Tourism has emerged as one of the world’s largest industries and a fast growing economic sector. The Asian region attracts a growing number of quality-conscious tourists as it is endowed with a rich biocultural/heritage diversity. However, the diversity and integrity of many Asian tourist destinations have been severely eroded or irreversibly damaged due to ill-conceived, poorly planned, and un...

BACKGROUND Dutch guideline-developing organizations do not focus systematically on differences between men and women when developing guidelines, even though there is increasing evidence that being male or female may have an effect on health and health outcomes. In collaboration with two prominent Dutch guideline-developing organizations, we designed a training course to encourage systematic att...

Introduction The Triple-S project (Syndromic Surveillance Systems in Europe, www.syndromicsurveillance.eu), co-financed by the European Commission and involving twenty four organizations from fourteen countries was launched in September 2010 with the following objectives 1) performing an inventory of existing or planned SyS systems in Europe both in animal and public health, 2) building a netwo...

The aim of this study is to characterize the current status of blended learning in Portugal, given that b-learning has grown exponentially in the Portuguese market over recent years. 38 organizations (representing 68% of all institutions certified to provide distance training by the Government Labour Office – DGERT -) participated in this study. The results revealed that in 2007, although the p...

Attempts to provide a practical framework in which practitioners may develop human resources (HR) strategies in line with their organizations' corporate planning processes. Proposes a four-step approach involving: development of a strategic framework; generating of HR mission statement; application of analysis; and making strategic planning decision between HR options. Outlines a four-dimension...

This study tested the idea of habits as a form of goal-directed automatic behavior. Expanding on the idea that habits are mentally represented as associations between goals and actions, it was proposed that goals are capable of activating the habitual action. More specific, when habits are established (e.g., frequent cycling to the university), the very activation of the goal to act (e.g., havi...

When parts of the states in a goal POMDP are fully observable and some actions are deterministic it is possible to take advantage of these properties to efficiently generate approximate solutions. Actions that deterministically affect the fully observable component of the world state can be abstracted away and combined into macro actions, permitting a planner to converge more quickly. This proc...