Search Results (25)

The Lidia cattle breed is featured in several traditional popular bullfighting festivals throughout Spain, including the “Toro de Cuerda” event, in which the animals are subjected to intense physical exercise. However, the physiological impact and welfare implications of these activities remain poorly characterized. This study aimed to evaluate the stress response and muscle damage in Lidia breed bulls during roping bull celebrations through comprehensive blood analysis. Blood samples were collected from 53 adult male Lidia bulls before and after a standardized 45 min continuous running exercise during traditional roping bull events in four Spanish autonomous regions. Hematological parameters, muscle enzymes (creatine kinase, lactate dehydrogenase, lactate), and stress hormones (cortisol and ACTH) were analyzed. Significant increases (p < 0.05) were observed in leukocytes, lymphocytes, monocytes, eosinophils, neutrophils, erythrocytes, hematocrit, hemoglobin, and post-exercise platelets. Muscle enzymes showed marked elevations, with creatine kinase increasing up to 10-fold above baseline values. Stress hormones, cortisol and ACTH, also demonstrated significant increases. Despite the magnitude of these changes, all parameters remained within established reference ranges for the bovine species. This study provides the first physiological assessment of Lidia cattle during popular bullfighting celebrations, establishing baseline data for evidence-based welfare evaluation and management protocols. Full article

Long-term source apportionment of PM_2.5 during high-pollution periods is essential for achieving sustained reductions in both PM_2.5 levels and their health impacts. This study conducted PM_2.5 sampling in Shenzhen from January to March over the years 2021–2024 to investigate the long-term impact of coronavirus disease 2019 and the short-term impact of the Spring Festival on PM_2.5 levels. The measured average PM_2.5 concentration during the research period was 22.5 μg/m³, with organic matter (OM) being the dominant component. Vehicle emissions, secondary sulfate, secondary nitrate, and secondary organic aerosol were identified by receptor model as the primary sources of PM_2.5 during the observational periods. The pandemic led to a decrease of between 30% and 50% in the contributions of most anthropogenic sources in 2022 compared to 2021, followed by a rebound. PM_2.5 levels in January–March 2024 dropped by 1.4 μg/m³ compared to 2021, mainly due to reduced vehicle emissions, secondary sulfate, fugitive dust, biomass burning, and industrial emissions, reflecting Shenzhen’s and nearby cities’ effective control measures. However, secondary nitrate and fireworks-related emissions rose significantly. During the Spring Festival, PM_2.5 concentrations were 23% lower than before the festival, but the contributions of fireworks burning exhibited a marked increase in both 2023 and 2024. Specifically, during intense peak events, fireworks burning triggered sharp, short-term spikes in characteristic metal concentrations, accounting for over 50% of PM_2.5 on those peak days. In the future, strict control over vehicle emissions and enhanced management of fireworks burning during special periods like the Spring Festival are necessary to reduce PM_2.5 concentration and improve air quality. Full article

This study delves into the once-in-a-century extreme precipitation events in the northern region of the Pearl River Basin during the 2022 Dragon Boat Festival period. Through a comprehensive analysis spanning various temporal scales, from synoptic-scale systems to subseasonal oscillations, including the rare triple-peaked La Niña phenomenon, we illuminate the intricate interactions among these factors and their impact on extreme precipitation events. Specifically, we present a conceptual model of multiscale interaction systems contributing to extreme precipitation in the BeiJiang Basin. Our findings reveal that, during the 2022 Dragon Boat Festival period, precipitation in the BeiJiang Basin exhibited characteristics across multiple time scales, with the synoptic-scale environment proving highly conducive. Systems such as the South Asian High, Western Pacific Subtropical High, and South China Sea summer monsoon were identified as the direct influencing factors of precipitation. Importantly, our study highlight the pivotal role of subseasonal oscillation propagation stagnation in extreme precipitation in the BeiJiang Basin, with synoptic-scale systems playing a contributing role. We emphasize the indirect influence of ENSO signals, regulating not only monsoons but also the propagation of subseasonal oscillations. The interplay of these factors across different temporal scales significantly impacts flood hazards. Overall, our study significantly enhances the understanding of mechanisms driving extreme precipitation events in the Pearl River Basin, with profound implications for water resource management and disaster prevention. Full article

With increasing incidents due to congestion at events, effective pedestrian guidance has become a critical safety concern. Recent research has explored the application of reinforcement learning to crowd simulation, where agents learn optimal actions through trial and error to maximize rewards based on environmental states. This study investigates the use of reinforcement learning and simulation techniques to mitigate pedestrian congestion through improved guidance systems. We employ the Multi-Agent Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient (MA-DDPG), a multi-agent reinforcement learning approach, and propose an enhanced method for learning the Q-function for actors within the MA-DDPG framework. Using the Mojiko Fireworks Festival dataset as a case study, we evaluated the effectiveness of our proposed method by comparing congestion levels with existing approaches. The results demonstrate that our method successfully reduces congestion, with agents exhibiting superior cooperation in managing crowd flow. This improvement in agent coordination suggests the potential for practical applications in real-world crowd management scenarios. Full article

The Bio-Circular-Green (BCG) model presents a transformative framework for advancing sustainability in food festival tourism, particularly in Thailand. Food festivals serve as dynamic platforms for celebrating local culinary heritage while fostering environmental responsibility and economic resilience. This study examined the integration of the BCG model with critical success factors and community identity to assess its impact on sustainable food festival management. Employing a quantitative research approach and structural equation modeling, data were collected from 503 festival attendees to analyze key relationships among event management, community identity, and sustainability practices. The findings underscore the effectiveness of the BCG model in enhancing resource efficiency, minimizing waste, and promoting local sourcing, thus strengthening the sustainability and attractiveness of food festivals. Notably, while the role of community identity was found to be less significant than anticipated, this suggests evolving tourist preferences favoring sustainability and quality over traditional cultural attributes. These insights offer valuable implications for policymakers, event organizers, and stakeholders in designing eco-conscious, culturally enriching festivals that align with the global sustainability goals. This study contributes to the theoretical discourse on sustainable tourism and provides practical strategies to foster environmentally responsible and economically viable food festivals. Full article

Artificial intelligence (AI) stands out as a transformative force in various sectors, offering both new opportunities and challenges. In tourism and music events, AI has proven to be a powerful tool for improving the attendee experience, personalizing artist recommendations, optimizing event logistics in real time, and enhancing audience interaction through virtual assistants and immersive visual effects, thus highlighting its transformative potential. This study aims to analyze the impact of applying AI to the experience of consumers at music festivals. In particular, the research examines the impact of AI on the quality of information delivered, the extent of consumer engagement with brands at the event, and the level of trust in the technology. A quantitative methodology was used, collecting 400 responses from Portuguese consumers who attended music festivals. The results show that the quality of information and the AI positively influence customer engagement with the brand. Greater customer engagement, in turn, increases the willingness to use AI solutions. Trust in AI is significantly shaped by the quality of the information and the reliability of the system, which further promotes electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM) and the willingness to adopt AI. In addition, eWOM plays a key role in encouraging the use of AI technologies. Finally, memorable tourist experiences positively influence the willingness to adopt AI, underlining the importance of experiential factors in promoting adoption. These results highlight the interconnected roles of information quality, trust, involvement, and user experiences in shaping attitudes toward artificial intelligence applications. This study expands the literature by analyzing how AI-driven information quality influences consumer trust and engagement, thus emphasizing the need to optimize these factors for better festival strategies. It highlights the link between trust and positive eWOM, showing that trust based on high-quality information enhances the festival’s reputation and attracts participants. A key contribution is its exploration of how trust and eWOM influence AI adoption at future festivals, which offers insights to boost credibility and acceptance. Lastly, it provides strategic guidelines that improve attendee experience and festival management. Full article

The Festival of the Patios of Cordoba, declared an Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH) by UNESCO in 2012, serves as an emblematic case of how this designation acts as a tourist brand, attracting a greater number of visitors and granting a competitive advantage to the city’s tourist market. This research is focused on analyzing the differences and similarities in the satisfaction, lived experience and behavioral intention of tourists according to their sociodemographic profile during the 2022 edition of the Patios Festival. The study’s main objective is to understand the sociodemographic profile of the tourist who visits this event and if there are features of this profile that influence the satisfaction and lived experience with the event. Using a quantitative methodological approach, field work was carried out during the Fiesta de los Patios of Cordoba (Spain) in its 2022 edition, which took place between 3 and 15 May 2022, obtaining 383 valid surveys. The results reveal differences in the perception and satisfaction of the experience depending on the sociodemographic profile of the visitors. These findings highlight the need to adapt the tourism offerings to improve the visitor experience and also contribute to the scarcity of studies on ICH to help tourism managers formulate strategies that maximize the cultural and economic benefits of these Word Heritage inscriptions. Full article

Organized as part of the annual Art Days festival in the capital of the Latvian SSR, the First Exhibition of Approximate Art comprised a cacophonous and provocative mashup of music, dance, performance art, and design. At the center of the event was a demonstration of mixing and scratching records by Maximilian Lenz, also known as Westbam, one of the leading DJs in West Berlin. Mining archival sources in Berlin and Riga, this article reconstructs the complicated path by which the DJ came to perform at the event. It reveals a surprising network of relations and alliances operating in tandem behind the scenes, featuring a Riga artist dedicated to enacting a vision of postmodern performance in his city, an ambitiously networking émigré Latvian living in exile in West Germany, and a pair of Soviet offices under direct control of the KGB, charged with managing cultural exchanges with the West in hopes of currying sympathies for Soviet culture and policy. Complementing and extending research on the “gaps” and “holes” in the Soviet system that sometimes allowed for the staging of otherwise unacceptable works of art, the story of the First Exhibition of Approximate Art reveals how personal connections and interpersonal networks within even the most highly monitored parts of the system itself—the state security apparatus—could open doors for artistic projects unanticipated and even undesired by the bureaucratic state. Full article

The COVID-19 pandemic has had a significant impact on numerous industries, including the event industry, resulting in widespread disruptions. The widespread cancellations of festivals have been a direct consequence of the pandemic, and, following the reopening, those that have taken place have had to implement changes in response to the new guidelines and regulations created as a result of the pandemic. In this study, we examine the experiences of festivals held in 2021 in the Veszprém–Balaton 2023 European Capital of Culture region (VEB 2023 region). The study aims to adapt the PwC Risk Management Model and identify its four pillars (1: detect; 2: protect; 3: react; 4: restore) in the case of festivals. Our study outlines how festival organizers have faced unprecedented challenges and risks (detect), how they survived in complete uncertainty (protect), what lessons they learned, and what risk management decisions they made as a challenge of the pandemic period from a consumer perspective (react). The present study utilized a qualitative research methodology and involved conducting structured interviews with a total of 19 event organizers from five different events. In addition, to gain a comprehensive understanding of the sustainable consumption habits of festival visitors, a questionnaire survey was administered yielding 1133 responses. The biggest challenges for the organizers during the times of the pandemic were uncertainty and unpredictability, with increased financial, human, and mental risks and burdens. However, the positive benefits of the pandemic period and the future developmental directions of sustainable festivals were also highlighted (e.g., small-scale, family-friendly events). Regarding the future, the aspects of greening aspirations, a need to reflect on the social-environmental criteria of sustainability, and more flexible management decisions to deal with uncertainty have emerged among the festival organizers (restore). The research has revealed that festival visitors themselves will be important allies in the introduction of sustainable measures. The research result helps festival organizers to adapt more effectively to the new socio-economic circumstances caused by the pandemic. Full article

EDM event attendees are a high-risk population for substance use and associated adverse effects. The aim of this study was to examine substance use at EDM events, focusing on associations between attendance motives and substance use. Sociodemographic characteristics, event specifics, past-year use, and attendance motives were assessed through an online survey. Participants were 1345 Belgian EDM event attendees (69.44% male, M_age = 22.63, SD_age = 4.03). Ecstasy/MDMA/Molly (52.28%), other synthetic hallucinogens (53.68%), ketamine (42.13%), amphetamines (40.45%), and alkyl nitrites (poppers) (32.76%) were most frequently used at festivals/outdoor parties/raves. In nightclubs, cocaine (32.29%) was shown to be prevalent as well, while other synthetic hallucinogens (15.79%) were less often consumed. At events with a more private character, cannabis (68.88%) and magic mushrooms (66.44%) were most frequently used. Aside from alcohol (47.76%), substance use in pubs/bars was negligible. Overall enjoyment was demonstrated to be the key attendance motive, which was succeeded by those relating to music and socialization. A wide range of motives proved to be more important to users (e.g., dance, exploration, escapism, excitement, alcohol, drugs) than non-users, while some were associated with the use of particular substances. The prevalence of substance use was shown to be dependent on the specifics of the setting. Moreover, the idea of a three-dimensional classification of the most principal motives for music event attendance was supported. Finally, correlations were estimated between attendance motives and substance use as well as specific substances. Results could enable more tailored approaches in prevention and harm reduction efforts as well as event management strategies. Full article

Cultural heritage inventories have been created to collect and preserve the culture and to allow the participation of stakeholders and communities, promoting and disseminating their knowledges. There are two types of inventories: those who give data access via web services or open data, and others which are closed to external access and can be visited only through dedicated web sites, generating data silo problems. The integration of data harvested from different archives enables to compare the cultures and traditions of places from opposite sides of the world, showing how people have more in common than expected. The purpose of the developed portal is to provide query tools managing the web services provided by cultural heritage databases in a transparent way, allowing the user to make a single query and obtain results from all inventories considered at the same time. Moreover, with the introduction of the ICH-Light model, specifically studied for the mapping of intangible heritage, data from inventories of this domain can also be harvested, indexed and integrated into the portal, allowing the creation of an environment dedicated to intangible data where traditions, knowledges, rituals and festive events can be found and searched all together. Full article

Workforce planning is essential in today’s business management. If an organization can find and keep enough staff who have the right values, then they can provide high-quality service. This paper presents a workforce planning framework for selecting the best forecasting model in order to provide minimum wage and computer electricity costs for a mobile call center during the Songkran festival event, and to optimize workforce planning. The framework is constructed with four main steps: a study of a separate period; the separation of models with different data types; the simulation of models under different service levels to determine the number of customers waiting in a call center; and the evaluation of the models. The results from the proposed framework presented the best forecasting method and the optimal workforce plan. It is clear that this approach can assist in systematically selecting the best forecasting model. In addition, a workforce planner can use this framework to support workforce planning and cost evaluation in other event periods. Full article

Intangible cultural heritage (ICH) can be a valuable tourism resource for both government and local communities. However, the complex definition and the massive and fragmented nature of ICH data make it hard to review and conclude research trends and future directions of ICH tourism. In this study, 85 keywords extracted from ICH definitions are input in the Web of Science database before collecting papers indexed in the Social Sciences Citation Index, the Arts and Humanities Citation Index, and the Conference Proceedings Citation Index-Social Science and Humanities. Later, a systematic literature review of 418 ICH tourism studies from 76 countries published between 2000 and 2021 were conducted based on three groups of questions. The findings mainly illustrated that: (1) Currently research in ICH tourism is mainly composed of three themes: resource planning and sustainability, the impact of tourism development, and tourist behavior and destination marketing; (2) topics related to food tourism, sacred knowledge, traditional management systems, traditional management systems, legends, and myths can achieve high impact; (3) in the last five years, scholars have reduced using the official full name of ICH in tourism studies, while the category of “social practices, rituals and festive events” has become a hot topic since 2010; (4) ecotourism, culinary tourism, festival tourism, and religious tourism are the most discussed in ICH tourism research, and they will still be intensive topics in near future; (5) future directions in ICH tourism research are resultant of three vectors: place making, technology, and environment. The results present a comprehensive picture of current popular ICH topics and predict future directions in the field of ICH tourism. The systematic review of literature can help contribute to both theoretical construction, heritage preservation, and tourism practices. Full article

Heritage conservation and cultural tourism are central features of academic debates, as this relationship has not been always peaceful. This paper seeks to evaluate the correlation between the extensive conservation and restoration of the wall and castle of the medieval town of Óbidos (1930–1950) and the tourism-oriented projects developed since this period. Due to the criticism of several previous studies, one of the primary aims of this research was to assess whether this Portuguese town constitutes a good example of medieval reconstitution, or if it is a fanciful twentieth-century intervention. Another main goal was to establish our position regarding the challenges inherent to the management of this historic centre, especially those concerning current tourism challenges and the preservation of and regard for historical buildings and monuments. By means of a long-term study based on the common history of art methodology (cross-analysis of bibliography, archival research, in situ observation of the heritage and attendance of festivals and events), we were able to make the following contributions to advance the debate: although the earlier interventions in Óbidos abided by strict criteria which merited international praise, the management model of the town as a tourist destination over the last two decades calls for a revaluation, placing greater importance on history, historic and artistic heritage and the identity of the location. Full article

An emerging paradigm for festival and event management reveals that hosting theme-based festivals can foster economic growth at the local and national levels. As a case of this research, the annual Macau Food Festival was selected to explore relationships among visitors’ perceptions of festival quality, festival value, trust in the festival, visitors’ satisfaction, and behavior intention. Out of 453 questionnaires distributed, 433 questionnaires were valid for data analysis using partial least squares-structural equation modeling. The results showed that festival quality consisting of the sub-dimensions of hospitality, venue, product, convenience, and program have a positive impact on festival value, trust in festival, and festival satisfaction, which in turn affect festival loyalty. Based on these empirical findings, the current study offers practical and theoretical implications for destination management organizations and festival hosts to sustain annual theme-based festivals held at a certain destination such as Macau Food Festival. Full article