Eggs, incubation and hatching asynchrony in gulls

Birds can influence the embryonic development through incubation behaviour because avian embryos develop using parent’s body heat. Although previous studies assumed that incubation behaviour influences hatching patterns, few studies have studied the effect of incubation behaviour during egg-laying and early incubation on hatching patterns due to difficulties to determine onset of incubation during egg-laying. I investigated whether incubation behaviour during egg-laying and early incubation affects hatching patterns in gulls using measurements of mean nest attendance and daily change of nest attendance. Hatching patterns were influenced by incubation behaviour during egg-laying and early incubation behaviour. As parents spent more time in their nests, a brood hatched more synchronously and hatching success of the first-laid eggs increased when gulls laid relatively smaller first-laid eggs than other pairs. Within-clutch variation in eggshell colour related to daily change of incubation behaviour. This might relate to hormonal change during egg-laying. Increase of prolactin initiates incubation and accompanies decline of steroid hormones which relate to accumulation of eggshell pigments. Hatching patterns may also be influenced by accelerated development of last-laid eggs. When eggs were swapped to increase interval between eggs, last-laid eggs of herring gulls accelerated their development to catch up. Accelerated development may increase the survival of chicks from last-laid eggs by reducing the disadvantage of small size within a clutch. However, the costs of accelerated development seem to appear during the embryonic period. Hatching success was low in eggs with accelerated development, although there were no differences in growth rate and early nestling survival between accelerated and control last-laid eggs. Eggshell characteristics might be a factor affecting hatching patterns because they are related to embryonic metabolism. Hatching duration was not related to eggshell thickness and total functional area, but chicks which hatched from eggs with higher proportion of mammilllary cone contact area took longer to hatch. Chicks hatched from thicker eggshells showed longer “head plus bill” at hatching and grew faster in skeleton size after hatching. Diet during egg-laying and early incubation affected nest attendance. Females which consumed more marine food during egg formation had lower nest attendance during egg-laying and early incubation. This may relate to longer foraging time required to obtain marine food. In conclusion, this thesis suggests that parents can influence hatching patterns by altering incubation behaviour during egg-laying and early incubation and hatching patterns also may be affected by accelerated development of last-laid eggs, diet during egg-laying and early incubation and eggshell characteristics (proportion of mammillary cone contact area)

Comparing Generation Y Hotel Employees in the United States and China

Millennials will represent 75% of the global workforce by 2025. They were born and raised in an era of rapid technological development, better access to education, and growing globalization. They are often characterized as protected by Baby Boomer parents and society. They are technologically-savvy, achievement-oriented, team-oriented, job-hoppers, and focused on life-balance. It is essential to understand their values in term of work attitudes and behaviors. Employees’ commitment to customer service is particularly important in the hotel sector as it results in greater customer satisfaction and loyalty as well as better service quality. We surveyed hotel employees in the United States and China to see if they might differ in terms of their work attitude and behaviors. Millennial employees in both cultures expressed a solid commitment to customer service and their attitudes towards power distance, empowerment, employee voice, and team member exchange were similar. The distinct difference was considering how these factors might predict employees’ commitment to customer service, where team member exchange was the most significant predictor for U. S. employees while employee voice was the most significant predictor for the Chinese hotel employees. The findings of this study will help hotel managers understand Generation Y’s values in term of work attitudes and behaviors in a cross-cultural workplace

Weak log-majorization and inequalities of power means

As non-commutative versions of the quasi-arithmetic mean, we consider the Lim-P\'{a}lfia's power mean, R\'{e}nyi right mean and R\'{e}nyi power means. We prove that the Lim-P\'{a}lfia's power mean of order $t \in [-1,0)$ is weakly log-majorized by the log-Euclidean mean and fulfills the Ando-Hiai inequality. We establish the log-majorization relationship between the R\'{e}nyi relative entropy and the product of square roots of given variables. Furthermore, we show the norm inequalities among power means and provide the boundedness of R\'{e}nyi power mean in terms of the quasi-arithmetic mean.Comment: 18 page

Extending satisfaction and loyalty research with a longitudinal perspective

This study examines the relationship between customer satisfaction and loyalty based on two dimensions of loyalty: attitudinal loyalty and behavioral loyalty. By measuring a traveler’s actual future behavior on a longitudinal perspective rather than just at a cross-sectional perspective, this research seeks to contribute to develop theoretical frameworks and quality measures of customer loyalty. The proposed model was tested in a hotel setting with structural equation analysis with the results showing that customer satisfaction is an important antecedent to attitudinal loyalty. Customer satisfaction and attitudinal loyalty were found to not be related to behavioral loyalty. Theoretical and practical implications of the study are discussed

SVAT: Secure Outsourcing of Variant Annotation and Genotype Aggregation

BACKGROUND: Sequencing of thousands of samples provides genetic variants with allele frequencies spanning a very large spectrum and gives invaluable insight into genetic determinants of diseases. Protecting the genetic privacy of participants is challenging as only a few rare variants can easily re-identify an individual among millions. In certain cases, there are policy barriers against sharing genetic data from indigenous populations and stigmatizing conditions. RESULTS: We present SVAT, a method for secure outsourcing of variant annotation and aggregation, which are two basic steps in variant interpretation and detection of causal variants. SVAT uses homomorphic encryption to encrypt the data at the client-side. The data always stays encrypted while it is stored, in-transit, and most importantly while it is analyzed. SVAT makes use of a vectorized data representation to convert annotation and aggregation into efficient vectorized operations in a single framework. Also, SVAT utilizes a secure re-encryption approach so that multiple disparate genotype datasets can be combined for federated aggregation and secure computation of allele frequencies on the aggregated dataset. CONCLUSIONS: Overall, SVAT provides a secure, flexible, and practical framework for privacy-aware outsourcing of annotation, filtering, and aggregation of genetic variants. SVAT is publicly available for download from https://github.com/harmancilab/SVAT

The pricing for same-day arrival guests in the hotel industry

The objective of this study was to recognize the impact on pricing dynamics that elements such as reservation channels, price decision makers, and pricing for same-day and very late (after 11 PM) same-day arrival guests. The data was collected via a random sample from a list of 3,000 hotels provided by Smith Travel Research, with 283 responses being analyzed. Though this is an exploratory study, it fills a need in the hospitality literature for empirical research, as it reveals hotels’ pricing patterns for same-day arrival guests. This study enables managers and scholars to form a better understanding of hotels’ actual pricing for same-day arrival guests. Researchers can thus have a starting point for developing models that can empirically demonstrate what pricing strategies are effective for same-day arrival guests

Evaluation of Vicinity-Based Hidden Markov Models for Genotype Imputation

BACKGROUND: The decreasing cost of DNA sequencing has led to a great increase in our knowledge about genetic variation. While population-scale projects bring important insight into genotype-phenotype relationships, the cost of performing whole-genome sequencing on large samples is still prohibitive. In-silico genotype imputation coupled with genotyping-by-arrays is a cost-effective and accurate alternative for genotyping of common and uncommon variants. Imputation methods compare the genotypes of the typed variants with the large population-specific reference panels and estimate the genotypes of untyped variants by making use of the linkage disequilibrium patterns. Most accurate imputation methods are based on the Li-Stephens hidden Markov model, HMM, that treats the sequence of each chromosome as a mosaic of the haplotypes from the reference panel. RESULTS: Here we assess the accuracy of vicinity-based HMMs, where each untyped variant is imputed using the typed variants in a small window around itself (as small as 1 centimorgan). Locality-based imputation is used recently by machine learning-based genotype imputation approaches. We assess how the parameters of the vicinity-based HMMs impact the imputation accuracy in a comprehensive set of benchmarks and show that vicinity-based HMMs can accurately impute common and uncommon variants. CONCLUSIONS: Our results indicate that locality-based imputation models can be effectively used for genotype imputation. The parameter settings that we identified can be used in future methods and vicinity-based HMMs can be used for re-structuring and parallelizing new imputation methods. The source code for the vicinity-based HMM implementations is publicly available at https://github.com/harmancilab/LoHaMMer