The Job Compatibility Index: A New Approach to Defining the Hospitality Labor Market

Both employers and employees usually look within the confines of their own industry when they are thinking about filling or taking a job. When the labor market is tight, however, hotel operators might be better off if they could consider workers from other industries who have skills that would fit them for hotel jobs. By the same token, when the job opportunities are rare, job seekers can look outside of their current industry for positions that match their skill set. (This would include unemployed hospitality workers, who could seek compatible jobs in other industries.) Because existing sources that give listings of comparable jobs do not explain how or why they match up various jobs, it makes sense to use a human-capital approach to comparing jobs. This means analyzing and matching the individual skills, knowledge, and abilities needed for each position. The Job Compatibility Index presented here provides a method for comparing jobs based on their component skills. The index compiles the compatibility score and importance rating of each of 35 skills for the job in question. To arrive at a single index score, the compatibility of each skill is weighted by its importance. By adding up the resulting scores one can see how a seemingly unrelated job is in fact a potential source of hospitality employees. Taking the example of a hotel front-desk clerk, the index identifies nine jobs that involve most of the same skills, only three of them in the hospitality industry, expanding the reach of the potential labor pool by ten-fold. Non-hospitality jobs that require skills similar to the front-desk job including personal and home-care aides, nursery workers, and life guards. Thus, the JCI identifies opportunities for both employers and workers

Gravity Waves from a Cosmological Phase Transition: Gauge Artifacts and Daisy Resummations

The finite-temperature effective potential customarily employed to describe the physics of cosmological phase transitions often relies on specific gauge choices, and is manifestly not gauge-invariant at finite order in its perturbative expansion. As a result, quantities relevant for the calculation of the spectrum of stochastic gravity waves resulting from bubble collisions in first-order phase transitions are also not gauge-invariant. We assess the quantitative impact of this gauge-dependence on key quantities entering predictions for gravity waves from first order cosmological phase transitions. We resort to a simple abelian Higgs model, and discuss the case of R_xi gauges. By comparing with results obtained using a gauge-invariant Hamiltonian formalism, we show that the choice of gauge can have a dramatic effect on theoretical predictions for the normalization and shape of the expected gravity wave spectrum. We also analyze the impact of resumming higher-order contributions as needed to maintain the validity of the perturbative expansion, and show that doing so can suppress the amplitude of the spectrum by an order of magnitude or more. We comment on open issues and possible strategies for carrying out "daisy resummed" gauge invariant computations in non-Abelian models for which a gauge-invariant Hamiltonian formalism is not presently available.Comment: 25 pages, 10 figure

Metabolically exaggerated cardiac reactions to acute psychological stress: The effects of resting blood pressure status and possible underlying mechanisms

The study aimed to: confirm that acute stress elicits metabolically exaggerated increases in cardiac activity; test whether individuals with elevated resting blood pressure show more exaggerated cardiac reactions to stress than those who are clearly normotensive; and explore the underlying mechanisms. Cardiovascular activity and oxygen consumption were measured pre-, during, and post- mental stress, and during graded submaximal cycling exercise in 11 young men with moderately elevated resting blood pressure and 11 normotensives. Stress provoked increases in cardiac output that were much greater than would be expected from contemporary levels of oxygen consumption. Exaggerated cardiac reactions were larger in the relatively elevated blood pressure group. They also had greater reductions in total peripheral resistance, but not heart rate variability, implying that their more exaggerated cardiac reactions reflected greater β-adrenergic activation

Quantum control via a genetic algorithm of the field ionization pathway of a Rydberg electron

Quantum control of the pathway along which a Rydberg electron field ionizes is experimentally and computationally demonstrated. Selective field ionization is typically done with a slowly rising electric field pulse. The $(1/n^*)^4$ scaling of the classical ionization threshold leads to a rough mapping between arrival time of the electron signal and principal quantum number of the Rydberg electron. This is complicated by the many avoided level crossings that the electron must traverse on the way to ionization, which in general leads to broadening of the time-resolved field ionization signal. In order to control the ionization pathway, thus directing the signal to the desired arrival time, a perturbing electric field produced by an arbitrary waveform generator is added to a slowly rising electric field. A genetic algorithm evolves the perturbing field in an effort to achieve the target time-resolved field ionization signal.Comment: Corrected minor typographic errors and changed the titl

Effect of silver content on the structure and antibacterial activity of silver-doped phosphate-based glasses

Staphylococcus aureus can cause a range of diseases, such as osteomyelitis, as well as colonize implanted medical devices. In most instances the organism forms biofilms that not only are resistant to the body's defense mechanisms but also display decreased susceptibilities to antibiotics. In the present study, we have examined the effect of increasing silver contents in phosphate-based glasses to prevent the formation of S. aureus biofilms. Silver was found to be an effective bactericidal agent against S. aureus biofilms, and the rate of silver ion release (0.42 to 1.22 µg·mm–2·h–1) from phosphate-based glass was found to account for the variation in its bactericidal effect. Analysis of biofilms by confocal microscopy indicated that they consisted of an upper layer of viable bacteria together with a layer (20 µm) of nonviable cells on the glass surface. Our results showed that regardless of the silver contents in these glasses (10, 15, or 20 mol%) the silver exists in its +1 oxidation state, which is known to be a highly effective bactericidal agent compared to that of silver in other oxidation states (+2 or +3). Analysis of the glasses by 31P nuclear magnetic resonance imaging and high-energy X-ray diffraction showed that it is the structural rearrangement of the phosphate network that is responsible for the variation in silver ion release and the associated bactericidal effectiveness. Thus, an understanding of the glass structure is important in interpreting the in vitro data and also has important clinical implications for the potential use of the phosphate-based glasses in orthopedic applications to deliver silver ions to combat S. aureus biofilm infections