An In-Depth Comparison of Three Fast Food Industry Giants: How Chick-Fil-A Differs from Mcdonald\u27s and Wendy\u27s in the Growth from Humble Beginnings to Become Multi-Billion Dollar Companies

From humble beginnings to industry giants, three companies have combined for over 163 years of implementing innovative business models and growing sales across the globe. Chick-fil-A, McDonald\u27s, and Wendy\u27s have accounted for tens of billions of dollars in sales revenue since their respective inceptions. Chick-fil-A is a family-owned company started and run by S. Truett Cathy and his children. McDonald\u27s is an industry juggernaut created by Ray Kroc, and Dave Thomas founded Wendy\u27s. Over the years, Chick-fil-A has prioritized its growth by maintaining their high quality standards in exchange for a slower growth rate. McDonald\u27s has grown rapidly to an enormous size and expanded across the world. Wendy\u27s followed a growth pattern similar to McDonald\u27s, but experienced a halt in growth around the late 1990s. While their overall financial success is comparable, their guiding philosophies and ideologies are somewhat different. Chick-fil-A, in particular, has a unique outlook on how to run a business — to make business decisions based on biblical principles. While customer loyalty can be difficult to measure, Chick-fil-A seems to have a customer base that identifies with Chick-fil-A\u27s values and has proven to be loyal supporters even throughout recent controversy. Employee satisfaction ratings for Chick-fil-A also indicate how highly they value their human resources. With McDonald\u27s and Wendy\u27s falling well behind in such metrics, Chick-fil-A holds a specific advantage in both customer and employee satisfaction. All three companies are active philanthropically, giving large sums of money to various internal and external charities each year. Although Chick-fil-A does not lead in overall sales volume, same-store sales growth and customer satisfaction ratings show Chick-fil-A\u27s unique business model can thrive in the modern business world

A Review of Apomixis and Differential Expression Analyses Using Microarrays

Apomixis is a complex trait of great interest to the agricultural community, as it has the potential to fix hybrid vigor in many agriculturally significant crops. Although apomixis has been studied extensively morphologically, the genetic and epigenetic factors responsible for apomixis are still very poorly understood. As no apomictic species has been sequenced and annotated, various low-cost tools and techniques are being utilized to begin profiling the trait. These include cross-species microarrays using probe masking, which deletes information from array probes that do not hybridize to the genomic DNA of the cross species. Despite their limitations, these tools are providing a strong informatics foundation for which future, more robust profiling procedures can be conducted

An In-Depth Comparison of Three Fast Food Industry Giants: How Chick-Fil-A Differs from Mcdonald’s and Wendy’s in the Growth from Humble Beginnings to Become Multi-Billion Dollar Companies

From humble beginnings to industry giants, three companies have combined for over 163 years of implementing innovative business models and growing sales across the globe. Chick-fil-A, McDonald’s, and Wendy’s have accounted for tens of billions of dollars in sales revenue since their respective inceptions. Chick-fil-A is a family-owned company started and run by S. Truett Cathy and his children. McDonald’s is an industry juggernaut created by Ray Kroc, and Dave Thomas founded Wendy’s. Over the years, Chick-fil-A has prioritized its growth by maintaining their high quality standards in exchange for a slower growth rate. McDonald’s has grown rapidly to an enormous size and expanded across the world. Wendy’s followed a growth pattern similar to McDonald’s, but experienced a halt in growth around the late 1990s. While their overall financial success is comparable, their guiding philosophies and ideologies are somewhat different. Chick-fil-A, in particular, has a unique outlook on how to run a business – to make business decisions based on biblical principles. While customer loyalty can be difficult to measure, Chick-fil-A seems to have a customer base that identifies with Chick-fil-A’s values and has proven to be loyal supporters even throughout recent controversy. Employee satisfaction ratings for Chick-fil-A also indicate how highly they value their human resources. With McDonald’s and Wendy’s falling well behind in such metrics, Chick-fil-A holds a specific advantage in both customer and employee satisfaction. All three companies are active philanthropically, giving large sums of money to various internal and external charities each year. Although Chick-fil-A does not lead in overall sales volume, same-store sales growth and customer satisfaction ratings show Chick-fil-A’s unique business model can thrive in the modern business world

Factors influencing resilience to postoperative delirium in adults undergoing elective orthopaedic surgery

Introduction Delirium occurs after elective arthroplasty in 17 per cent of adults1, and is associated with poor outcomes, including cognitive decline2, dementia3,4, and death5. Predisposing and precipitating risk factors accumulate and interact to precipitate delirium6. Much of the current literature analyses delirium as a dichotomous outcome, inevitably placing many people with symptoms of delirium, but falling short of a diagnosis, into the no-delirium group. Freedom from delirium symptoms should be investigated as an outcome. As evidence accumulates that delirium symptoms can also be associated with negative outcomes, it is important to identify the resilient groups in these studies and establish modifiable resilience predictors. Studies have explored risk factors for postoperative delirium; however, none to date has defined or considered delirium resilience as an outcome or phenotype. Resilience may be broadly defined as ‘the ability to withstand or recover quickly from difficult conditions’7,8. The aim of this study was to identify predictors of delirium resilience in the perioperative setting

Performing the identity of the medium: adaptation and television historiography

This article focuses on how histories of television construct narratives about what the medium is, how it changes, and how it works in relation to other media. The key examples discussed are dramatic adaptations made and screened in Britain. They include early forms of live transmission of performance shot with multiple cameras, usually in a TV studio, with the aim of bringing an intimate and immediate experience to the viewer. This form shares aspects of medial identity with broadcast radio and live television programmes, and with theatre. The article also analyses adaptations of a later period, mainly filmed dramas for television that were broadcast in weekly serialised episodes, and shot on location to offer viewers a rich engagement with a realised fictional world. Here, film production techniques and technologies are adapted for television, alongside the routines of daily and weekly scheduling that characterise television broadcasting. The article identifies and analyses the questions about what is proper to television that arise from the different forms that adaptations took. The analyses show that television has been a mixed form across its history, while often aiming to reject such intermediality and claim its own specificity as a medium. Television adaptation has, paradoxically, operated as the ground to assert and debate what television could and should be, through a process of transforming pre-existing material. The performance of television’s role has taken place through the relay, repetition and remediation that adaptation implies, and also through the repudiation of adaptation

Representations of sport in the revolutionary socialist press in Britain, 1988–2012

This paper considers how sport presents a dualism to those on the far left of the political spectrum. A long-standing, passionate debate has existed on the contradictory role played by sport, polarised between those who reject it as a bourgeois capitalist plague and those who argue for its reclamation and reformation. A case study is offered of a political party that has consistently used revolutionary Marxism as the basis for its activity and how this party, the largest in Britain, addresses sport in its publications. The study draws on empirical data to illustrate this debate by reporting findings from three socialist publications. When sport did feature it was often in relation to high profile sporting events with a critical tone adopted and typically focused on issues of commodification, exploitation and alienation of athletes and supporters. However, readers’ letters, printed in the same publications, revealed how this interpretation was not universally accepted, thus illustrating the contradictory nature of sport for those on the far left

Homogenization via formal multiscale asymptotics and volume averaging: How do the two techniques compare?

A wide variety of techniques have been developed to homogenize transport equations in multiscale and multiphase systems. This has yielded a rich and diverse field, but has also resulted in the emergence of isolated scientific communities and disconnected bodies of literature. Here, our goal is to bridge the gap between formal multiscale asymptotics and the volume averaging theory. We illustrate the methodologies via a simple example application describing a parabolic transport problem and, in so doing, compare their respective advantages/disadvantages from a practical point of view. This paper is also intended as a pedagogical guide and may be viewed as a tutorial for graduate students as we provide historical context, detail subtle points with great care, and reference many fundamental works

A2ML1 and otitis media : novel variants, differential expression, and relevant pathways

A genetic basis for otitis media is established, however, the role of rare variants in disease etiology is largely unknown. Previously a duplication variant within A2ML1 was identified as a significant risk factor for otitis media in an indigenous Filipino population and in US children. In this report exome and Sanger sequencing was performed using DNA samples from the indigenous Filipino population, Filipino cochlear implantees, US probands, Finnish, and Pakistani families with otitis media. Sixteen novel, damaging A2ML1 variants identified in otitis media patients were rare or low-frequency in population-matched controls. In the indigenous population, both gingivitis and A2ML1 variants including the known duplication variant and the novel splice variant c.4061 + 1 G>C were independently associated with otitis media. Sequencing of salivary RNA samples from indigenous Filipinos demonstrated lower A2ML1 expression according to the carriage of A2ML1 variants. Sequencing of additional salivary RNA samples from US patients with otitis media revealed differentially expressed genes that are highly correlated with A2ML1 expression levels. In particular, RND3 is upregulated in both A2ML1 variant carriers and high-A2ML1 expressors. These findings support a role for A2ML1 in keratinocyte differentiation within the middle ear as part of otitis media pathology and the potential application of ROCK inhibition in otitis media.Peer reviewe

GPI Spectra of HR8799 C, D, and E in H-K Bands with KLIP Forward Modeling

We demonstrate KLIP forward modeling spectral extraction on Gemini Planet Imager coronagraphic data of HR8799, using PyKLIP. We report new and re-reduced spectrophotometry of HR8799 c, d, and e from H-K bands. We discuss a strategy for choosing optimal KLIP PSF subtraction parameters by injecting fake sources and recovering them over a range of parameters. The K1/K2 spectra for planets c and d are similar to previously published results from the same dataset. We also present a K band spectrum of HR8799e for the first time and show that our H-band spectra agree well with previously published spectra from the VLT/SPHERE instrument. We compare planets c, d, and e with M, L, and T-type field objects. All objects are consistent with low gravity mid-to-late L dwarfs, however, a lack of standard spectra for low gravity late L-type objects lead to poor fit for gravity. We place our results in context of atmospheric models presented in previous publications and discuss differences in the spectra of the three planets

Search for new particles in events with energetic jets and large missing transverse momentum in proton-proton collisions at root s=13 TeV

A search is presented for new particles produced at the LHC in proton-proton collisions at root s = 13 TeV, using events with energetic jets and large missing transverse momentum. The analysis is based on a data sample corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 101 fb(-1), collected in 2017-2018 with the CMS detector. Machine learning techniques are used to define separate categories for events with narrow jets from initial-state radiation and events with large-radius jets consistent with a hadronic decay of a W or Z boson. A statistical combination is made with an earlier search based on a data sample of 36 fb(-1), collected in 2016. No significant excess of events is observed with respect to the standard model background expectation determined from control samples in data. The results are interpreted in terms of limits on the branching fraction of an invisible decay of the Higgs boson, as well as constraints on simplified models of dark matter, on first-generation scalar leptoquarks decaying to quarks and neutrinos, and on models with large extra dimensions. Several of the new limits, specifically for spin-1 dark matter mediators, pseudoscalar mediators, colored mediators, and leptoquarks, are the most restrictive to date.Peer reviewe