profit from more powerful languages) could suit the requirements of many under-resourced languages.     

Experiments for the selection of sub-word units in the Basque context for semantic tasks

The long term goal of our project is the development of robust ASR systems in the Basque context where coexist French, Spanish and Basque (a minority language). The development of ASR systems involves dealing with issues such as Acoustic Phonetic Decoding (APD), Language Modelling (LM) or the development of appropriate Language Resources (LR). Thus, these applications are generally very language-dependent and require very large resources. This work is focused on the selection of appropriate sub-word units with under-resourced and noisy conditions. Nowadays, in particular, the work is oriented to Basque Broadcast News (BN) due to the interest of digital mass-media as the trilingual Infozazpi radio (situated in French Basque Country). Thus, in order to decrease the negative impact that the lack of resources has in this issue we apply several data optimization methodologies based on Matrix Covariance Estimation and Ontology-based approaches.     

OFP_CLASS: a hybrid method to generate optimized fuzzy partitions for classification

The discretization of values plays a critical role in data mining and knowledge discovery. The representation of information through intervals is more concise and easier to understand at certain levels of knowledge than the representation by mean continuous values. In this paper, we propose a method for discretizing continuous attributes by means of fuzzy sets, which constitute a fuzzy partition of the domains of these attributes. This method carries out a fuzzy discretization of continuous attributes in two stages. A fuzzy decision tree is used in the first stage to propose an initial set of crisp intervals, while a genetic algorithm is used in the second stage to define the membership functions and the cardinality of the partitions. After defining the fuzzy partitions, we evaluate and compare them with previously existing ones in the literature.     

Polyadic tense \theta-valued \Lukasiewicz–Moisil algebras

In this paper we introduce the polyadic tense $\theta$ -valued $\L$ ukasiewicz–Moisil algebras (=polyadic tense $\hbox{LM}_{\theta}$ -algebras), as a common generalization of polyadic tense Boolean algebras and polyadic $\hbox{LM}_{\theta}$ -algebras. Our main result is a representation theorem for polyadic tense $\hbox{LM}_{\theta}$ -algebras.     

Additives to prevent the formation of surface defects during poly(vinyl chloride) calendering

Gas checks are visible fleck-shaped defects that occur on the surface of poly(vinyl chloride) (PVC) films during industrial calendering. Films containing these surface defects often do not meet minimum product specifications and therefore must be disposed of or recycled, resulting in increased cost and material waste. Currently, gas checks are controlled by keeping film gauge low and through trial-and-error modifications of processing parameters by calender operators. In this work, our group developed a series of chemical additives that can be blended with PVC to prevent the formation of gas check defects. We found that a series of poly(caprolactone) (PCL)-based compounds with diester linkers and alkyl chain cappers were all effective at preventing the formation of gas checks during calendering, with additive concentrations as low as 8 phr producing films with no gas checks. We found that the blends produced with our additives had higher melt viscosities than those produced with additives that do not remove gas checks, suggesting that viscosity plays an important role in preventing gas check defects.