Customer satisfaction, training and TQM: a comparative study of Western and Thai hotels

Managers within the hospitality industry make frequent reference to TQM principles. The extent to which these principles are applied effectively within the human resource management area of hospitality however remains under-researched. By applying TQM principles, this paper focusses on the relationship between customer service and training drawing upon comparative data from Western and Thai hotels. The paper also examines the perceptions of staff towards of hotels' guest-orientation and the provision of quality guest services. The researchers found that guest assessments of the performance of hotel frontline staff depend on their services function (e.g., front-office, housekeeping). The service quality skills needed by frontline staff were also found to differ in the case of Western and Thai hotels. Such differences merit proper consideration on the part of managers within the major hotel chains. The various findings may assist hospitality managers to determine appropriate strategies for the enhancement of guest services particularly in cross-cultural settings

Quantum sensing of local magnetic field texture in strongly correlated electron systems under extreme conditions

An important feature of strong correlated electron systems is the tunability between interesting ground states such as unconventional superconductivity and exotic magnetism. Pressure is a clean, continuous and systematic tuning parameter. However, due to the restricted accessibility introduced by high-pressure devices, compatible magnetic field sensors with sufficient sensitivity are rare. This greatly limits the detections and detailed studies of pressure-induced phenomena. Here, we utilize nitrogen vacancy (NV) centers in diamond as a powerful, spatially-resolved vector field sensor for material research under pressure at cryogenic temperatures. Using a single crystal of BaFe2(As0:59P0:41)2 as an example, we extract the superconducting transition temperature (Tc), the local magnetic field profile in the Meissner state and the critical fields (Hc1 and Hc2). The method developed in this work will become a unique tool for tuning, probing and understanding quantum many body systems

Irreversible and reversible modes of operation of deterministic ratchets

We discuss a problem of optimization of the energetic efficiency of a simple rocked ratchet. We concentrate on a low-temperature case in which the particle's motion in a ratchet potential is deterministic. We show that the energetic efficiency of a ratchet working adiabatically is bounded from above by a value depending on the form of ratchet potential. The ratchets with strongly asymmetric potentials can achieve ideal efficiency of unity without approaching reversibility. On the other hand we show that for any form of the ratchet potential a set of time-protocols of the outer force exist under which the operation is reversible and the ideal value of efficiency is also achieved. The mode of operation of the ratchet is still quasistatic but not adiabatic. The high values of efficiency can be preserved even under elevated temperatures

Flavour Symmetries and Kahler Operators

Any supersymmetric mechanism to solve the flavour puzzle would generate mixing both in the superpotential Yukawa couplings and in the Kahler potential. In this paper we study, in a model independent way, the impact of the nontrivial structure of the Kahler potential on the physical mixing matrix, after kinetic terms are canonically normalized. We undertake this analysis both for the quark sector and the neutrino sector. For the quark sector, and in view of the experimental values for the masses and mixing angles, we find that the effects of canonical normalization are subdominant. On the other hand, for the leptonic sector we obtain different conclusions depending on the spectrum of neutrinos. In the hierarchical case we obtain similar conclusion as in the quark sector, whereas in the degenerate and inversely hierarchical case, important changes in the mixing angles could be expected.Comment: 22 pages, LaTe

Getting real about food prices

The 2008 price spike in world grain prices had serious impacts on food security and poverty but analysts have consistently described these real food prices as low in historical terms. The inconsistency between the severity of the food crisis and low real prices results from the use of advanced and global economy price indices to calculate real prices. This ignores the high share of food in poor people’s expenditures and indirect effects of income growth on expenditure patterns of rich and poor consumers. Poor consumers have not experienced the same falls in real food prices as those with growing incomes and are more vulnerable to price shocks. As high and fluctuating international grain prices appear to be a feature of the current world economy, food price and policy analysis must recognise this, and develop and use different price indices that take account of differences between consumer groups

Characterization of water and wildlife strains as a subgroup of Campylobacter jejuni using DNA microarrays.

Campylobacter jejuni is the leading cause of human bacterial gastroenteritis worldwide, but source attribution of the organism is difficult. Previously, DNA microarrays were used to investigate isolate source, which suggested a non-livestock source of infection. In this study we analysed the genome content of 162 clinical, livestock and water and wildlife (WW) associated isolates combined with the previous study. Isolates were grouped by genotypes into nine clusters (C1 to C9). Multilocus sequence typing (MLST) data demonstrated that livestock associated clonal complexes dominated clusters C1-C6. The majority of WW isolates were present in the C9 cluster. Analysis of previously reported genomic variable regions demonstrated that these regions were linked to specific clusters. Two novel variable regions were identified. A six gene multiplex PCR (mPCR) assay, designed to effectively differentiated strains into clusters, was validated with 30 isolates. A further five WW isolates were tested by mPCR and were assigned to the C7-C9 group of clusters. The predictive mPCR test could be used to indicate if a clinical case has come from domesticated or WW sources. Our findings provide further evidence that WW C. jejuni subtypes show niche adaptation and may be important in causing human infection

Implementing Loss Distribution Approach for Operational Risk

To quantify the operational risk capital charge under the current regulatory framework for banking supervision, referred to as Basel II, many banks adopt the Loss Distribution Approach. There are many modeling issues that should be resolved to use the approach in practice. In this paper we review the quantitative methods suggested in literature for implementation of the approach. In particular, the use of the Bayesian inference method that allows to take expert judgement and parameter uncertainty into account, modeling dependence and inclusion of insurance are discussed

Importance of small earthquakes for stress transfers and earthquake triggering

We estimate the relative importance of small and large earthquakes for static stress changes and for earthquake triggering, assuming that earthquakes are triggered by static stress changes and that earthquakes are located on a fractal network of dimension D. This model predicts that both the number of events triggered by an earthquake of magnitude m and the stress change induced by this earthquake at the location of other earthquakes increase with m as \~10^(Dm/2). The stronger the spatial clustering, the larger the influence of small earthquakes on stress changes at the location of a future event as well as earthquake triggering. If earthquake magnitudes follow the Gutenberg-Richter law with b>D/2, small earthquakes collectively dominate stress transfer and earthquake triggering, because their greater frequency overcomes their smaller individual triggering potential. Using a Southern-California catalog, we observe that the rate of seismicity triggered by an earthquake of magnitude m increases with m as 10^(alpha m), where alpha=1.00+-0.05. We also find that the magnitude distribution of triggered earthquakes is independent of the triggering earthquake magnitude m. When alpha=b, small earthquakes are roughly as important to earthquake triggering as larger ones. We evaluate the fractal correlation dimension of hypocenters D=2 using two relocated catalogs for Southern California, and removing the effect of short-term clustering. Thus D=2alpha as predicted by assuming that earthquake triggering is due to static stress. The value D=2 implies that small earthquakes are as important as larger ones for stress transfers between earthquakes.Comment: 14 pages, 7 eps figures, latex. In press in J. Geophys. Re

Electro-Magnetic Earthquake Bursts and Critical Rupture of Peroxy Bond Networks in Rocks

We propose a mechanism for the low frequency electromagnetic emissions and other electromagnetic phenomena which have been associated with earthquakes. The mechanism combines the critical earthquake concept and the concept of crust acting as a charging electric battery under increasing stress. The electric charges are released by activation of dormant charge carriers in the oxygen anion sublattice, called peroxy bonds or positive hole pairs (PHP), where a PHP represents an $O_3X/^{OO}\backslash YO_3$ with $X,Y = Si^{4+}, Al^{3+}...$, i.e. an $O^-$ in a matrix of $O^{2-}$ of silicates. We propose that PHP are activated by plastic deformations during the slow cooperative build-up of stress and the increasingly correlated damage culminating in a large ``critical'' earthquake. Recent laboratory experiments indeed show that stressed rocks form electric batteries which can release their charge when a conducting path closes the equivalent electric circuit. We conjecture that the intermittent and erratic occurrences of EM signals are a consequence of the progressive build-up of the battery charges in the Earth crust and their erratic release when crack networks are percolating throughout the stressed rock volumes, providing a conductive pathway for the battery currents to discharge. EM signals are thus expected close to the rupture, either slightly before or after, that is, when percolation is most favored.Comment: 17 pages with 3 figures, extended discussion with 1 added figure and 162 references. The new version provides both a synthesis of two theories and a review of the fiel

Measuring organisational readiness for patient engagement (MORE) : an international online Delphi consensus study

Date of Acceptance: 28/01/2015. © 2015 Oostendorp et al.; licensee BioMed Central. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly credited. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise statedWidespread implementation of patient engagement by organisations and clinical teams is not a reality yet. The aim of this study is to develop a measure of organisational readiness for patient engagement designed to monitor and facilitate a healthcare organisation’s willingness and ability to effectively implement patient engagement in healthcarePeer reviewedFinal Published versio