Challenges and dilemmas of creative tourism in the 21st century: How can we preserve it from the massive offer?

Although there are not data to attest to the growth of various Creative Tourism experiences worldwide, the expectation of their increase is consistent with the strength of the nowadays markets and the strategies and changes needed to sustain this growth at the twenty-first century. So, it will be relevant to follow the new trends, changes and challenges that will shape the future path of Creative Tourism. In the context of the European Union, economic prosperity and well-being should respond to twin digital and green transitions that should prepare society to mitigate problems that arise from pandemic situations, such as the recent COVID-19. How do we follow new and future experiences, and how can institutions be positioned without jeopardising the massification of this segment? As with cultural tourism, this segment of creative initiatives can and should develop ways to avoid these possible mass derivations and adjust the preservation of its sustainability in the future. What strategy needs to be adapted so that future risks of vulgarisation will be avoided even within the possible new trends? What will be the role of the Southern European countries? This final chapter envisages promoting critical thinking about the role of Creative Tourism for local and regional development. The discussion focuses on how to prevent massification and how to respond to new challenges and saturated formulas and in accordance with the digital area of the twenty-first century. Also, it promotes some solutions based on short-term strategies to be outlined and on a TIN (Think, Integrate and Network) model, which can be replicated in many countries in Europe and in the rest of the world. © 2022 Paula Remoaldo, Vitor Ribeiro, Juliana Alves, Elaine Borges Scalabrini and Helder Lopes. All rights reserved.

Visual Analysis Tool for a BLE Technology based Tracking Data

Several systems deal with human mobility. Most of them are for outdoor environments and use mobile phones to capture data. However, there is a growing interest of enterprises to consider indoor movement to take employees and client classes into account. Moreover, they usually want to assign semantics to the visited locations. We propose a visual exploration tool for analyzing the dynamics of individual movements in an indoor environment in this work. We present the use of suitable charts and animations to explore these complex data better. Finally, we argue that one could use our solution to monitor social distancing in indoor environments, which is a sensible thing during the current COVID-19 pandemic. Copyright © 2021 by SCITEPRESS – Science and Technology Publications, Lda. All rights reserved.

Learning from the pandemic, building increased international cooperation

The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted a fragile preparation by countries and regions for epidemic events, exposing exacerbated nationalisms in pandemic mitigation and control actions. Both conditions decisively compromise the effectiveness and efficiency of pandemic control capacity. It is important to develop frameworks that help overcome frailties in response to epidemics. Based on a thematic literature review and discussions with multiple national and international entities an attempt was made to build a tool for responding to future epidemics, the Pandemic Preparation Framework (2PF). The proposed 2PF tool is aligned with the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction and with international bodies, such as the European Health Emergency Preparedness and Response Authority (HERA). It aims to be a framework for operationalizing these agreements. The response to pandemics must be based essentially on international action and closer collaboration between countries and regions. © 2021 Lopes et al;.

An unexpected Socialist majority: the 2022 Portuguese general elections

The Portuguese elections of early 2022 took place during the most severe wave of COVID-19 infections in Portugal. Nevertheless, the pandemic was not the most important issue in the campaign. Although opinion polls forecast a narrow election, the Socialists gained their second absolute majority in history. The electoral results marked a breakthrough for the radical right and Liberals. Every other traditional party had its worst electoral night in democratic history. The Christian Democrats and the Greens ended up exiting the parliament. The 2022 general elections saw the Socialists rise to dominance and the end of the Portuguese exceptionalism in keeping the radical right at arm's length.

Modelling public health policies for influenza vaccination campaigns

Issue/problem Public health policies (PHP) are crucial for controlling infectious diseases. Namely, those focused on influenza stand out for the permanent threat of seasonal and the risk of pandemic flu. The COVID-19 pandemic revealed many frailties in PHP, part of which may be lessons to improving responses to future flu epidemics and pandemics. Among the tools available to control influenza, vaccination stands out, a matter where much remains to be improved regarding PHP and communication with the public, among others. The Kassianos model (2021) seeks to create a qualitative conceptual tool to optimizing influenza vaccination campaigns, being organized into 5 pillars with 42 categories. Description of the problem We seek to take a step forward based on the Kassianos model, making it quantitative. This project is the mathematical modelling and the testing in a country (Sweden). It started in January 2021 and will be completed towards the end of the year. Results This work will allow health authorities and similar partners to have a tool to support the optimization of influenza vaccination campaigns in effectiveness and efficiency. The work is expected to be pre-completed in October 2021. The international presentation of results is intended to be simultaneous at the European Parliament and, if possible, at the 14th European Public Health Conference 2021. The results will cover the dimensions of vaccination and relations to VCR: Campaign accountability Access to vaccination HCP engagement Burden of Disease Awareness Communication with the public Lessons It is possible to increase the effectiveness and efficiency of vaccination campaigns through the quantitative modelling of aspects related to influenza vaccination, usually worked as qualitative. Key messages It is essential to have PHP as rigorous for supporting public health action. The need for really effective influenza vaccination is critical and must be achieved in the shortest time.

Yet another BLE technology based tracking system

There are numerous systems for analyzing human mobility for outdoor environments at the scale of large regions or entire cities. Most of them use mobile phones to capture data information. However, these systems are agnostic to a specific business field, do not consider indoor movement, do not take into account the participants' employee or client category, and usually do not assign semantics to the visited locations. In this work, we first developed a low-cost tracking system to detect, collect, process, and store users' movement and presence data in indoor environments. Such an approach takes into consideration the users' category and location semantic. We collected these data in two university buildings used by faculty, staff, and students. We suggest that our work could monitor social distancing in indoor environments due to its human presence detection capability, whenever required, such as for the COVID-19 pandemic. © 2021 Owner/Author.

Permissioned blockchains: Towards privacy management and data regulation compliance

Data privacy and protection has been a trending topic in recent years. The COVID 19 pandemic has brought about additional challenges and tensions. For example, sharing health data across several organizations is crucial for significant control and reduction of massive infection and death risks. This implies the need for broadly collecting and using personal and sensitive data, which raises the complexity of data protection and privacy challenges. Permissioned blockchain technology is one way to empower users in controlling how their data flows through the net, in a transparent and secure way, through an immutable, unified, and distributed database ruled by smart contracts. Given this background, we developed a second layer data governance model for permissioned blockchains based on the Governance Analytical Framework principles to be applied in pandemic situations. The model has been designed to organize the relationship between data subjects, data controller, and data processor. Regarding privacy concerns, our proposal complies with the Brazilian General Data Protection Law. © 2020 The Authors, Faculty of Law, Masaryk University and IOS Press.

How we have been productive when Coronavirus locked us out of University

In the Covid-19 pandemic era researchers and academics worldwide have experienced an unprecedented phenomenon. In this context of uncertainty and instability, academia was not spared the consequences of the new Coronavirus that locked everybody out of university. However, research and academic productivity during these unprecedented times may not have adversely affected projects, students, and their supervisors. Building on the authors’ personal experience this paper highlights some positive impacts of pursuing a PhD during a pandemic, focusing the reflection along two lines: 1) that work during social isolation may be better than ever;and 2) how open science has been crucial in this coronavirus era. © 2020 by the author.