A strategy for a university cafe during holidays

With no existing strategy for a cafe business and a highly competitive market, the organisation requires a planned strategy. This research proposes to research a café to determine the best strategy for the organisation. A questionnaire will collect quantitative and qualitative data and the organisation will be observed to determine business strategies

What is the best strategy?

The research question of this study is “What is the best strategy for Momento-Uni, especially in holiday”. Momento-Uni is a café and restaurant which is located in the Waikato University in Hamilton. In this study, it is aim to develop and identify a proper strategy for Momento-Uni to create competitive advantages and increase its sales in normal period of time, furthermore, a specific strategy also needs to be developed when there is a holiday period to balance its loss and profits. On the other hand, because of the special location of the Momento-Uni, the strategy needs to be created for its sustainable and long-term development and its unique marketing position. In this study, a mixed research method is used which includes quantitative and qualitative study design and observation. A questionnaire is developed to collect the information and data about the customers’ evaluation and recommendation for Momento-Uni’s service and products. An interview was held with their manager to understand Momento-Uni’s business goals, current situation, internal working environment and future development. The observation was developed by the researcher to evaluate their competitor and internal working issues. As a result, it shows that the main customers are students from 18-30 years old and coffee and drinks and snacks take up most profit of the whole sales. Through the result, a focus strategy is developed because students are the mainly targeted segments and to meet their needs. However, Momento-Uni does not have a clear differentiation and cost-leadership strategy to meet customers’ variable needs. As students do not have a high consumption level, in the future, the challenges will be existed. The results also shows that in holidays, the number of customers are declined steeply which increase the difficulties in the future growth. According to the results, it recommends that Momento-Uni needs to develop a clear strategy with differentiation and cost-leadership strategy to offer customer differentiated service and products, creates its products varieties and improve its service quality. For the customer psychology and behavior, by better understanding the potential thought, feeling and intentions of the customers, a proper strategy needs to be developed about validation of existing insights and the creation of new and novel insight to follow the marketing trend to increase its marketing competitiveness. For the human resource management, Momento-Uni needs to have a reasonable staff management during the normal time, especially in holidays, the opening hour for each site in holiday will be adjusted, Lake site and Ms2 site will be closed in a few weeks. Lake site always have overmuch staff, the staff in lake site will be reduced in normal time. For the future growth, the new working policy and business plan will be developed and improved to achieve its business goals for the future success

INFERENCE, POWER AND SAMPLE SIZE FOR ADAPTIVE TWO-STAGETREATMENT STRATEGIES

An adaptive treatment strategy (ATS) is defined as a sequence of treatments and intermediate responses. ATS' arise when chronic diseases such as cancer and depression are treated over time with various treatment alternatives depending on intermediate responses to earlier treatments. For example, in two-stage adaptive treatment strategies, patients receive one of the induction treatments followed by a maintenance therapy given that the patients responded to the induction treatment they received. Clinical trials are often designed to compare adaptive treatment strategies based on appropriate designs such as sequential randomization designs. One of the main objectives of these trials is to compare two or more treatment strategies in terms of largest patient benefit, such as prolonged survival.Statistical inference from such trials needs to account for the sequential randomization structure of the design. Recent literature suggests several methods of estimation. A comparative review of currently available inferential procedures for analyzing data from such trials is presented. A sample size formula is introduced for comparing the survival probabilities under two treatment strategies sharing the same initial treatment. The formula is based on the large sample properties of inverse-probability- weighted estimator. Monte Carlo simulation study shows strong evidence that the proposed sample size formula guarantees desired power, regardless of the true distributions of survival times. To test for a difference in the effects of different induction and maintenance treatment combinations, a supremum weighted log-rank test is proposed. The test is applied to a dataset from a two-stage randomized trial and the results are compared to those obtained using a standard weighted log-rank test. A sample-size formula is derived based on the limiting distribution of the supremum weighted log-rank statistic. Simulation studies show that the proposed test provides sample sizes which are close to those obtained by standard weighted log-rank test under a proportional hazard alternative. However, the proposed test is more powerful than the standard weighted log-rank test under non-proportional hazard alternatives.The public health significance of this work is to provide a practical guidance of sample size determination and a test procedure in clinical trials that adopt two stage randomization designs

Revealing the cosmic web dependent halo bias

Halo bias is the one of the key ingredients of the halo models. It was shown at a given redshift to be only dependent, to the first order, on the halo mass. In this study, four types of cosmic web environments: clusters, filaments, sheets and voids are defined within a state of the art high resolution $N$-body simulation. Within those environments, we use both halo-dark matter cross-correlation and halo-halo auto correlation functions to probe the clustering properties of halos. The nature of the halo bias differs strongly among the four different cosmic web environments we describe. With respect to the overall population, halos in clusters have significantly lower biases in the {$10^{11.0}\sim 10^{13.5}h^{-1}\rm M_\odot$} mass range. In other environments however, halos show extremely enhanced biases up to a factor 10 in voids for halos of mass {$\sim 10^{12.0}h^{-1}\rm M_\odot$}. Such a strong cosmic web environment dependence in the halo bias may play an important role in future cosmological and galaxy formation studies. Within this cosmic web framework, the age dependency of halo bias is found to be only significant in clusters and filaments for relatively small halos \la 10^{12.5}\msunh.Comment: 14 pages, 14 figures, ApJ accepte

Improved SVD + + Recommendation Algorithm Based on Fusion Time Factor

Collaborative filtering algorithm is widely used in recommendation system. Aiming at the problems of data sparsity and low recommendation accuracy in traditional collaborative filtering algorithm, an improved recommendation algorithm is proposed PT _ SVD++. Firstly, the attribute information of users and the implicit feedback information of items are introduced to improve the SVD++ algorithm, which solves the insufficient utilization of information and alleviates the problem of sparse data；Secondly the time effect model is established to further improve the accuracy of the prediction results. The experimental results on MovieLens dataset show that compared with other algorithms, the average absolute error and root mean square error of this algorithm are lower, and its recommendation accuracy is higher

Mapping the Real Space Distributions of Galaxies in SDSS DR7: II. Measuring the growth rate, clustering amplitude of matter and biases of galaxies at redshift 0.10.1

We extend the real-space mapping method developed in Shi et at. (2016) so that it can be applied to flux-limited galaxy samples. We use an ensemble of mock catalogs to demonstrate the reliability of this extension, showing that it allows for an accurate recovery of the real-space correlation functions and galaxy biases. We also demonstrate that, using an iterative method applied to intermediate-scale clustering data, we can obtain an unbiased estimate of the growth rate of structure $f\sigma_8$, which is related to the clustering amplitude of matter, to an accuracy of $\sim 10\%$. Applying this method to the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) Data Release 7 (DR7), we construct a real-space galaxy catalog spanning the redshift range $0.01 \leq z \leq 0.2$, which contains 584,473 galaxies in the north Galactic cap (NGC). Using this data, we infer \fss at a median redshift $z=0.1$, which is consistent with the WMAP9 cosmology at the $1\sigma$ level. By combining this measurement with the real-space clustering of galaxies and with galaxy-galaxy weak lensing measurements for the same sets of galaxies, we are able to break the degeneracy between $f$, $\sigma_8$, and $b$. From the SDSS DR7 data alone, we obtain the following cosmological constraints at redshift $z=0.1$: $f=$$0.464^{+0.040}_{-0.040}$, $\sigma_8=0.769^{+0.121}_{-0.089}$, and $b=1.910^{+0.234}_{-0.268}$, $1.449^{+0.194}_{-0.196}$, $1.301^{+0.170}_{-0.177}$, and $1.196^{+0.159}_{-0.161}~$ for galaxies within different absolute magnitude bins $^{0.1}{\rm M}_r-5\log h=[-23,0, -22.0], [-22,0, -21.0], [-21.0, -20.0]$ and $[-20.0, -19.0]$, respectively

Galaxy-galaxy weak-lensing measurement from SDSS: II. host halo properties of galaxy groups

As the second paper of a series on studying galaxy-galaxy lensing signals using the Sloan Digital Sky Survey Data Release 7 (SDSS DR7), we present our measurement and modelling of the lensing signals around groups of galaxies. We divide the groups into four halo mass bins, and measure the signals around four different halo-center tracers: brightest central galaxy (BCG), luminosity-weighted center, number-weighted center and X-ray peak position. For X-ray and SDSS DR7 cross identified groups, we further split the groups into low and high X-ray emission subsamples, both of which are assigned with two halo-center tracers, BCGs and X-ray peak positions. The galaxy-galaxy lensing signals show that BCGs, among the four candidates, are the best halo-center tracers. We model the lensing signals using a combination of four contributions: off-centered NFW host halo profile, sub-halo contribution, stellar contribution, and projected 2-halo term. We sample the posterior of 5 parameters i.e., halo mass, concentration, off-centering distance, sub halo mass, and fraction of subhalos via a MCMC package using the galaxy-galaxy lensing signals. After taking into account the sampling effects (e.g. Eddington bias), we found the best fit halo masses obtained from lensing signals are quite consistent with those obtained in the group catalog based on an abundance matching method, except in the lowest mass bin. Subject headings: (cosmology:) gravitational lensing, galaxies: clusters: generalComment: 12 pages, 7 figures, submitted to Ap

How do parents of preverbal children with acute otitis media determine how much ear pain their child is having?

The objective of this study was to determine how parents of preverbal children determine whether their child is having otalgia. We constructed 8 cases describing a 1-year-old child with acute otitis media (AOM) using various combinations of the following 6 observable symptoms: fussiness, ear tugging, eating less, fever, sleeping difficulty, and playing less. Parents of children with a history of AOM presenting for well or sick appointments to an ambulatory clinic were asked to assign a pain level to each case on a visual analog scale. Sixty-nine parents participated in the study. Each of the 6 behaviors was associated with increased pain levels (P < .0001). Ear tugging and fussiness had the highest impact on the assigned pain levels. Higher level of parental education and private insurance were associated with higher reported pain levels (P = .007 and P = .001, respectively). Because interpretation of symptoms appears to be influenced by socioeconomic status, we question the utility of using an overall pain score from a 1-item parent scale as an outcome measure in clinical trials that include preverbal children. Perspective: Parents of preverbal children with acute otitis media use observable behaviors to determine their child's pain level. Interpretation of symptoms, however, appears to be influenced by socioeconomic status. Thus, we question the utility of using a 1-item parental pain scale in clinical trials that include preverbal children. © 2010 by the American Pain Society

Two helices from one chiral centre – self organization of disc shaped chiral nanoparticles

Gold nanoparticles (AuNPs) have been prepared and surfacefunctionalizedwith a mixture of 1-hexanethiol co-ligands and chiraldiscogen ligands separated from a disulfide function via a flexiblespacer. Polarized optical microscopy together with differentialscanning calorimetry showed that the organic corona of thenanocomposite forms a stable chiral discotic nematic (ND*) phasewith a wide thermal range. Synchrotron X-ray diffraction showedthat gold NPs form a superlattice with p2 plane symmetry. Analysisindicated that the corona takes up the shape of a flexiblemacrodisk. Synchrotron radiation-based circular dichroism signalsof thin films are significantly enhanced on the isotropic-LCtransition in line with the formation of a chiral nematic phase of theorganic corona. At lower temperatures the appearance of CDsignals associated with the NPs is indicative of the formation of asecond helical structure. The decreased volume required and thechiral environment of the disc ligands drives the nanoparticles intocolumns that arrange helically parallel to the shortest axis of thetwo dimensional lattice