Study to Examine the Preparation and Training of Hospitality Expatriate Executives

This study solicited information from the members of the International Hotel and Restaurant Association (IH&RA) to examine the preparation and training of hospitality expatriate executives for a successful assignment overseas. The survey was developed as a self-administered instrument in three parts. The first part asked questions related to respondents' professional background that dealt with overseas experience and hospitality experience. The second part asked questions about the extent that the respondents possess the attributes of a hospitality expatriate executives, the management skills that respondents should possess and the effectiveness of the cross-cultural training activities that parent company provided. The third section of the questionnaire asked questions about the demographics that dealt with gender, age, annual income, and position of the expatriate executive. Findings and Conclusions: The majority of the respondents were between the ages of 51 to 60 years old, male, married and highly educated (most of them had graduate degree). They had prior overseas experience, had worked in the host country for six months and they worked in luxury hotel properties. There was a broad variation in professional backgrounds, years of international experience, and expatriate assignments across the respondents. Exploratory factor analysis generated three components of a model for a successful hospitality expatriate assignment. These three components or factors were personal competencies, global management skills, and expatriate adjustment. Independent samples t test revealed that seven cross-cultural training activities provided by the parent company were effective. And One-Way Analysis of Variance indicated that management skills vary according to the location of the parent company and country of origin of the hospitality expatriate executives.The findings of this study suggested that the success of an overseas assignment was determined by personal competencies, global management skills and expatriate adjustment. However, it was not verified which of these factors would influence successful expatriate assignment. In addition, cross cultural training should be taken into account.School of Hotel and Restaurant Administratio

Equation of state for hot dense matter using a relativistic screened hydrogenic model

The study of matter under conditions of high density, pressure, and temperature is a valuable subject for inertial confinement fusion (ICF), astrophysical phenomena, high-power laser interaction with matter, etc. In all these cases, matter is heated and compressed by strong shocks to high pressures and temperatures, becomes partially or completely ionized via thermal or pressure ionization, and is in the form of dense plasma. The thermodynamics and the hydrodynamics of hot dense plasmas cannot be predicted without the knowledge of the equation of state (EOS) that describes how a material reacts to pressure and how much energy is involved. Therefore, the equation of state often takes the form of pressure and energy as functions of density and temperature. Furthermore, EOS data must be obtained in a timely manner in order to be useful as input in hydrodynamic codes. By this reason, the use of fast, robust and reasonably accurate atomic models, is necessary for computing the EOS of a material

L’Artritis reumatoide

Treballs d'Educació Farmacètica als ciutadans. Unitat Docent d'Estades en Pràctiques Tutelades. Facultat de Farmàcia, Universitat de Barcelona. Curs: 2014/2015, Tutors: David Berlana Martin, Ignasi Cardona Pascual i Marian March Pujol.L’artritis reumatoide és una malaltia autoimmunitària que afecta a tots els grups poblacionals, i que cursa amb inflamació de les articulacions. La seva etiologia és encara desconeguda, fet que provoca que sigui un camp d’interès actual d’investigació. El tractament de primera línia consisteix en l’administració d’antiinflamatoris, analgèsics i/o corticoides, per tal de calmar el dolor i controlar la inflamació. A més s’afegeix FAME’s per alentir la progressió de la malaltia. Si amb aquest tractament no és suficient per mantenir un control, es passa al de segona línia que consisteix en l’administració d’anticossos monoclonals (teràpia biològica). Amb l’elaboració d’aquest treball i la realització de les activitats proposades, hem aplicat el rol de farmacèutic en l’educació ciutadana, proporcionant informació als malalts d’artritis per tal de promoure la seva salut. Cal destacar la importància que no només el pacient, sinó també el seu entorn familiar coneguin les característiques i evolució de la malaltia, amb l’objectiu de millorar la qualitat de vida dels malalts

Detailed-level-accounting approach calculation of radiative properties of aluminium plasmas in a wide range of density and temperature

In this work it is accomplished a study of radiative properties of aluminium plasmas. It is analyzed the calculation of spectrally resolved and mean opacities both under NLTE and LTE approaches. Furthermore, the effect of the re-absorption of the radiation in these magnitudes is also examined. The calculations were performed into the detailed-levelaccounting approach including configuration interaction among the levels belonging to the same non-relativistic configuration

Analysis of the influence of the plasma thermodynamic regime in the spectrally resolved and mean radiative opacity calculations of carbon plasmas in a wide range of density and temperature

In this work the spectrally resolved, multigroup and mean radiative opacities of carbon plasmas are calculated for a wide range of plasma conditions which cover situations where corona, local thermodynamic and non-local thermodynamic equilibrium regimes are found. An analysis of the influence of the thermodynamic regime on these magnitudes is also carried out by means of comparisons of the results obtained from collisional-radiative, corona or Saha–Boltzmann equations. All the calculations presented in this work were performed using ABAKO/RAPCAL code

Molecular epidemiology of nontypeable haemophilus influenzae causing community-acquired pneumonia in adults

Nontypeable Haemophilus influenzae (NTHi) is an opportunistic pathogen which causes a variety of respiratory infections. The objectives of the study were to determine its antimicrobial susceptibility, to characterize the b-lactam resistance, and to establish a genetic characterization of NTHi isolates. Ninety-five NTHi isolates were analyzed by pulsed field gel electrophoresis (PFGE) and multi locus sequence typing (MLST). Antimicrobial susceptibility was determined by microdilution, and the ftsI gene (encoding penicillin-binding protein 3, PBP3) was PCR amplified and sequenced. Thirty (31.6%) isolates were non-susceptible to ampicillin (MIC$2 mg/L), with 10 of them producing b-lactamase type TEM-1 as a resistance mechanism. After ftsI sequencing, 39 (41.1%) isolates showed amino acid substitutions in PBP3, with Asn526->Lys being the most common (69.2%). Eighty-four patients were successfully treated with amoxicillin/clavulanic acid, ceftriaxone and levofloxacin. Eight patients died due either to aspiration or complication of their comorbidities. In conclusion, NTHi causing CAP in adults shows high genetic diversity and is associated with a high rate of reduced susceptibility to ampicillin due to alterations in PBP3. The analysis of treatment and outcomes demonstrated that NTHi strains with mutations in the ftsI gene could be successfully treated with ceftriaxone or fluoroquinolones

Determination of level populations and radiative properties of optically thin and thick carbon plasmas

In several research fields of current interest such as astrophysics or inertial fusion confinement the knowledge of the interactions between the photons and the plasma particles, i.e. plasma radiative properties, result essential. Thus, for example, the understanding of these plasmas requires properties such as emissivities and opacities both for hydro-simulations and diagnostics. Carbon is one of the most interesting elements under investigation, since it is likely to be a major plasma-facing wall component in ITER, and it plays a major role in inertial fusion scenarios. Also, some laser experiments have focused on the spectrally resolved emission from hydrocarbon systems. Therefore, radiative properties from carbon plasmas must be known and, as a consequence, the theoretical study of these plasmas is a subject of current interest and many efforts are headed. In particular, recent NLTE workshops have focused on comparisons of modelling calculations for specific cases that allow testing the models since there are very few experimental measurements for carbon plasmas. For these reasons it is interesting to characterize them in a wide range of plasma conditions. In a previous work we carried out an exhaustive study of optically thin carbon plasmas under steady state condition in a wide range of electron densities and temperatures given by (1-200) eV and (10 12 -10 22 ) cm -3 respectively [1], where CE, NLTE or LTE regimes are achieved. In this work we analyse the reabsorption radiation effects for homogeneous carbon plasmas in planar geometry by means of the escape factor formalism. We focus our attention on the average ionization and ionic populations as well as the multifrequential and mean opacity. All the calculations presented in this work were performed by using ABAKO code [1] which integrates the RAPCAL code [2] in order to calculate optical properties for a wide range of temperatures and electron number densitie

Analytical opacity formulas for low Z plasmas

The accurate computation of radiative opacities is basic in the ICF target physics analysis, in which the radiation is an important feature to determine in detail. For this reason, accurate analytical formulas for giving mean opacities versus temperature and density of the plasma seem to be a useful tool. In this work we analyse some analytical expressions found in the literature for the opacity low Z plasmas in a wide range of temperature and densities. The validity of these formulas for computing the opacity under NLTE conditions is investigated using the new code ABAKO

(3R,4S)-3,4-Isopropylidenedioxy-5-phenylsulfonylmethyl-3,4-dihydro-2H-pyrrole 1-oxide

The title compound, C14H17NO5S, was prepared by oxidation of (2R,3S,4R)-2-phenyl­sulfonyl­methyl-1-hy­droxy-3,4-iso­pro­pyl­idene­dioxy­pyrrolidine. Its crystal structure confirms unequivocally its configuration. Two inter­molecular C—H⋯O inter­actions help to establish the packing