Marketing strategies a motel can use to compete

The aim in this study is to find out what marketing strategies can be used to compete in the motel industry. Interviews were conducted with the manager of a motel. Data was also collected from five other hotels and motels through online booking channels such as Booking.com, Expedia and Agoda. The results show that different strategies are used, such as changing prices daily, use of golf packages for branding, linking with local restaurants. Recommendations for the motel are that they increase customer satisfaction, reviews online content, and use social media as a powerful tool to link with the customer. The introduction of a mobile app for better and easy service for guests is a recommendation

How does organisational culture influence employee retention within a landscaping business?

This research project set out to answer the question; how does organisational culture influence employee retention within a landscaping business? The purpose of this research project is to understand better the importance of culture and the part that it plays in retaining employees within a landscaping organisation. A qualitative method of five semi-structured interviews was used to gather data for this current research. Four themes identified from literature; Induction Programs and Training, Organisational Culture, Organisational Commitment, and Rewards and Recognition posed as the foundation for the research project. Key results found that a positive induction and effective training improves culture which has a positive influence on retention. It was found that clear communication of organisational vision, pay opportunities and events, positively influences culture, which improves retention. It was concluded that culture plays a significant role not only in retaining employees within a landscaping business but also attracting them. This research project recommends the modification of the current induction program to develop a clear training and advancement opportunity plan, to clearly communicate the vision and values of GGL, to develop a rewards system for employees based on work done and skill development, and to establish a social event plan. This research project provides the foundation for future research in this field specifying on landscapers within the organisation. This research will lead to an understanding of the factors affecting the turnover rate of MasterHouse through secondary research, then researchers will collect data through quantitative research, and develop a strategic plan for MasterHouse to reduce employee turnover. The researcher will use questionnaires to investigate the HR strategies of MasterHouse and employees’ views on MasterHouse current HR process and policies. This research will involve five factors that affect employee turnover rate: Long-term relationships, benchmark, work-life balance, talent management, rewards and motivation. The researcher then connected and compared survey results with information in the literature and developed a practical plan for MasterHouse to reduce employee turnover rate

Baseline Outlook for Missouri Representative Farms 2005-2009

This report presents a five-year outlook for the set of 40 Missouri representative farms using the FAPRI 2005 Baseline.Agricultural and Food Policy,

Reit Organizational Structure and Operating Characteristics

As a corporate organizational form, real estate investment trusts (REITs) fall into two competing property management structures: internally advised and externally advised. This study tests the hypothesis that, due to their superior ability to resolve conflicts of interests between REIT management and shareholders, internally-advised REITs will dominate the externally-advised REITs. We also test the hypothesis that larger REITs will come to dominate the market and find support for this hypothesis. The results confirm that externally-advised REITs are responding to market pressure to conform to the performance standards set by newer, internally-advised REITs.

Time to introduce automatic enrolment

With the Rudd government looking at making changes to the Electoral Act, Peter Brent places automatic enrolment as a high priority. In this paper, he highlights the mass of database information which the Australian Electoral Commission has access to, but cannot efficiently use for updating the electoral roll. Brent calls for the AEC to be given the power to update the roll automatically – doing away with the need for citizens to fill out lengthy enrolment forms

Hereditary relics holding back the AEC

This discussion paper examines the regional structure of the Australian Electoral Commission and argues that the existence of permanent District Returning Offices is wasteful and is holding back the adoption of world\u27s best practice enrolment procedures

Ideal operators and higher indescribability

We investigate properties of the ineffability and the Ramsey operator, and a common generalization of those that was introduced by the second author, with respect to higher indescribability, as introduced by the first author. This extends earlier investigations on the ineffability operator by James Baumgartner, and on the Ramsey operator by Qi Feng, by Philip Welch et al. and by the first author.Comment: Fixed minor typos and error

The influence of galaxy surface brightness on the mass-metallicity relation

We study the effect of surface brightness on the mass-metallicity relation using nearby galaxies whose gas content and metallicity profiles are available. Previous studies using fiber spectra indicated that lower surface brightness galaxies have systematically lower metallicity for their stellar mass, but the results were uncertain because of aperture effect. With stellar masses and surface brightnesses measured at WISE W1 and W2 bands, we re-investigate the surface brightness dependence with spatially-resolved metallicity profiles and find the similar result. We further demonstrate that the systematical difference cannot be explained by the gas content of galaxies. For two galaxies with similar stellar and gas masses, the one with lower surface brightness tends to have lower metallicity. Using chemical evolution models, we investigate the inflow and outflow properties of galaxies of different masses and surface brightnesses. We find that, on average, high mass galaxies have lower inflow and outflow rates relative to star formation rate. On the other hand, lower surface brightness galaxies experience stronger inflow than higher surface brightness galaxies of similar mass. The surface brightness effect is more significant for low mass galaxies. We discuss implications on the different inflow properties between low and high surface brightness galaxies, including star formation efficiency, environment and mass assembly history

Using Open Stack for an Open Cloud Exchange(OCX)

We are developing a new public cloud, the Massachusetts Open Cloud (MOC) based on the model of an Open Cloud eXchange (OCX). We discuss in this paper the vision of an OCX and how we intend to realize it using the OpenStack open-source cloud platform in the MOC. A limited form of an OCX can be achieved today by layering new services on top of OpenStack. We have performed an analysis of OpenStack to determine the changes needed in order to fully realize the OCX model. We describe these proposed changes, which although significant and requiring broad community involvement will provide functionality of value to both existing single-provider clouds as well as future multi-provider ones

Baseline Outlook for Missouri Representative Farms 2005-2009

This report presents a five-year outlook for the set of 40 Missouri representative farms using the FAPRI 2005 U.S. Baseline.This material is based on work supported by the Cooperative State Research Education and Extension Service, U.S. Department of Agriculture, under agreement no. 2004-34228-14502