Guide to understanding the lodging industry and one of its most attractive segments

Thesis (S.M. in Real Estate Development)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Urban Studies and Planning, 2007.This electronic version was submitted by the student author. The certified thesis is available in the Institute Archives and Special Collections."September 2007."Includes bibliographical references (leaves 128-133).This thesis serves as a pedagogical guide to the hospitality industry, and presents a broad overview of the unique issues that arise through the development, ownership and management of select-service franchised hotels. It attempts to answer the following four questions: * How is the lodging industry organized? * How has the industry changed over time, and where is the industry headed? * What hotel product type is particularly attractive from a development, investment and operational standpoint? * What are the issues to be aware of when developing this particular product? To answer the first two questions, Section One of this paper offers a full discussion of the industry evolution and focuses on three major innovations that have been gaining momentum in the lodging industry. These innovations are the trends toward franchising, market segmentation, and the "life-style" brand. The study will describe how franchise and management relationships have gained strength in the lodging industry since their introduction in the mid-twentieth century. The study will then explore the intricacies of the on-going process of market segmentation. Through market segmentation, hotel firms have been able to create and introduce greater operationally efficient hotel typologies, one of which is the select-service hotel. Finally, this section of the thesis will explain how the third innovation--that of the "life-style" brand hotel--combined with the ideas of franchising and of operationally efficient product types, has borne into the hotel market a new and exciting product, the select-service franchised life-style hotel called Aloft. Section Two of the study will address the third and fourth questions by presenting a broad overview of the development process for a hotel of this type, as well as highlight the most pertinent issues and requirements that are associated with such a development.(cont.) Additionally, this section will explore the relationships associated with owning and operating a franchised hotel, and the advantages and pitfalls of owning and building an asset under such an arrangement.by Brandon B. Berger and Donald J. Chiofaro, Jr.S.M.in Real Estate Developmen

Cal Poly SAE Formula Electric Chassis

The Cal Poly Formula Electric team has been in need of a chassis redesign, making that a logical choice for a senior project. The original goal of the project was to build the lightest possible frame while still maintaining adequate strength and stiffness. The existing frame made a good starting point. The steel tube spaceframe weighed a colossal 105 lb. There was ample room for improvement, even with a similar spaceframe design. The greatest potential to reduce weight lay in submitting designs under the Alternative Frame (AF) rule set. This could avoid the added weight of many required tubes. The new 2014-15 rules introduced more strict requirements for tube sizes used in alternative frames. These new requirements effectively eliminated any advantage in building a steel tube frame under AF rules, making the developing chassis design no longer viable. In response to the rule changes, possibilities were reevaluated and a cut-and-fold carbon composite monocoque was chosen as a good alternative to the steel tube design. This new design direction promised significant weight savings while maintaining the strength required to pass the tests set out in the AF rules. The primary body of the frame began as flat panels of 3/4” 3-ply carbon composite that was then cut to the desired outline and folded into shape. These folds were reinforced with a wet layup using carbon tape and the resin, and filled with glass micro-spheres in order to reduce the weight of the resin used. This folded panel was bolted to the front and main roll hoops. The roll hoops were still steel tubes, as this was required by any rule set. Various properties were tested along the way in order to properly document chassis construction and justify FEA analysis to the FSAE officials. Most of these tests were destructive material tests on the composite panels themselves. All major subsystems except the battery box were carried over from the existing car to the new one. The suspension, drivetrain, and space for the new battery box were all part of the design from the beginning for a seamless transition from one chassis to the next. Once the monocoque was completed, the other systems were simply assembled into it. Once the entire car was assembled, the final tests for the chassis were to be passing technical inspection and performance at competition. Since the team was unable to get into the competition from the waitlist, this was not possible. Final design validation, instead, came from a technical inspection performed by Professor Fabijanic before the car was driven and from driver feedback

Weightless: Lossy Weight Encoding For Deep Neural Network Compression

The large memory requirements of deep neural networks limit their deployment and adoption on many devices. Model compression methods effectively reduce the memory requirements of these models, usually through applying transformations such as weight pruning or quantization. In this paper, we present a novel scheme for lossy weight encoding which complements conventional compression techniques. The encoding is based on the Bloomier filter, a probabilistic data structure that can save space at the cost of introducing random errors. Leveraging the ability of neural networks to tolerate these imperfections and by re-training around the errors, the proposed technique, Weightless, can compress DNN weights by up to 496x with the same model accuracy. This results in up to a 1.51x improvement over the state-of-the-art

Towards the Refinement of Von Neumann Machines

Mathematicians agree that certifiable configurations are an interesting new topic in the field of programming languages, and scholars concur. Given the current status of atomic modalities, programmers dubiously desire the synthesis of replication. In or- der to accomplish this intent, we describe a distributed tool for analyzing context-free grammar (Tor), verifying that the little- known collaborative algorithm for the em- ulation of the Internet by M. Garey et al. [3] is in Co-NP

Effects of Display Location Within Simulated Driving Environments

Driving simulators offer researchers experimental control while minimizing safety issues and reducing costs relative to on-road and test track experimental procedures. However, with the control of the visual environment that simulators allow, it can be tempting to develop experimental protocols that utilize displays within the visual environment of the simulator. Such displays have the potential to differentially affect driving performance based on their location within the driving environment. A simulator experiment was conducted in order to assess the effects of having drivers fixate a display at nine different locations on the center channel of a DriveSafety driving simulator. In general, driving performance was best when the display was in the middle of the screen. Both horizontal and vertical deviations from the center of the screen resulted in increased lane position variability, and drivers tended to drive closer to the opposite lane boundary toward which they were fixating when a display was located to the left or right of the center. In addition, response times to a task presented in the display were faster when the display was located toward the center of the screen

More Elevated Fastballs Associated with Placement on the Injured List Due to Shoulder Injury

Purpose To evaluate whether impending shoulder injury was associated with changes in pitch location or velocity immediately preceding injury. Methods Pitchers placed on the injured list (IL) due to a shoulder injury between 2015 and 2020 were identified in the Major League Baseball transactions database. Four-seam fastball velocity and frequency of pitch location for each pitch type was collected for each player in the season before placement on the IL and within 1 month of placement on the IL with a minimum of 55 pitches thrown of 1 type. Pitch locations were collected as identified by Baseball Savant’s Game-Day Zones. Game-Day Zones were consolidated into high (above the strike zone midpoint) versus low, arm side (closer to the pitcher’s arm side of the plate) versus opposite side, and within the strike zone versus out of zone. Repeated measures analysis of variance determined differences in four-seam velocity and the location distribution of 4-seam fastballs, change-ups, and breaking balls among each group. Results In total, 267 pitchers were placed on the IL for a shoulder injury with the majority diagnosed with inflammation (89/267) followed by strain or sprain (69/267). Four-seam fastball locations significantly increased above the mid-point of the zone (45.9% vs 42.4%, P = .008) and out of the strike zone (48.5% vs 46.5%, P = .011) within a month before IL placement. There was no significant change in 4-seam fastball velocity immediately before IL placement. Conclusions Pitchers threw more elevated 4-seam fastballs and out-of-zone 4-seam fastballs in the month before IL placement for shoulder injury. These findings suggest that a loss of 4-seam fastball command decreases with impending shoulder injury. Level of Evidence IV, prognostic case series