187,497 research outputs found
Origins of the commercial hospitality industry : from the fanciful to factual
Explores some of the different historical roots of commercial hospitality in three distinct epochs with the intention of promoting further empirical research and beginning an informed debate into the origins and evolution of the contemporary hospitality industry. Reports on empirical research based on texts, artefacts and archaeological evidence. Wherever possible all the primary sources were consulted in the original languages; all translations are the author's own unless otherwise stated. Contrary to established and often fanciful rhetoric, commercial hospitality has at least 4000 years of history in the area of investigation. The rich and incredibly diverse heritage of the hospitality industry is illustrated and the conclusions emphasise that hospitality research should focus on deepening understanding of the industry through empirical research; learning from the past helps to inform the future. The particular focus of this article is restricted to reporting to empirical studies of three epochs: Mesopotamia (c. 2000 BC); Pompeii (79 AD), and Middle Eastern Trade Routes (c. 700 AD onwards). These distinct time periods illustrate the different roots and highlight the need for further research into the evolution of the commercial hospitality industry. The origins of commercial hospitality is an under-researched area in hospitality management and this paper highlights the rich data that is available through disciplined empirical study
Well-Structured Futures and Cache Locality
In fork-join parallelism, a sequential program is split into a directed
acyclic graph of tasks linked by directed dependency edges, and the tasks are
executed, possibly in parallel, in an order consistent with their dependencies.
A popular and effective way to extend fork-join parallelism is to allow threads
to create futures. A thread creates a future to hold the results of a
computation, which may or may not be executed in parallel. That result is
returned when some thread touches that future, blocking if necessary until the
result is ready.
Recent research has shown that while futures can, of course, enhance
parallelism in a structured way, they can have a deleterious effect on cache
locality. In the worst case, futures can incur deviations, which implies
additional cache misses, where is the number of cache lines, is the
number of processors, is the number of touches, and is the
\emph{computation span}. Since cache locality has a large impact on software
performance on modern multicores, this result is troubling.
In this paper, however, we show that if futures are used in a simple,
disciplined way, then the situation is much better: if each future is touched
only once, either by the thread that created it, or by a thread to which the
future has been passed from the thread that created it, then parallel
executions with work stealing can incur at most additional
cache misses, a substantial improvement. This structured use of futures is
characteristic of many (but not all) parallel applications
Evidence of authentic achievement: the extent of disciplined enquiry in student teachers' essay scripts
The purpose of this study was to describe the extent to which undergraduates engage in disciplined enquiry, as one means of operationalising critical thinking. Three hundred essays from second-year students were judged on the indicators of disciplinary concepts, elaborated written communication and analysis. Non parametric statistical tests revealed that disciplinary concepts were more in evidence than was analysis. This was manifest in written communications which were not, overall, elaborated into coherent essays. The results suggest that students need to appreciate that knowledge is an intentional, and perhaps, effortful construction of the human mind and that this involves the use of a knowledge-transforming strategy rather than the coping strategy of knowledge-telling. For this to happen, however, some current pedagogic practices may need to be revise
CVXR: An R Package for Disciplined Convex Optimization
CVXR is an R package that provides an object-oriented modeling language for
convex optimization, similar to CVX, CVXPY, YALMIP, and Convex.jl. It allows
the user to formulate convex optimization problems in a natural mathematical
syntax rather than the restrictive form required by most solvers. The user
specifies an objective and set of constraints by combining constants,
variables, and parameters using a library of functions with known mathematical
properties. CVXR then applies signed disciplined convex programming (DCP) to
verify the problem's convexity. Once verified, the problem is converted into
standard conic form using graph implementations and passed to a cone solver
such as ECOS or SCS. We demonstrate CVXR's modeling framework with several
applications.Comment: 34 pages, 9 figure
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Designing a consulting services architecture model
textDuring my years of experience in the technology industry, it has become obvious that standard processes and methodologies within the engineering discipline are at a mature state. The realization though is that software engineering specifically lags behind. Most software engineering methodologies that I have studied focus on the mission of software development. It is this realization and the need for structure that led me to review existing methodologies used within my company's software services organization. The definition of what a successful software services methodology entails is rather limited. This report will provide a history of existing software engineering methodologies that I have studied, describe an initial services method that was being developed within my organization, develop a new model that addresses previous shortcomings and identify additional components required to further define a strong software services-oriented delivery methodology.Electrical and Computer Engineerin
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