Guide to understanding the lodging industry and one of its most attractive segments

Thesis (S.M. in Real Estate Development)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Urban Studies and Planning, 2007.This electronic version was submitted by the student author. The certified thesis is available in the Institute Archives and Special Collections."September 2007."Includes bibliographical references (leaves 128-133).This thesis serves as a pedagogical guide to the hospitality industry, and presents a broad overview of the unique issues that arise through the development, ownership and management of select-service franchised hotels. It attempts to answer the following four questions: * How is the lodging industry organized? * How has the industry changed over time, and where is the industry headed? * What hotel product type is particularly attractive from a development, investment and operational standpoint? * What are the issues to be aware of when developing this particular product? To answer the first two questions, Section One of this paper offers a full discussion of the industry evolution and focuses on three major innovations that have been gaining momentum in the lodging industry. These innovations are the trends toward franchising, market segmentation, and the "life-style" brand. The study will describe how franchise and management relationships have gained strength in the lodging industry since their introduction in the mid-twentieth century. The study will then explore the intricacies of the on-going process of market segmentation. Through market segmentation, hotel firms have been able to create and introduce greater operationally efficient hotel typologies, one of which is the select-service hotel. Finally, this section of the thesis will explain how the third innovation--that of the "life-style" brand hotel--combined with the ideas of franchising and of operationally efficient product types, has borne into the hotel market a new and exciting product, the select-service franchised life-style hotel called Aloft. Section Two of the study will address the third and fourth questions by presenting a broad overview of the development process for a hotel of this type, as well as highlight the most pertinent issues and requirements that are associated with such a development.(cont.) Additionally, this section will explore the relationships associated with owning and operating a franchised hotel, and the advantages and pitfalls of owning and building an asset under such an arrangement.by Brandon B. Berger and Donald J. Chiofaro, Jr.S.M.in Real Estate Developmen

Designing and Developing an Alternative Implementation of the Digital Bathymetric Database, Variable Resolution (DBDB-V)

This documentation describes a project to design and develop an alternative implementation of the Digital Bathymetric Database Variable Resolution (DBDB-V) that will allow efficient ingestion into Geospatial Information System (GIS). DBDB-V is a well-known storage facility for wide-reaching bathymetry. It is created, maintained, and extensively used by the U.S. Navy, and it is seen in many applications within the public sector. Environmental Systems Research Institute (ESRI) develops a popular suite of GIS applications called ArcGIS Desktop that is used worldwide and offered to U.S. Navy programs though the Commercial Joint Mapping Toolkit (CJMTK). This thesis will examine the development of an ESRI-compatible spatial geodatabase (GDB) that will hold the DBDB-V data and provide native data ingestion into ESRI products thereby improving the efficiency of how bathymetry is used within the GIS. It will also investigate tools needed to build and update the geodatabase as well as to provide access to the data stored within it. The thesis will also consider test cases to validate the new geodatabase and its tools

Neonatal growth of Steller sea lion (Eumetopias jubatus) pups in Alaska

The growth rate of Steller sea lion (Eumetopias jubatus) pups was studied in southeast Alaska, the Gulf of Alaska, and the Aleutian Islands during the first six weeks after birth. The Steller sea lion population is currently stable in southeast Alaska but is declining in the Aleutian Islands and parts of the Gulf of Alaska. Male pups (22.6 kg [±2.21 SD]) were significantly heavier than female pups (19.6 kg [±1.80 SD]) at 1−5 days of age, but there were no significant differences among rookeries. Male and female pups grew (in mass, standard length, and axillary girth) at the same rate. Body mass and standard length increased at a faster rate for pups in the Aleutian Islands and the western Gulf of Alaska (0.45−0.48 kg/day and 0.47−0.53 cm/day, respectively) than in southeast Alaska (0.23 kg/day and 0.20 cm/day). Additionally, axillary girth increased at a faster rate for pups in the Aleutian Islands (0.59 cm/ day) than for pups in southeast Alaska v(0.25 cm/day). Our results indicate a greater maternal investment in male pups during gestation, but not during early lactation. Although differences in pup growth rate occurred among rookeries, there was no evidence that female sea lions and their pups were nutritionally stressed in the area of population declin

Treadmill exercise within lower body negative pressure protects leg lean tissue mass and extensor strength and endurance during bed rest.

Leg muscle mass and strength are decreased during reduced activity and non-weight-bearing conditions such as bed rest (BR) and spaceflight. Supine treadmill exercise within lower body negative pressure (LBNPEX) provides full-body weight loading during BR and may prevent muscle deconditioning. We hypothesized that a 40-min interval exercise protocol performed against LBNPEX 6 days week(-1) would attenuate losses in leg lean mass (LLM), strength, and endurance during 6° head-down tilt BR, with similar benefits for men and women. Fifteen pairs of healthy monozygous twins (8 male and 7 female pairs) completed 30 days of BR with one sibling of each twin pair assigned randomly as the non-exercise control (CON) and the other twin as the exercise subject (EX). Before and after BR, LLM and isokinetic leg strength and endurance were measured. Mean knee and ankle extensor and flexor strength and endurance and LLM decreased from pre- to post-BR in the male CON subjects (P < 0.01), but knee extensor strength and endurance, ankle extensor strength, and LLM were maintained in the male EX subjects. In contrast, no pre- to post-BR changes were significant in the female subjects, either CON or EX, likely due to their lower pre-BR values. Importantly, the LBNPEX countermeasure prevents or attenuates declines in LLM as well as extensor leg strength and endurance. Individuals who are stronger, have higher levels of muscular endurance, and/or have greater LLM are likely to experience greater losses during BR than those who are less fit

Piloted simulation study of an ILS approach of a twin-pusher business/commuter turboprop aircraft configuration

A six-degree-of-freedom nonlinear simulation of a twin-pusher, turboprop business/commuter aircraft configuration representative of the Cessna ATPTB (Advanced turboprop test bed) was developed for use in piloted studies with the Langley General Aviation Simulator. The math models developed are provided, simulation predictions are compared with with Cessna flight-test data for validation purposes, and results of a handling quality study during simulated ILS (instrument landing system) approaches and missed approaches are presented. Simulated flight trajectories, task performance measures, and pilot evaluations are presented for the ILS approach and missed-approach tasks conducted with the vehicle in the presence of moderate turbulence, varying horizontal winds and engine-out conditions. Six test subjects consisting of two research pilots, a Cessna test pilot, and three general aviation pilots participated in the study. This effort was undertaken in cooperation with the Cessna Aircraft Company

Domain Adaptation for Enterprise Email Search

In the enterprise email search setting, the same search engine often powers multiple enterprises from various industries: technology, education, manufacturing, etc. However, using the same global ranking model across different enterprises may result in suboptimal search quality, due to the corpora differences and distinct information needs. On the other hand, training an individual ranking model for each enterprise may be infeasible, especially for smaller institutions with limited data. To address this data challenge, in this paper we propose a domain adaptation approach that fine-tunes the global model to each individual enterprise. In particular, we propose a novel application of the Maximum Mean Discrepancy (MMD) approach to information retrieval, which attempts to bridge the gap between the global data distribution and the data distribution for a given individual enterprise. We conduct a comprehensive set of experiments on a large-scale email search engine, and demonstrate that the MMD approach consistently improves the search quality for multiple individual domains, both in comparison to the global ranking model, as well as several competitive domain adaptation baselines including adversarial learning methods.Comment: Proceedings of the 42nd International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieva

Muscleblind-like 3 deficit results in a spectrum of age-associated pathologies observed in myotonic dystrophy.

Myotonic dystrophy type I (DM1) exhibits distinctive disease specific phenotypes and the accelerated onset of a spectrum of age-associated pathologies. In DM1, dominant effects of expanded CUG repeats result in part from the inactivation of the muscleblind-like (MBNL) proteins. To test the role of MBNL3, we deleted Mbnl3 exon 2 (Mbnl3(ΔE2)) in mice and examined the onset of age-associated diseases over 4 to 13 months of age. Accelerated onset of glucose intolerance with elevated insulin levels, cardiac systole deficits, left ventricle hypertrophy, a predictor of a later onset of heart failure and the development of subcapsular and cortical cataracts is observed in Mbnl3(ΔE2) mice. Retention of embryonic splice isoforms in adult organs, a prominent defect in DM1, is not observed in multiple RNAs including the Insulin Receptor (Insr), Cardiac Troponin T (Tnnt2), Lim Domain Binding 3 (Ldb3) RNAs in Mbnl3(ΔE2) mice. Although rare DM1-like splice errors underlying the observed phenotypes cannot be excluded, our data in conjunction with the reported absence of alternative splice errors in embryonic muscles of a similar Mbnl3(ΔE2) mouse by RNA-seq studies, suggest that mechanisms distinct from the adult retention of embryonic splice patterns may make important contributions to the onset of age-associated pathologies in DM1

Platelet-mediated thrombosis in stenosed canine coronary arteries: Inhibition by nicergoline, a platelet-active alpha-adrenergic antagonist

The effects of nicergoline, a new agent that blocks alpha-adrenergic receptors and inhibits platelet phospholipase, were evaluated in a canine model of platelet-mediated coronary thrombosis. In 48 open chest dogs, the circumflex coronary artery was stenosed by plicating the artery wall with a suture. Thirty-four of the 48 dogs exhibited cyclic reductions in flow in the stenotic vessel, followed by a sudden return to control levels. The reductions in flow were unabated in all but two dogs after heparin administration (1,000 U/kg per h), unaffected by large doses of nitroglycerin and nifedipine and associated with platelet aggregates in the stenotic segment (demonstrated by histologic and electron microscopic examination). These observations support the conclusion that the flow reductions were caused by platelet aggregation rather than by fibrin deposition or vasospasm.Twenty dogs were monitored for 1 hour after heparin administration and then assigned to a control (n = 7) or nicergoline-treated (n = 13; 1 mg/kg intravenously) group. In control dogs, cyclic reductions in flow continued unchanged for another hour, whereas in the treated group they were markedly decreased in 1 dog and completely abolished in the other 12 dogs. Aspirin (30 mg/ kg intravenously) suppressed flow reductions in all control dogs, confirming the primary role of platelet aggregation in the phenomenon.This study provides a modified model of platelet-mediated thrombosis in stenosed coronary arteries. Furthermore, the results indicate that nicergoline can effectively interfere with platelet function in vivo. The potent antithrombotic activity exhibited by nicergoline might enhance the therapeutic usefulness of this vasodilator