Böcker utgivna av Anchor Academic Publishing

Marine and beach tourism is one of the still growing fields in tourism worldwide. These tourism activities include scuba diving, snorkeling, wind surfing, fishing, observing marine mammals and birds, cruising or ferry riding, sea kayaking, visiting fishing villages and lighthouses, sailing, and motor yachting. The growth in marine and beach tourism has helped develop and improve coastal areas. Thailand, with its numerous attractions and tourist destinations, continues to amaze the world regarding marine and beach tourism. One of the most popular marine and beach destinations in Thailand is Phuket. Phuket is Thailand's largest island and considered to be the most famous. This island has an exceptional climate: The monsoon in Phuket comes earlier than in the other parts of the gulf and during the rainy season, the island experiences rain only once or twice a day. The purpose of this study aims to develop the fields of ecotourism, sea tourism, and beach tourism. The study was conducted at the site of Phuket, being one of the worldwide known marine and beach attractions and well-known among foreigners. Moreover, the island of Phuket also has many beautiful marine and beach attractions that are still to be discovered by the public and need to be developed to entice more tourists to come and revisit the island.

Tourism is identified as one of the major potential industries of Thai economy. It is considered to be a top priority for the following reasons; Firstly, it is an industry requiring much labor, thus it provides many jobs for city residents, by which it helps to solve unemployment for society. Secondly, it is an industry which brings with it many important benefits, improving the social-economic situation, and enhancing income for people. Thirdly, it can promote peace, enhancing common understanding and building a unified and sustainable country. In the last years, Thailand's tourism industry has made significant progress and contributed largely to the economic development and social progress of the nation. In the context of international integration, the Thailand government has focused on developing the tourism industry even further, enhancing service quality, and expanding operations scale. As a result, the number of tourists coming to Thailand has increased significantly between 2009 and 2015. This study investigates the perceived value, satisfaction and revisit of Russian tourists who visit Thailand on the basis of selected tourism destinations in Bangkok, Thailand.

Germany will spend around $6.6 billion to cope with an estimated 800,000 refugees expected to have entered the country in the year 2016; this reality indeed extending further into 2017. Despite this overwhelming number of people entering the country, Chancellor Angela Merkel stated that there is "e;no legal limit to the number of asylum seekers Germany will take in in the coming years."e; The announcement by Merkel's coalition government followed Germany and Austria opening their borders to the large numbers of refugees making their way north and west from the Middle East, Africa and elsewhere. In particular, this statement came after the Syrian refugee crisis created the biggest refugee crisis the world has seen since the Second World War. Germany is seen as the immigration hub of Europe. It also happens to be the second most popular destination for immigrants after the United States of America. Germany is also the country in Europe with the highest numbers of foreign nationals to date. Germany established a new immigration law in 2005 which was born out of a realization that it was coming to terms with a demographic crisis stemming from an ageing population and further complimented by a sharp decline of national birth rates. In foresight, and within this unfortunate context, migration was seen by much of the German political class as an economic necessity, and the answer to the German economic and demographic time bomb. Between the years 2009 and 2014, annual net migration in Germany rose from 100,000 to 580,000 individuals. Moreover, the inflow of foreign nationals increased from 266,000 to 790,000 individuals. As of January 2015, approximately 10% of residents in Germany were foreign nationals, with around 12% born outside the country. Naturally, these figures have all risen significantly following Merkel's decision to allow what has reached one million refugees and migrants into Germany across 2016 and moving into 2017. Moving from this reality, the research will focus on the importance of the compliance of Germany's migration policy with International Refugee and Migration Law, as it is crucial for the country's survivability and move forward throughout this phase of its history. The importance of the research lies in whether or not Germany's migration policy towards the Syrian Refugees in particular complies with its duties toward international law embodied in the treaties and conventions it has committed to.

Breast cancer is the most common type of cancer in women, which also causes the most cancer deaths among them today. Mammography is the only reliable method to detect breast cancer in the early stage among all diagnostic methods available currently. Breast cancer can occur in both men and women and is defined as an abnormal growth of cells in the breast that multiply uncontrollably. The main factors which cause breast cancer are either hormonal or genetic. Masses are quite subtle, and have many shapes such as circumscribed, speculated or ill-defined. These tumors can be either benign or malignant. Computer-aided methods are powerful tools to assist the medical staff in hospitals and lead to better and more accurate diagnosis. The main objective of this research is to develop a Computer Aided Diagnosis (CAD) system for finding the tumors in the mammographic images and classifying the tumors as benign or malignant. There are five main phases involved in the proposed CAD system: image pre-processing, extraction of features from mammographic images using Gabor Wavelet and Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT), dimensionality reduction using Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and classification using Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifier.

Epilepsy is a chronic disorder, the hallmark of which is recurrent, unprovoked seizures. Many people with epilepsy have more than one type of seizures and may have other symptoms of neurological problems as well. Epilepsy is caused due to sudden recurrent firing of the neurons in the brain. The symptoms are convulsions, dizziness and confusion. One out of every hundred persons experiences a seizure at some time in their lives. It may be confused with other events like strokes or migraines. Unfortunately, the occurrence of an epileptic seizure seems unpredictable and its process still is hardly understood. In India, the number of persons suffering from epilepsy is increasing every year. The complexity involved in the diagnosis and therapy has to be cost effective. In this project, the authors applied an algorithm which is used for a classification of the risk level of epilepsy in epileptic patients from Electroencephalogram (EEG) signals. Dimensionality reduction is done on the EEG dataset by applying Power Spectral density. The KNN Classifier and K-Means clustering is implemented on these spectral values to epilepsy risk level detection. The Performance Index (PI) and Quality Value (QV) are calculated for the above methods. A group of twenty patients with known epilepsy findings are used in this study.

Lahore is one of the cities most effected by uncontrolled noise pollution in Pakistan. The most important factor of noise pollution is the road traffic. The main objective of this study was to analyze and evaluate road traffic noise and to measure its effects on the population of Lahore city. A weighting sound level meter was used in the study. All the measurements were taken at a height of about 1.2 m from the ground at 56 sample sites. The spatial noise pattern was shown in maps. These were also drawn to show buffers dividing areas into moderate, high and extremely high risk zones in accordance with noise risk levels. The maps were additionally divided in day and night time maps, each with graduated symbols. The main day-night values were exceeding the permissible environmental standards used in Pakistan. Therefore, a survey was conducted to study the diseases caused by noise pollution in the areas with highest noise levels.

Alzheimer's disease is the most common form of dementia which is incurable. Although some kinds of memory loss are normal during aging, these are not severe enough to interfere with the level of function. -Secretase is an important protease in the pathogenesis of Alzheimer's disease. Some statine-based peptidomimetics show inhibitory activities to the -secretase. To explore the inhibitory mechanism, molecular docking and three-dimensional quantitative structure-activity relationship (3D-QSAR) studies on these analogues were performed. Quantitative structure-activity relationship (QSAR) modeling pertains to the construction of predictive models of biological activities as a function of structural and molecular information of a compound library. The concept of QSAR has typically been used for drug discovery and development and has gained wide applicability for correlating molecular information with not only biological activities but also with other physicochemical properties, which has therefore been termed quantitative structure-property relationship (QSPR). In this study, 3D QSAR and pharmacophore mapping studies were carried out using Accelrys Discovery Studio 2.1. The best nine drugs were selected from the 16 ligands and pharmacophore features were generated.

It is necessary to ascertain current prescribing of antibiotics for upper respiratory tract infections (URTIs) to address potential overuse. Hence, the objective of this study is to analyse the current prescription patterns and the economics of drugs used in the treatment of URTI. For this, a prospective observational study was carried out in the out-patient department of paediatrics. Children of 1 month to 18 years, diagnosed with URTI by the physician, were included in the study. The demographic details, drugs prescribed, dose, duration of therapy, cost of drug therapy were all noted from the out-patient record. The cost of individual drugs was analysed and the health economic analysis of drugs was performed.

The indispensable need for alignment and optimization of sound systems has prompted this study. It tries to answer questions such as: What constitutes audio and frequency response components? Are they pragmatic? What are filters in this context?The work mainly focuses on improving an input audio signal to be free from shape glitch in order to circumvent unwanted audible peaks or anomalies in the final sound. Additionally, this study tries to offer operational flexibility per definition of an Audio Multitone Refiner. Because of their versatility, the signal analyzing tools Laplace transform, Fourier series, D.C. and transient analysis were employed to ascertain the realization of all constructed circuits in this study. 'Casio fx7400G' language was used during programming of the band pass filter, as were active filters.

This book has been written basically to analyse a typical phenomenon concerning the media/politics nexus in contemporary Ghana by exploring how the processes of Othering are linguistically embedded in the political discourses of the state-owned Ghanaian newspaper, the Daily Graphic, when representing the relation between the ruling and opposition parties in Ghana since 1992. Secondly, the aim of this book is to demonstrate how Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) can be applied (or broadened) to alternative settings - here, alternative settings refer to contexts in which a conflict is not the topic of the discourse - and finally, to demonstrate that the scope of CDA can be broadened to include alternative settings.

Central banks around the world have lowered their key interest rates to historical lows and implemented large asset purchase programs in the past few years. Within the scientific and, most recently, also increasingly in the political debate, the nominal interest rate is mainly the subject of discussion. The question is often raised whether saving and retirement provision are still worthwhile for private households, especially in Germany. In this context it is often ignored or not considered that the purchasing power of the nominal interest rates fluctuates considerably with the inflation rate. Inflation-adjusted real interest rates are therefore decisive for the actual income from financial assets and crucial for the savings and investment behavior. This study, therefore, shall play ist part to investigate scientifically the influence and correlation of low and negative key interest rates on yield levels of selected asset classes within the sphere of influence of the European Central Bank. In this context, the mainly populist question is also answered whether savers are expropriated slowly.

This book tries to explore why so many people actively seek out and enjoy horror as a form of entertainment. Why some find pleasure in horror is a question that many have asked before, but never fully answered. This book does not claim to deliver a general answer to that question, but rather offers an overview of the most popular theories and hypothesis, as well as a study focusing on the player affect. The explanations and solutions offered include mostly psychological, emotional or general approaches. Every approach presented has its benefits and flaws and will be discussed accordingly. How these come into play individually, as well as in connection to each other, will constitute a major part of this study. After having provided the general theoretical basis of horror and why it might be so appealing to some people, this study goes on discussing the medium game, and in a further step, tries to explore if the unique characteristics of the medium game change the overall horror experience one might have. Different aspects and properties of the medium in question are discussed in detail - how immersion affects us as consumers, what the role of interactivity is and how they both relate to one another in-game, how this understanding comes into play in a game design context and how it can create a whole different experience for the player, and lastly, how certain game design elements can be utilized to further improve the emotional response.

In the last decades, states revealed a tendency for expanding their dependence on so-called strategic bombing in wars against other states, an approach that raised questions on whether it is possible to reduce the involvement of ground and naval forces in future military confrontations. The successful employment of strategic bombing as the major pillar of military operations that took place within different geographical areas and terrains encouraged states to limit or altogether avoid resorting to campaigns that involve putting their "e;boots on the ground."e; As a matter of fact, one can claim that improvements in the military aircraft industry - including persistent research on issues of technology, effectiveness and accuracy - have pushed for this result. Another set of reasons, however, that are indirectly connected to developments in aerial capabilities of militaries should not be ignored, including demands by governments for shorter, less costly wars, concerns about public opinion and electoral implications, as well as the fear of high rates of casualties. Airmen, meanwhile, were also called to implement strategic bombing operations against non-state actors. Yet, the outcome is certainly an issue of debate. In general, launching air strikes on states differs on many levels from aerially attacking militant organizations, terrorist groups or local tribes. Armies are fundamentally trained to fight against other armies, in addition to the difficulties of differentiating between civilians and militants, the so-called principle of discrimination. This study seeks to examine both the rationale and objectives of states in resorting to air power against non-state actors in the Middle East, focusing on the three cases of aerial operations on Hezbollah in Lebanon, ISIS in Syria, and the Houthi rebels in Yemen.

Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) - the commitment of organizations to balance financial performance with contributions to the quality of life of their employees, the local community and society at large - is gaining worldwide value as a business tool and social effort. The review of literature suggests that many studies have been undertaken globally to understand CSR as a subject of management but there have been very few studies undertaken to understand the other dimension of CSR which is beneficiary (community) aspect of CSR, especially in India. Here, the authors make an attempt to understand the CSR concept from both the dimensions of CSR i.e. management and beneficiaries of CSR (community). The authors try to understand the issues covered by the management and their implementing strategies in order to meet community needs. Also, the authors try to study the requirements and satisfaction of the community in the area where the corporates implement CSR. This type of attempt is the first one in India to study the community awareness and ist knowledge about CSR as well as the organisations working in the community. The present study also tries to measure the impact of CSR activities undertaken by the organizations in a way to have the sustainable development at village level. In this context, the present study plays a significant role in the field of Research Methodology, the field of management as well as social science, especially from the social work perspective. To meet the study objectives, both primary and secondary data were used. The primary data was collected in Karnataka, India by selecting nine organisations, three of each from Govt., Private and Multinational companies; those were recognised as leaders in implementing CSR activities. To understand the impact of CSR on community, 450 community respondents were also interviewed with the help of structured questionnaire. Secondary data for the study was obtained from Karmayog. CSR Ratings of the 500 largest Indian companies and other similar studies, other available articles, books, companies' annual reports and related publications were reviewed in the study.

"e;Equal Channel Angular Extrusion"e; (ECAE) is a significant method in industrial forming applications, which is the most important method for the production of ultrafine grained bulk samples, where plastic strains are introduced into the bulk material without any changes in the cross section. ECAE has different die channel angles from which an optimum die channel angle should be identified so that efficient mechanical properties will be obtained. This study is focused on the plastic deformation behavior of Al alloys by modeling ECAE with experimental and finite element software. A solid model was generated using CATIA. The STL files of ECAE die generated in CATIA were used in DEFORM-3D for simulations. The experiments are performed by designing the ECAE tools such as die, punch and billet. A series of numerical experiments were carried out for the die angles of 115 125and 135 and outer corner angle of 6 using a billet diameter of 9mm and a height of 70mm. A detailed analysis of the strains introduced by ECAP ("e;Equal Channel Angular Pressing"e;) in a single passage through the die is noted. The experiments are conducted by attaching the ECAE tools to the Universal Testing Machine on aluminum alloy. The dimensions are followed for ECAE by taking considerations from the existing literature into account. On the basis of the experiment and simulation results, load, displacement, and punch force are evaluated and compared with each other.

The broad consensus before the recent financial crisis was that the so called fair value accounting (FVA) improves transparency contrary to the historical cost model. Since 2008, the discussion has been on the root cause of the crisis, which lessons can be gleaned from it and how making the same mistakes again can be avoided. Basel III was implemented in order to improve the regulatory environment and was the response of regulators and politicians to public pressure and suspicions raised by the bail out programmes for banks. Consequently, an until then inconceivable number of new regulations and regulatory bodies were introduced. FVA was also blamed as part of the cause of the recent financial crisis. Available-for Sales (AfS) securities represent a major component of bank balance sheet asset. Gains and losses of AfS-positions are recorded within the Other Comprehensive Income (OCI). The OCI includes items which are not recognized (IAS 1.7) in income statements but increase or decrease a bank's equity. The items also include income and expenses from Available-for-Sale positions (AfS) in accordance with IAS 39. On October 13th, 2008, an amendment to IAS 39 was published by IASB. This amendment did authorize the reclassification of assets. This amendment clearly demonstrates the influence of FVA on the value of assets of banks that apply IFRS. The main objective of this book is to verify the influence of OCI and whether the new regulations sufficiently capture this critical factor. Regulators should ensure that unrealized profits do not result in a capital drain. One way to assure this is to make OCI subject to a prudential filter and to deduct it from regulatory capital, which was the case until CRR became effective on January 1st, 2014 (CEBS guideline 2004). Basel III is even less strict than Basel II in that regard. Article 26(1) CRR clearly states that CET1 items must be recognized only in case they are really available to the financial institution for "e;unrestricted and immediate use to cover risks or losses as soon as these occur"e;. Nevertheless, with the introduction of the CRR, the prudential filter for positions that caused the financial crisis and led to poor capitalization of banks was not strengthened but actually removed. At present, CRR does not envisage any filter for unrealized gains parked in OCI.

With the opening of the Indian economy, many multinational corporations are shifting their manufacturing base to India. This includes setting up green field projects or acquiring established business firms of India. The region of this business unit is expanding globally. The variety and size of the customer base is expanding and the business risk related to bad debts is increasing. Close monitoring and analysis of payment trends helps to predict customer behavior and predict the chances of customer financial strength. The present manufacturing companies generate and store tremendous amount of data. The amount of data is so huge that manual analysis of the data is difficult. This creates a great demand for data mining to extract useful information buried within these data sets. One of the major concerns that affect companies' investments and profitability is bad debts; this can be reduced by identifying past customer behavior and reaching the suitable payment terms. The Clustering and Prediction module was implemented in WEKA - a free open source software written in Java. This study model can be extended to the development of a general purpose software package to predict payment trends of customers in any organisation.

The topic of immigration is never simple. Questions such as 'who belongs to society?' and 'how do you define national identity?', or 'what values are needed to maintain a coexisting society?' are extremely difficult to answer. Global migration introduces unprecedented challenges for conceptualising the integration of immigrants. On a European scale, Germany can be said to represent the first destination for immigrants since its unification in 1989. On a global level, Germany is the second largest immigrant receiving country after the United States. Nevertheless, only recently has Germany recognised and admitted that it is an ethnically and culturally diverse society. Before the 1998 elections, successive governments have always stuck to the maxim that Germany is 'not a country of immigration'. The infamous phrase came under increased pressure with the electoral victory of the Red-Green coalition in 1998. New laws regarding immigration, integration and citizenship were on the agenda with the aim of replacing the traditional ethnocultural model of German nationhood with a more liberal and modern model by moving away from the concepts of Volk and ius sanguinis. The conservative CDU, however, accused the Schroder government of trying to jeopardize German cultural identity, causing a fierce debate known as the Leitkultur (Guiding culture) debate. On the one side of this debate there were the conservative CDU politicians who viewed Germany in ethno-nationalist terms, while on the other members of the Green Party and the SPD, who attempted substituting the 'volkish' tradition with a multicultural model of citizenship that guaranteed universal human rights. The aim of this study is to assess which of these two models are currently prevailing in moulding immigration and integration policy. Has the progressive left achieved its objective of moving away from the traditional ethnocultural and assimilationalist model defining citizenship towards a more inclusive multicultural model?

Dengue is a tropical, mosquito borne flavivirus infection and a leading public health problem in India. Four serotypes DEN1-4 cause high morbidity and mortality. Dengue is a spherical, lipid enveloped, positive stranded RNA virus having a 10200 Kb RNA genome coding for three structural (capsid C, premembrane PrM, and envelope E) and seven nonstructural proteins. Early, sensitive and specific diagnosis is paramount for patient management, prevention of complications, etiologic investigation and disease control. Early diagnosis is achieved by NS1 antigen detection, nucleic acid amplification and virus isolation. Diagnosis after five days is conferred by IgM/IgG based serological techniques such as ELISA, hemagglutination inhibition, complement fixation and neutralization test. The aim of this study is to compare serological and nucleic acid based methods for early diagnosis of dengue and differentiation of serotypes. For this, Dengue was diagnosed using NS1 antigen, IgM/IgG LF-ICT, IgM capture ELISA, RT-PCR and tests were compared. M-PCR was done to identify serotypes.

Epilepsy is a common and diverse set of chronic neurological disorders characterized by seizures. It is a paroxysmal behavioral spell generally caused by an excessive disorderly discharge of cortical nerve cells of the brain. Epilepsy is marked by the term "e;epileptic seizures"e;. Epileptic seizures result from abnormal, excessive or hyper-synchronous neuronal activity in the brain. About 50 million people worldwide have epilepsy, and nearly 80% of epilepsy occurs in developing countries. The most common way to interfere with epilepsy is to analyse the EEG (electroencephalogram) signal which is a non-invasive, multi channel recording of the brain's electrical activity. It is also essential to classify the risk levels of epilepsy so that the diagnosis can be made easier. This study investigates the possibility of Extreme Learning Machine (ELM) and Continuous GA as a post classifier for detecting and classifying epilepsy of various risk levels from the EEG signals. Singular Value Decomposition (SVD), Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and Independent Component Analysis (ICA) are used for dimensionality reduction.

In this book, models for the prediction of lattice parameters of substitutional and interstitial solid solutions as a function of concentration and temperature are presented. For substitutional solid solutions, the method is based on the hypothesis that the measured lattice parameter versus concentration is the average of the interatomic spacing within a selected region of a Bravais lattice. The model is applied on Ni-Cu and Ge-Si solid solutions. For the interstitial solid solution of the Fe-C system, the method is based on the assumption that the change in lattice parameter of the pure Fe phase is due to the occupation by carbon atoms to the octahedral holes in the fcc austenite; and bct martensite. The model of lattice parameter versus temperature for both substitutional and interstitial solid solutions is based on the relative change in length and vacancy concentration at lattice sites that are in thermal equilibrium. Combinations of both models then facilitate the calculation of lattice parameters as a function of concentration and temperature. The results are discussed accordingly.

In various instances, countries, regional organizations, and the United Nations have resorted to the use of sanctions as a foreign policy and as a tool for geopolitics, in order to influence the behavior of targeted states. Numerous researches and analyses have been conducted to observe and understand the effectiveness and impact of sanctions, and subsequently dismissed them as either effective, ineffective, or counterproductive to their intended objectives. This study seeks to address the aforementioned question; in particular, whether sanctions remain to be an option as a geopolitical tool to influence the behavior of targeted states. The core of this work consists of three case studies: first, sanctions on the Russian Federation (2014-present); sanctions on Iran (1979 -present, 2006, 2012 -2016); and the US trade embargo on Cuba (1960 -present). These case studies have been analyzed from the structural point of view to understand their specifics, background, and plausible retaliation by the respective state. Then, the technical results achieved by the sanctions are reviewed, and their weaknesses are highlighted. Lastly, numerous relevant arguments are provided to reinforce the conclusion.

Coffee is one of the most important cash generative crops in the mid hill regions of Nepal. This study examines the production economics along with marketing performance of coffee in Pakuwa VDC of Parbat district, Nepal. The Survey was done in June 2014. Data collection was conducted through semi-structured pre-tested questionnaire administered on 40 farmer respondents selected randomly. Gross margin analysis, profitability index and the benefit-cost ratio (B-C ratio) were used to analyze the production economics of coffee in the study area.

Since the emergence of civilization, man has been marching in search of knowledge and wisdom. Various research studies have been proposed through education so that humanity, brotherhood and harmony are wedded together. Education is central for making life meaningful and purposeful. Education in India is provided by the public sector as well as the private sector, with control and funding coming from three levels: central, state, and local. Takshasila was the earliest recorded centre of higher learning in India from at least 5th century B.C. and it is debatable whether it could be regarded a university or not. The Nalanda University was the oldest university system of education in the world. Western education became ingrained into Indian society with the establishment of the British Raj. Since gaining independence, India has made considerable progress in education with reference to overall literacy, infrastructure and universal access and enrolment in schools. This book covers a wide range of important topics on the development of education and ist progress at National level. The author is extremely grateful to the number of authors and scholars whose material has been consulted and referred to in this book. The author would heartily welcome and acknowledge quires, suggestions and comments, both from the teachers and the students for further improvement in the next edition.