Fitting Restaurant Service Style to Brand Image for Greater Customer Satisfaction

Supported by academic researchers, the restaurant industry has devoted enormous effort to the task of conceptualizing and developing measures of “service quality,” 1 based on the reasonable proposition that restaurant guests’ satisfaction relies on quality of service. However, it has become clear to us that quality alone is not the full measure of how restaurant guests gauge or react to their servers’ actions. Consequently, in this CHR report, we measure the effects of “service style,” which we conceptualize as a manner of delivering guest service that is specifically identifiable on some dimension other than quality. We feel that this issue of service style has largely been overlooked, and we believe it’s important to assess the effectiveness of different service styles in a particular restaurant context

Touch Versus Tech: When Technology Functions as a Barrier or a Benefit to Service Encounters

Interpersonal exchanges between customers and frontline service employees increasingly involve the use of technology, such as point-of-sale terminals, tablets, and kiosks. The present research draws on role and script theories to demonstrate that customer reactions to technology-infused service exchanges depend on the presence of employee rapport. When rapport is present during the exchange, the use of technology functions as an interpersonal barrier preventing the customer from responding in kind to employee rapport-building efforts, thereby decreasing service encounter evaluations. However, during service encounters in which employees are not engaging in rapport building, technology functions as an interpersonal barrier, enabling customers to retreat from the relatively unpleasant service interaction, thereby increasing service encounter evaluations. Two analyses using J.D. Power Guest Satisfaction Index data support the barrier and beneficial effects of technology use during service encounters with and without rapport, respectively. A follow-up experiment replicates this data pattern and identifies psychological discomfort as a key process that governs the effect. For managers, the results demonstrate the inherent incompatibility of initiatives designed to encourage employee–customer rapport with those that introduce technology into frontline service exchanges

Intermediate Old Star Clusters in a Young Starburst: The case of NGC 5253

We investigate the star cluster population in the outer parts of the starburst galaxy NGC 5253 using archive images taken with the Hubble Space Telescope's Advanced Camera for Surveys. Based on the F415W, F555W, and F814W photometry ages and masses are estimated for bona-fide star cluster candidates. We find three potentially massive (\ge 10 \time 10^5 \Msun) star clusters at ages of order of 1-2 Gyr, implying, if confirmed, a high global star formation rate in NGC 5253 during that epoch. This result underlines earlier findings that the current star burst is just one episode in an very active dwarf galaxy.Comment: accepted for publication in MNRAS - The definitive version is (will be) available at www.blackwell-synergy.co

Assessing the Impact of the Concrete Canoe and Steel Bridge Competitions on Civil Engineering Technology Students

The new accreditation criteria (TC2K) of the Technology Accreditation Commission of ABET require an assessment of Program Intended Learning Outcomes. Some of the learning outcomes required by the “a” through “k” and the Civil criteria of TC2K include leadership skills, teamwork skills, project management skills, communication skills, and design and construction skills. The American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) and the American Institute for Steel Construction (AISC) sponsors regional and national concrete canoe and steel bridge competitions on an annual basis. The Civil Engineering Technology (CET) students at the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) have participated in these competitions for the past nine years. These competitions give students a chance to apply what they have learned in the classroom. To assess the impact of the concrete canoe and steel bridge competitions on student learning and development, the authors carried out a survey of current students and graduates of the CET program at RIT who have been members of the concrete canoe and steel bridge teams. The issues addressed in our survey include the following: impact of these activities on leadership skills, communication skills, teamwork skills, design and construction skills, project management skills, confidence levels, students’ enthusiasm for the profession, and a positive image and exposure for students and CET programs. In this paper, we discuss the results of this survey and some of the challenges to student participation in these non-credit activities at RIT, and present some suggestions for enhancing the level of student participation

Discovery, photometry, and astrometry of 49 classical nova candidates in M81 galaxy

This paper reports on a search for new classical nova candidates in the M81 galaxy based on archival, as well as recent, new images. We used images from 1999-2007 to search for optical transients in M81. The positions of the identified classical nova candidates were used to study their spatial distribution. Kolmogorov - Smirnov test (KS) and bottom-to-top (BTR) ratio diagnostic were used to analyze the nova candidate distribution and differentiate between the disk and the bulge populations. In total, 49 classical nova candidates were discovered. In this study, we present the precise positions and photometry of these objects, plus the photometry of an additional 9 classical nova candidates found by Neill and Shara (2004). With our large sample, we find a different spatial distribution of classical nova candidates when compared to the results of earlier studies. Also, an extraordinarily bright nova was found and studied in detail.Comment: Accepted for publication in Astronomy & Astrophysics, 23 pages, 8 figure

Hubble Space Telescope Observations of Comet 9P/Tempel 1 during the Deep Impact Encounter

We report on the Hubble Space Telescope program to observe periodic comet 9P/Tempel 1 in conjunction with NASA's Deep Impact mission. Our objectives were to study the generation and evolution of the coma resulting from the impact and to obtain wide-band images of the visual outburst generated by the impact. Two observing campaigns utilizing a total of 17 HST orbits were carried out: the first occurred on 2005 June 13-14 and fortuitously recorded the appearance of a new, short-lived fan in the sunward direction on June 14. The principal campaign began two days before impact and was followed by contiguous orbits through impact plus several hours and then snapshots one, seven, and twelve days later. All of the observations were made using the Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS). For imaging, the ACS High Resolution Channel (HRC) provides a spatial resolution of 36 km (16 km/pixel) at the comet at the time of impact. Baseline images of the comet, made prior to impact, photometrically resolved the comet's nucleus. The derived diameter, 6.1 km, is in excellent agreement with the 6.0 +/- 0.2 km diameter derived from the spacecraft imagers. Following the impact, the HRC images illustrate the temporal and spatial evolution of the ejecta cloud and allow for a determination of its expansion velocity distribution. One day after impact the ejecta cloud had passed out of the field-of-view of the HRC.Comment: 15 pages, 14 postscript figures. Accepted for publication in Icarus special issue on Deep Impac

Imaging of star clusters in unperturbed spiral galaxies with the Advanced Camera for Surveys. I. The low luminosity galaxy NGC 45

We present results from ACS and WFPC observations in the low luminosity galaxy NGC 45. We identified 28 young star cluster candidates. While the exact values of age, mass, and extinction depend somewhat on the choice of SSP models, we find no young clusters with masses higher than a few 1000 Msun for any model choice. We derive the luminosity function of young star clusters and find a slope of alpha=-1.94+-0.28. We also identified 19 old globular clusters and we estimate a specific frequency of globular clusters of S_N=1.4-1.9 which is significantly higher than observed for other late-type galaxies (e.g. SMC, LMC, M33). Most of these globular clusters appear to belong to a metal-poor population, although they coincide spatially with the location of the bulge of NGC 45.Comment: 16 pages,18 figures, accepted for publication in A&