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Dynamic Pricing And Minimum Length Of Stay Controls As A Hotel Management Practice: Are There Customer Perception, Ethical, And Legal Questions?, Robert H. Wilson, Linda K. Enghagen, Minwoo Lee

Journal of Hospitality Financial Management

Length of stay controls and dynamic pricing are components of revenue management tools widely used in the lodging industry. Length of stay controls require guests to stay for a minimum number of nights, even if they might wish to stay for only one night. Dynamic pricing characterized by high room rates and length of stay controls are common when hotel demand is strong for a specific event, such as a college graduation, natural disasters and emergencies, New Year’s Eve festivities, July 4 fireworks and concerts, or a major sporting event. While implemented to boost revenue, the combination of dynamic pricing …

Business Cycle And Long-Term Debt: Effects On Hotel Operating Lease, Myong Jae Lee, Chang Huh, Ju Yeong Lee

Journal of Hospitality Financial Management

Over the last 25 years, many hotel operators have chosen to lease their property instead of owning as a financing strategy. This paper examines the combined and separate contributions of business cycles and a firm’s level of long-term debt on hotel owner/operator use of operating leases. The results indicate that operating leases were used more often during contracting business cycles and less often during cycles of expansion. According to the results, operating leases and long-term debt are not complementary, although they are increasingly treated as complements when the economy suffers a downturn.

2015 – A Year In Review For Hotel Firms, Atul Sheel

Journal of Hospitality Financial Management

No abstract provided.

Who Are The Bulls And Bears In Global Lodging Markets?, Albert A. Barreda, Murat Kizidag

Journal of Hospitality Financial Management

This article looks at the values of market-based equities (common stocks) based on the relative investment valuation, analyzed with several earnings multiples in global lodging markets in 2014. To be specific, we compare the value of various common stock portfolios sorted for four geographical regions with those relative value investment metrics so that we can make a solid judgment about bullish and bearish markets demonstrating investors’ confidence or stagnancy, anomalies in prices indicating under and overvalued stocks, and outperforming lodging portfolios in global markets. Common stock prices in portfolios are standardized, utilizing earnings parameters such as Current Price/Earnings Ratio (PE) …

Expense Preference Behavior By Managers In Casino Resorts, Toni Repetti, Michael C. Dalbor, Ashok K. Singh, Bo J. Bernhard

Journal of Hospitality Financial Management

The main goal of management in the United States is to maximize the wealth of shareholders. Managers, though, sometimes make decisions that benefit them more than the shareholders. When this occurs they are considered to be exhibiting expense preference behavior. This study evaluates expense preference behavior by managers of Nevada casinos. Using ordinary least squares regression, significant positive results show that for each 1% increase in revenue, employees increase 0.88%, salaries and wages increase 0.98%, and total payroll increases 1.01%. Also during the biggest economic downturn to hit Nevada casinos, management significantly decreased employees 14.7%, salaries and wages 4.9%, and …

What Keeps Hotel Asset Managers Up At Night: Key Industry Issues And Proposed Solutions, A. J. Singh, Raymond S. Schmidgall, Yunwei Zhang

Journal of Hospitality Financial Management

The Hospitality Asset Managers Association (HAMA), which represents hotel owners globally, regularly surveys its members to identify issues of concern to owners. The association conducts an annual student competition to research these issues and present their results at the annual HAMA conference. The article identifies these issues and presents research conducted by one of the students on the issue of hotel room service and recommends alternatives to room service.

Abstracts Of Presentations At The 2014 Annual Ahfme Research Symposium

Journal of Hospitality Financial Management

No abstract provided.

Measuring Environmental Inequality, James K. Boyce, Klara Zwickl, Michael Ash

PERI Working Papers

This study presents alternative measures of environmental inequality in the 50 U.S. states for exposure to industrial air pollution. We examine three methodological issues. First, to what extent are environmental inequality measures sensitive to spatial scale and population weighting? Second, how do sensitivities to different segments of the overall distribution affect rankings by these measures? Third, how do vertical and horizontal (inter-group) inequality measures relate to each other? We find substantive differences in rankings by different measures and conclude that no single indicator is sufficient for addressing the entire range of equity concerns that are relevant to environmental policy; instead …

The Effect Of Public Health Expenditure On Infant Mortality: Evidence From A Panel Of Indian States, 1983-84 To 2011-12, Andrew J. Barenberg, Deepankar Basu, Ceren Soylu

PERI Working Papers

Using a panel data set of Indian states between 1983–84 and 2011–12, this paper studies the impact of public health expenditure on the infant mortality rate (IMR), after controlling for other relevant covariates like per capita income, female literacy, and urbanization. We find that public expenditure on health care reduces IMR. Our baseline specification shows that an increase in public health expenditure by 1 percent of state-level GDP is associated with a reduction in the IMR by about 8 infant deaths per 1000 live births. We also find that female literacy and urbanization reduces the IMR.

Validation Of Argon From Underground Sources For Use In The Darkside-50 Detector, Thomas R. Alexander

Masters Theses

Liquid argon is an attractive target for dark matter searches due to its low cost and exemplary event discrimination. However, atmospherically derived argon contains the beta-emitter 39Ar which confounds the growth of dual-phase time projection chamber (TPC) style detectors to the ton-scale. The DarkSide Collaboration seeks to bypass this limitation by extracting argon from deep underground, from a location known to contain significantly less 39Ar than atmospherically derived argon. This thesis will summarize the e orts taken to produce the first batch of underground argon, focusing on the first operation of the underground argon in a dual-phase TPC to validate …

Architecture For Housing: Multi-Function Transitional Space Of Housing In China, Zhaoqing Zhang

Masters Theses

This dissertation defines and develops transitional space of housing, which is adaptable to the Chinese environment. It is the integration of community, culture element and sustainable development. Although the lifestyle is changing today, the concept of courtyard which comes from the Chinese vernacular building remains in peoples’ minds. It’s not only a form but also an expression of national culture and a sense of space. There are some attempts for Chinese architects to renovate or reconstruct the “courtyard”, but most of them are low-rise buildings. Facing with the high density, high volume urban living environment, Chinese architects only set vii …

Modifying Instruction Sets In The Gem5 Simulator To Support Fault Tolerant Designs, Chuan Zhang

Masters Theses

Traditional fault tolerant techniques such as hardware or time redundancy incur high overhead and are inefficient for checking arithmetic operations. Our objective is to study an alternative approach of adding new instructions to check arithmetic operations. These checking instructions either rely on error detecting code or calculate approximate results and consequently, consume much less execution time. To evaluate the effectiveness of such an approach we wish to modify several benchmarks to use checking instructions and run simulation experiments to find out their execution time and memory usage. However, the checking instructions are not included in the instruction set and as …

Design And Implementation Of A Digital Information Security Service For Physical Documents, Xue Yu

Masters Theses

This thesis presents a hybrid information security approach for data on physical documents. This system, called CryptoPaper, allows portions of a physical document be printed with a machine-readable code. This code contains original data and related information security properties. To read this code and access the encoded data, a scanning device with suitable image recognition technology is used. Using a cloud-based access control system, it can be ensured that only authorized users can interpret the machine-readable code and additional security properties can be verified.

User Interface Design And Forensic Analysis For Diorama, Decision Support System For Mass Casualty Incidents, Jun Yi

Masters Theses

In this thesis we introduces the user interface design and forensic analysis tool for DIORAMA system. With an Android device, DIORAMA provides emergency personnel the ability to collect information in real time, track the resources and manage them. It allows the responders and commanders to mange multiple incidents simultaneously. This thesis also describes the implementations of commander app and responder app, as well as two different communication strategies used in DIORAMA. Several trials and simulated mass casualty incidents were conducted to test the functionalities and performance of DIORAMA system. All responders that participated in all trials were very satisfied with …

Indoor And Outdoor Real Time Information Collection In Disaster Scenario, Dongyi Yang

Masters Theses

A disaster usually severely harms human health and property. After a disaster, great amount of information of a disaster area is needed urgently. The information not only indicates the severity of the disaster, but also is crucial for an efficient search and rescue process. In order to quickly and accurately collect real time information in a disaster scenario, a mobile platform is developed for an outdoor scenario and a localization and navigation system for responders is introduced for an indoor scenario.

The mobile platform has been integrated to the DIORAMA system. It is built with a 6-wheel robot chassis along …

Multi-Segment Foot Coordination Of The Treated Clubfoot, Amy Whited

Masters Theses

Idiopathic congenital clubfoot can be treated either operatively (comprehensive surgical release (CSR)) or conservatively (ponseti technique (PCT)). This thesis compared the mid-term outcomes after CSR and PCT treatments to a typically developing sample. A Dynamical Systems Analysis (DSA) approach and a multi-segment foot model were used to examine group differences in multi-segment foot and lower extremity kinematics, kinetics, coordination and coordination variability during walking. Ten children with clubfoot treated with PCT and seven children with clubfoot treated with CSR were evaluated retrospectively and compared to ten typically developing children. Multi-segment foot and lower extremity kinematic (240 Hz) and kinetic (1080 …

Parody And Satire In Hanns Eisler's Palmström And Zeitungsausschnitte, Alyssa Wells

Masters Theses

Hanns Eisler routinely expressed his discontent with the state of music and society in the late 1920s in Die Rote Fahne—an organ of the Marxist revolutionary organization, the Spartakusbund, to which he often contributed. His 1928 essay “Man baut um,” among the most notable of these writings, declares that the high expenditures in art—such as the construction of a fourteen-million Mark opera house—to be the result of capitalist greed rather than a reflection of the desire for musical performances, as had been suggested. Although the cost of the new venue is the subject in this satirical passage, this …

Calcium And Potassium Accumulation In Lettuce Under Different Nitrogen Regimes, Sara Weil

Masters Theses

Nutrient accumulation in vegetable crops is declining. New varieties, selected for high yield, may be subject to a dilution effect of nutrient concentration. Alternatively, soil fertility may be to blame. Here, we investigate how nitrogen fertilization can enhance or suppress calcium and potassium content in two lettuce varieties already known to accumulate high or low amounts of these nutrients. Effects of varying the ammonium:nitrate ratio and effects of calcium carbonate buffering on plant growth by mass and on uptake and accumulation of potassium and calcium in two lettuce (Lactuca sativa L.) cultivars, Two Star and Red Deer Tongue, were …

Landform Architecture As Reconnecting Presence For Campus Complex Design, Yi Wang

Masters Theses

This thesis is an investigation into how land evolves into an architectural presence and representation to reconnect physical construction with social realities, human perception, and environmental considerations. As buildings lose their plasticity and their connection with the surroundings both physically and psychologically, they become isolated in the cool and distant realm of vision, lacking authenticity of material and tectonic logic in their construction. Landform architecture, which allows land to be engaged in an architectural representation, penetrates multi-dimensional architectural meaning through the manipulation of space, material, and structure. The built form of landform architecture is fundamentally developed from articulations of the …

Hardware Monitors For Secure Processing In Embedded Operating Systems, Tedy Mammen Thomas

Masters Theses

Embedded processors are being increasingly used in our daily life and have become an important part of many types of infrastructure in the world. As people start depending more on embedded systems for personal and business processing operations, the attacks on these systems have also been on a rise. Existing defense mechanisms targeted for desktop and server processors cannot be used to defend embedded systems as these system exhibit constraints on processing performance and processing power and energy. Thus, embedded systems require low overhead security approaches to ensure that they are protected from attacks.

This thesis describes a hardware based …

Impacts Of Land Cover And Climate Change On Water Resources In Suasco River Watershed, Ammara Talib

Masters Theses

Hydrological balance and biogeochemical processes in watershed are significantly influenced by changes in land use land cover (LULC) and climate change. Those changes can influence interception, evapotranspiration (ET), infiltration, soil moisture, water balance and biogeochemical cycling of carbon, nitrogen and other elements at regional to global scales. The impacts of these hydrological disturbances are generally reflected in form of increasing runoff rate and volume, more intense and frequent floods, decreasing groundwater recharge and base flow, elevated levels of sediments and increase in concentration of nutrients in both streams and shallow groundwater. Water quality of Sudbury, Assabet and Concord (SuAsCo) watershed …

Cultivating Color-Blindness?: The Impact Of Tv-Viewing, Racial Policy Reasoning, And Colorblind Racism On Opposition Toward Affirmative Action Policy, Carmella N. Stoddard

Masters Theses

I examine the effect of television viewing and ideological orientations associated with “modern” racism such as minimization of the impact of racial discrimination and individual attribution on opposition toward preferential hiring of Blacks. Using cross-sectional General Social Survey (GSS) responses from U.S. adults between 2004 and 2010, I estimate ordered logistic regression models predicting attitudes toward preferential hiring of Blacks. Additionally, I compare agreement with key tenets of abstract liberalism to the findings of previous policy reasoning studies to determine the importance of these attitudes in predicting support for affirmative action policy. In this study, I aim to address the …

Evaluation Of The Springfield Menu Program, Hannah Stenger

Masters Theses

Studies have shown that many low-income and disadvantaged Americans have a poor diet quality, which increases obesity and chronic disease risk. According to the Massachusetts Department of Public Health, education and income levels of Springfield residents are well below state averages, and racial diversity in Springfield has increased significantly over the past few decades. Springfield’s demographics increase the risk of health disparities in the community, and higher rates of diabetes, heart disease, and obesity are seen in Springfield. To promote healthy eating behaviors among Springfield residents, Mason Square Health Task Force (MSHTF), a Live Well Springfield (LWS) partner, created a …

Understanding Stakeholders Perception Towards Human-Wildlife Interaction And Conflict In A Tiger Landscape-Complex Of India, Ronak T. Sripal

Masters Theses

Human-population of the earth exceeding 6 billion and growing at an estimates rate of 1.2% per year (US census Bureau, 2002) will lead to increase in human-wildlife encounters. Attacks on humans are perhaps the least understood of these encounters, but the most interesting and emotionally connected to people (Quigley Howard 2005). The main aim of the study if to understand stakeholders’ perception towards human-wildlife interaction and conflicts in Corbett National park, India. We used a standardized IRB (Institutional Review Board) approved questionnaire to survey 315 household from 15 villages lying within and around Corbett National Park of India using snow-ball …

Using Digital Elevation Models Derived From Airborne Lidar And Other Remote Sensing Data To Model Channel Networks And Estimate Fluvial Geomorphological Metrics, Noah Slovin

Masters Theses

Recent advances in remote-sensing technologies and analysis methods, specifically airborne-LiDAR elevation data and corresponding geographical information system (GIS) tools, present new opportunities for automated and rapid fluvial geomorphic (FGM) assessments that can cover entire watersheds. In this thesis, semi-automated GIS tools are used to extract channel centerlines and bankfull width values from digital elevation models (DEM) for five New England watersheds. For each study site, four centerlines are mapped. LiDAR and NED lines are delineated using ArcGIS spatial analyst tools with high-resolution (1-m to 2-m) LiDAR DEMs or USGS National Elevation Dataset (NED) DEMs, respectively. Resampled LiDAR decreases LiDAR DEM …

Obesity-Induced Inflammation In Human Mammary Tissue: A Potential Microenvironment Favorable To The Development Of Postmenopausal Breast Cancer Via The Wnt Signaling Pathway, Agathe A. Roubert

Masters Theses

In the United States, over one third of adult women are obese, and one in eight women will be diagnosed with breast cancer in their lifetime. Obesity has been shown to be a risk factor for postmenopausal breast cancer and is associated with increased aggressiveness and poor prognosis regardless of menopausal status. However, the mechanisms involved in the relationship between obesity and breast cancer are still not fully understood. Wnt signaling is often elevated in breast tumors (~60%) and is suspected to play a key role in cancer development. It has been shown that inflammatory cytokines, such as TNF-α, IL-1β, …

Generating Best Management Practices For Avian Conservation In A Land-Sparing Agriculture System, And The Habitat-Specific Survival Of A Priority Migrant, Jeffrey D. Ritterson

Masters Theses

A large amount of the world’s biodiversity is located in a disproportionately small amount of area, namely the tropics. Many of these areas are experiencing rapid landscape changes, mainly in the form of deforestation for agricultural practices. Current conservation efforts are focused on agricultural areas and their ability to provide habitat. The conservation value of a novel land-sparing agroforestry system, known as Integrated Open Canopy (IOC), was recently demonstrated on the study site when applied to coffee. IOC coffee supports forest species that are uncommon or absent in shade grown coffee. I generated best management practices for IOC farms relative …

Impacts Of Three-Dimensional Non-Uniform Groundwater Flows For Quantifying Groundwater-Surface Water Interactions Using Heat As A Tracer, Jonathan M. Reeves

Masters Theses

Heat-as-a-tracer has become a common method to quantify surface water-groundwater interactions (SW/GW). However, the method relies on a number of assumptions that are likely violated in natural systems. Numerical studies have explored the effects of violating these fundamental assumptions to various degrees, such as heterogeneous streambed properties, two-dimensional groundwater flow fields and uncertainty in thermal parameters for the 1-dimensional heat-as-a-tracer method. No work to date has addressed the impacts of non-uniform, three-dimensional groundwater flows on the use of heat-as-a-tracer to quantify SW/GW interactions. Synthetic temperature time series were generated using COMSOL Multiphysics for a three-dimensional cube designed to represent a …

Estimating Access To A High Quality Diet For Older Adults In Springfield, Massachusetts, Nicole M. Ratchford

Masters Theses

Seventy five percent of older adults are affected by multiple chronic diseases. Consuming a high quality diet consisting of fruits, vegetables, whole grains, and lean protein assists with chronic disease prevention and management. Healthful food availability is a major determinant of individual eating behaviors. The purpose of the current study was to describe the types, variety, and density of food outlets and to estimate access to a high quality diet for older adults in an urban setting. The Community Nutrition Environment Evaluation Data System (C-NEEDS) survey and restaurant menus were used to determine availability of healthful food in thirteen neighborhoods …

Towards A Semantic Knowledge Management Framework For Laminated Composites, Vivek Premkumar

Masters Theses

The engineering of laminated composite structures is a complex task for design engineers and manufacturers, requiring significant management of manufacturing process and materials information. Ontologies are becoming increasingly commonplace for semantically representing knowledge in a formal manner that facilitates sharing of rich information between people and applications. Moreover, ontologies can support first-order logic and reasoning by rule engines that enhance automation. To support the engineering of laminated composite structures, this work developed a novel Semantic LAminated Composites Knowledge management System (SLACKS) that is based on a suite of ontologies for laminated composites materials and design for manufacturing (DFM) and their …