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Travel & tourism: A new itinerary
Both as destinations and as new sources of tourists, emerging economies are transforming the travel industry.
The rise of emerging economies marks the third revolution the travel industry has undergone in the past 50 years. The first came in the 1960s, in the shape of cheap air travel and package tours. Rising incomes enabled people of modest means to travel more, to farther-flung parts of the globe, and to take advantage of “all-in” offers that may have included sightseeing trips, scuba diving or camel rides. The second was the advent of the internet, which has allowed millions to book flights, hotels, hire cars and package tours without going near a high-street travel agent.
Now fast-growing emerging economies—not just Dubai but also the BRICs (Brazil, Russia, India and China) and others, such as South Korea and Vietnam—are changing the world of travel once again, either as destinations or as sources of newly affluent travellers. Often, citizens of these countries are visiting similar, emerging lands.
The WTTC claims that travel and tourism is the world's biggest industry in terms of its contribution to global GDP and employment.
Source:
http://www.economist.com/displayStory.cfm?source=hptextfeature&story_id=11374574
Cultural Advantage for Cities (book)
After more than a decade Michael Porter’s book
Competitive Advantage of Nations stays ahead of the other books, in particular as alternative framework from the
comparative advantage idea inspired by Adam Smith.
This small book is merely a small proposition, a postscript perhaps, to Porter’s book, with basic idea that one cannot rely merely on industrial processes alone to keep stay ahead of market changes. Hence, for cities in developing countries the municipal shall find out their city’s potential resources, and develop their city starting from there, instead of striving blindly in the conventional industrial path.
What we would like to emphasize here is the word ‘alternative’ in this book title. What we mean is that the proposed strategy is not always true for all conditions. for instance, in Hawaii, where industrialization and resources are very few the best strategy is perhaps to foster its 'cultural approach'. Meanwhile for other cities where there is no extensive cultural potential, then industrialization approach seems still working.
After all we do not pretend to have the last word on proper remedies to problems encountered by each developing country. It would need substantial study based on each particular country’s problems, contexts and resources.
To read more, you can download the complete ebook in www.sciprint.org --> user --> culturaladvantage. This is zipped file with password, to get the password, send $28 via paypal.com to email: vxianto@gmail.com. Then forward the paypal notification to the same email address.
admin@podtime.net
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Note: the photo shown above is Adam Smith. Source:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Featured_picture_candidates/June-2008
Label: cultural advantage
Zimbu: Does evolution gives advantage to monkey?
Hi,
If you use PC quite extensively, you may think as I do that perhaps it shall be better if we have special-wing to click the 'mouse' without leaving our two hands from the keypad. Sometimes I also wonder whether it is possible to configure these tools in a more efficient way.
And then yesterday I find that Dilbert also had had similar conversation with Zimbu (see Dilbert comic strip). [1] Zimbu is a monkey that company hired for specific tasks on PC, and it uses its tail to click the mouse so it can do it faster than human does. [2][3]
One day, Dilbert had had enough with Zimbu and warned that it cannot use tail to click 'mouse'. But Zimbu replied, that Dilbert only doesn't realize the irony side of the situation, that human has created PC with user-intuitive interfaces that enable monkeys to do their tails for their own advantages. In other words, according to Zimbu, time has come that evolution beats human back with their own technologies. Zimbu concludes that 'I can hear the evolution clocks tick tick tick...'
Frankly speaking, I think that Zimbu has something deep to say (behind this ironic humor), that perhaps human has created cultures, technologies etc which unfortunately are going to beat human back. For instance, we keep on produce pollution, and nature send us back acid rain etc.
Then perhaps it seems time has come to think whether we shall do re-thinking of this culture which has become so destructive for human being themselves. I just remember Fritjof Capra's book The Turning Point, which essentially reminds us of this hard-science, hard technology [4]. Now it seems time has come to switch our culture towards soft-science and more human approach to Nature.
VC
admin@podtime,netFurther reading:
[1] "Zimbu. A monkey who humiliates Dilbert and Wally by constantly outperforming them. He uses his tail to operate the computer mouse" http:// en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_minor_characters_in_Dilbert
[2]
http://www.a-a-p.org/presentations.html[3]
http://www.zimbu.org/[4]
www.mountainman.com.au/capra_0.html[5]
http://www.wplus.net/pp/Julia/Capra/Cpt1.htm
