Although hotels and other tourist institutions in Thailand have been making some sporadic attempts to incorporate specifically Thai food and beverage (F&B) elements into their overall product offering, this has rarely been attempted in a thoughtful and systematic manner. This is despite the importance of F&B in determining overall levels of customer satisfaction and the recent importance attached to incorporating ‘Thainess’ into the hotel and tourism industry nationwide. It is, therefore, rather surprising that little if any sustained effort has been made to define authenticity with respect to Thai food (bearing in mind also regional variations) or to incorporate certificates of quality to establishments providing such authentic dishes. This paper draws on qualitative research and personal observation undertaken in a wide range of Thai hotels with a view to identifying emergent value-adding clusters in the domestic hospitality sector. It describes and categorizes the uses of Thai F&B currently and identifies shortcomings in industry vision, which leads to recommendations for both hotel and resort managers and also to those responsible for national level tourism development efforts. The paper also recognizes the problematic nature of the concepts of ‘authenticity’ in this context and attempts to reconcile differing conceptions.

To describe the lifestyle, health, and environmental factors affecting young adult's weight management.

Euclid is a space-based survey mission from the European Space Agency designed to understand the origin of the Universe's accelerating expansion. It will use cosmological probes to investigate the nature of dark energy, dark matter and gravity by tracking their observational signatures on the geometry of the universe and on the cosmic history of structure formation. The mission is optimised for two independent primary cosmological probes: Weak gravitational Lensing (WL) and Baryonic Acoustic Oscillations (BAO). The Euclid payload consists of a 1.2 m Korsch telescope designed to provide a large field of view. It carries two instruments with a common field-of-view of ~0.54 deg2: the visual imager (VIS) and the near infrared instrument (NISP) which contains a slitless spectrometer and a three bands photometer. The Euclid wide survey will cover 15,000 deg2 of the extragalactic sky and is complemented by two 20 deg2 deep fields. For WL, Euclid measures the shapes of 30-40 resolved galaxies per arcmin2 in one broad visible R+I+Z band (550-920 nm). The photometric redshifts for these galaxies reach a precision of dz/(1+z) < 0.05. They are derived from three additional Euclid NIR bands (Y, J, H in the range 0.92-2.0 micron), complemented by ground based photometry in visible bands derived from public data or through engaged collaborations. The BAO are determined from a spectroscopic survey with a redshift accuracy dz/(1+z) =0.001. The slitless spectrometer, with spectral resolution ~250, predominantly detects Ha emission line galaxies. Euclid is a Medium Class mission of the ESA Cosmic Vision 2015-2025 programme, with a foreseen launch date in 2019. This report (also known as the Euclid Red Book) describes the outcome of the Phase A study.

Arctic climate is the result of a complex interplay between the atmosphere, the ocean, sea ice and a terrestrial component in which freezing and thawing are critical to variations over a range of timescales. In view of the delicate balances between these components and their poorly documented sensitivities, it is not surprising that global climate models show the largest disagreement among themselves, and also the strongest greenhouse-induced changes, in the polar regions. Since changes in the Arctic may well have global implications, it is essential that Arctic climate simulations be enhanced in order to reduce the uncertainties in projections of climate change. Given the challenges and opportunities in Arctic modeling, the International Arctic Research Center’s (IARC) 2008 summer school at the University of Alaska Fairbanks (UAF), was designed to bring the next generation of climate modelers to the Arctic.

The predictability of Alaskan sea ice extent over time scales of several months is evaluated quantitatively. The predictors include year-month means of the surface pressure and temperature fields as well as prior anomalies of sea ice extent. The problem of artificial predictability is described in order to motivate the representation of the predictors in terms of empirical orthogonal functions. Included in the results are statistics of the dominant orthogonal functions and preliminary estimates of the decay of the forecast skill with the length of the forecast interval. The skill at a lag of one month is highest for persistence. The skill scores obtained from the pressure and temperature fields are small but statistically significant at lags of 1-2 months. Little significant skill is found at longer lags.

We contrast recent climatic and environmental changes and their causes in the Arctic and the Antarctic. There are continuing increases in surface temperatures, losses of sea ice and tundra, and warming of permafrost over broad areas of the Arctic, while most of the major increase in Antarctic temperatures is on the Antarctic Peninsula associated with sea ice loss in the Bellingshausen–Amundsen Seas sector. While both natural atmospheric and oceanic variability, and changes in external forcing including increased greenhouse gas concentrations, must be considered in the quest for understanding such changes, the interactions and feedbacks between system components are particularly strong at high latitudes. For the 1950s to date in the Arctic and for 1957 to date in the Antarctic, positive trends in large‐scale atmospheric circulation represented by the Arctic oscillation (AO) and Antarctic oscillations (AAO) and the Pacific North American (PNA) pattern contribute to the long‐term temperature trends. However, continuing Arctic trends during the last decade of near neutral AO will require alternate explanations. The trend in the AAO since 1950 is larger than expected from natural variability and may be associated with the decrease in stratospheric ozone over Antarctic. The persistence shown in many Arctic and Antarctic Peninsula components of climate and their influence through possible feedback supports continuation of current trends over the next decade. One can expect large spatial and temporal differences, however, from the relative contributions of intrinsic variability, external forcing, and internal feedback/amplifications. It is particularly important to resolve regional feedback processes in future projections based on modeling scenarios. Copyright © 2006 Royal Meteorological Society.