Perspectives on training for the local café industry : how well does the hospitality training provided by institutional providers meet the expectations of local café stakeholders? : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master in Education (Adult Education) at Massey University, Palmerston North, New Zealand

The researcher holds a hypothesis about tacit differences in motivation behind training for the hospitality industry in New Zealand. Trainees have long held that there are differences between the experience of training in a tertiary institute and the realities of the workplace. These perceptions prompted this study of the values placed upon formal institutional training among a sample of owners, managers, and supervisors in the local café sector. The local café sector is known for its vibrancy, informality and unregulated approach to hospitality. The sector is a proliferation of small businesses which operates in a competitive environment. This study explores the relationship between small locally operated cafes and formal training of the kind fostered by polytechnics and similar institutions. The findings show there is little reliance on formal training or qualifications in the sector. There is a mixed attitude towards the hiring of staff members who have formal training. Some local café management views the qualifications and formal training with indifference. The main factor in employing new workers in the sector is 'experience' and in some cases, intrinsic qualities like 'personality' are important. This sector is largely made up of small business run by independent owner-operators. Competition in the sector is intense, and profit margins are small. Café employees are not generally well rewarded for their qualifications, and there is little in the workplace culture that may distract or inhibit the desire of workers to train formally. There is more evidence of formal institutional training and gaining of qualifications among cooking staff in cafes than front-of-house areas, signifying that cookery is an area of speciailised skill and features more as a career choice. While the management of local cafes will sometimes seek to hire qualified staff, they accept the lack of them. Management of local cafes who have themselves in the past been trained in formal institutional programmes are more likely to see benefits in employing people who have undergone similar training. This study concludes that formal institutional training is not a necessity in the local café sector, and that generally this sector views formal training to be of lesser relevance. As in most small businesses, cafes show that the need to survive commercially over-rides the propensity employers may have to improve the professional standing of their employees. Many employers will train employees on-the-job with the skills immediately necessary for the commercial well-being of their cafe. Local café managers have little energy or time to promote formal training programmes, and are content to accept that many of their employees will not be formally trained. The relationship between the content of traditional institutional training programmes and the skills required in the informal environment of the local café industry is somewhat incompatible

The OPERA experiment: Preliminary results from the 2008 run

The neutrino flavour oscillations hypothesis has been confirmed by several experiments, all are based on the observation of the disappearance of a given neutrino flavour. The long baseline neutrino experiment OPERA (Oscillation Project with Emulsion tRacking Apparatus) aims to give the first direct proof of the tau neutrino appearance in a pure muon neutrino beam (CERN Neutrinos to Gran Sasso beam). In 2008 the OPERA experiment has started full data taking with the CNGS beam and around 1700 interactions have been recorded. The experiment status and the first results from the 2008 run are presented.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figures Lake Louise Winter Institute 2009 conferenc

An Analysis of the EPA's Proposed Lead Hazard Standards For Homes

Exposure to lead in homes poses such large risks to children's health that reducing it is a major public health priority. To limit these risks, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) recently proposed national standards to identify hazardous levels of lead dust and lead in soil, as well as hazardous conditions for lead-based paint. Meeting those standards would require controls that would cost an average of thousands of dollars per home in 21 million homes where lead-based paint is present, according to the EPA. Although the EPA believes its proposed standards reflect an appropriate balancing of benefits and costs, a proper assessment of its proposal suggests otherwise. Each of the EPA's proposed standards for paint, soil and dust would result in measures to control lead that have costs in excess of benefits. Together those costs, less the associated benefits, are likely to exceed $20 billion. Estimates of net costs would be still greater if based on an analysis that corrects remaining deficiencies in the EPA's work. The EPA's proposal would likely increase unnecessarily the premature abandonment of housing in instances where control costs are large relative to the market value of homes. Such abandonment is especially undesirable because it will occur mostly in low-income neighborhoods of older homes. Standards with lower costs would result in less abandonment. The EPA's media-specific, national standards would have other undesirable consequences. Perversely, about half of all the homes that do not meet the standards have risks of elevated blood-lead less than at other homes in full compliance with the standards. In addition, all homes built before 1978 would be subject to the same national standards, although exposure, risk and the cost of controls vary substantially among different households. As a consequence, the EPA's standards would result in controls in homes of more than one million middle-income families whose children face risks lower than the risks for children of poor families living in homes that meet the standards. Controls to reduce low risks are not likely to be cost-effective and are unfair to families facing lower risks who would bear the brunt of the control costs. The EPA can set standards that would offer greater net benefits and avoid controls in lower-risk homes. To provide greater net benefits, the EPA should set less stringent standards based on a more careful reappraisal of the benefits and costs of controlling residential lead hazards. To avoid control measures in lower-risk homes, the EPA should set standards based on lead levels in all media and establish a range of lead levels where recommendations to control lead depend on risk factors specific to individual homes.

Is EPA's Ozone Standard Feasible?

The Environmental Protection Agency's estimate of the cost of meeting the new health-based ozone standard is likely to underestimate substantially the actual cost. EPA's cost estimates unrealistically assume that pollution control costs are capped at $10,000 per ton. Yet the required emission reductions in some cities exceed total motor vehicle emissions. By dropping EPA's assumption that control costs are constant, I show that meeting the standard in 2010 would cost nearly$5 trillion in one city, and $70 billion in seven other cities. These cost estimates exceed EPA's estimates of$10 billion per year by orders of magnitude. I also find that the incremental costs of control are likely to far exceed any estimates of incremental benefits. The high cost of meeting the ozone standard strongly suggests that it is likely to be infeasible in several cities. To avoid having EPA set such infeasible standards, Congress should amend the Clean Air Act to require the agency to balance the benefits and costs of regulation.

Rationalizing Air Pollution Regulation

On Valentine's Day, President Bush proposed new air pollution standards that would cut sulfur dioxide emissions from their the current level of 11 million tons per year to three million, nitrogen oxide emissions from five million tons to 1.7 million, and mercury emissions from 48 tons to 15 tons, all by the year 2018. At the same time, the Bush administration continues to advocate suspending the New Source Review (NSR) program, which critics have chastised for encouraging energy companies to continue operating "grandfathered" refineries and generation plants that are outmoded and minimally maintained, instead of refurbishing them or replacing them with new facilities. Clearly, environmentalist lawmakers and the White House have an opportunity to forge a sensible compromise that would enable the passage of new sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxide, and mercury caps while dumping NSR. But that process will not yield legislation that can be implemented in an economically sound manner unless Congress and the administration pay attention to a few basic economic issues.Environment, Technology and Industry, Regulatory Reform

The adoption of lotteries in the United States, 1964 - 2007. A model of conditional and time-dynamical diffusion

The paper examines the determinants of the diffusion of state lotteries as a process of policy innovation. After more than 100 years of prohibition, U.S. states began to establish lotteries in the 1960s. The article uses statistical event history analysis to show that the adoption and diffusion of state lotteries depends on fiscal, political, and regional factors of competition as well as on normative factors of social legitimization. The article develops two further arguments, first by discussing an advanced model of regional diffusion that views the regional effect as being dependent on the ideologicalinstitutional context and second by analyzing time dynamics in the diffusion process to show how initial explanatory factors change over time. In general, the findings point to the institutional environment as a factor influencing the diffusion of organizations. -- Der Aufsatz beschäftigt sich mit den Determinanten der Diffusion staatlicher Lotterien als Beispiel einer politischen Innovation. Nach einer Verbotszeit von mehr als einhundert Jahren führten US-Bundesstaaten Lotterien ab den 1960er-Jahren schrittweise wieder ein. Anhand von statistischen Ereignisdatenanalysen zeigt der Beitrag, dass der Diffusionsprozess von fiskalischen, politischen und regionalen Faktoren ebenso wie von normativen Faktoren der sozialen Legitimierung abhängt. Der Aufsatz stellt zwei weitere Aspekte heraus, die empirisch demonstriert werden: Zum einen wird ein erweitertes regionales Diffusionsmodell diskutiert, das die räumliche Ausbreitung in Abhängigkeit zur ideologischen Struktur angrenzender Staaten erfasst; zum anderen wird die zeitliche Dynamik des Prozesses modelliert. Hierfür ist der soziologische Neo-Institutionalismus der theoretische Bezugspunkt, und es wird angenommen, dass mit zunehmender Dauer des Diffusionsprozesses die ursprünglichen Kausalfaktoren ihre Erklärungskraft zugunsten eines Bedeutungsgewinns von Legitimitätsaspekten verlieren. Die Ergebnisse dokumentieren isomorphische Adaptionsprozesse und in organisationsökologischer Hinsicht die Bedeutung institutioneller Umwelten für die Ausbreitung von Organisationen.

An Analysis of the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Proposal to Allow Irradiation of Meat

Foodborne pathogens in the United States kill thousands and sicken millions each year, despite major efforts by federal agencies and industry to combat the problem. Food irradiation could safely prevent a substantial part of those deaths and illnesses and has been endorsed by all major public health organizations. Yet federal regulations prohibit the use of irradiation to kill pathogens on meat, eggs, and seafood and restrict its use on poultry, and so contribute to avoidable deaths and illnesses. The U.S. Department of Agriculture should expedite its rulemaking to allow irradiation of meat, and it should not require that food labels mention irradiation more prominently than they identify food additives. Most importantly, to boost food irradiation in the marketplace, the Food and Drug Administration should promptly determine that irradiation of any food, including precooked meats, eggs, and seafood, is generally recognized as safe.

An Analysis of the Use of EPA's Clean Air Benefit Estimates in OMB's Draft Report on the Costs and Benefits of Regulation

Many advocates of regulatory reform recommend more and better benefit-cost analyses. Perhaps the single most ambitious and sophisticated such analysis ever conducted is the retrospective report on the benefits and costs of clean air recently completed by the Environmental Protection Agency. But EPA's estimates of trillions of dollars in benefits from the Clean Air Act depend on a few arbitrary assumptions about the nature and value of health improvements. Although a panel of well-respected scientists and economists reviewed the EPA's report, the Office of Management and Budget should not include it in its own report to Congress without more extensive discussion of key limitations. In particular, OMB should include a quantitative illustration of how alternative assumptions as plausible as those in the EPA report could shrink the expected value of benefits to a fraction of those reported.

Clean Air For Less: Exploiting Tradeoffs Between Different Air Pollutants

The Administration's Clear Skies initiative and all competing legislative proposals take a pollutant-by-pollutant approach to address air pollution problems caused by emissions of both nitrogen oxides (NOx) and sulfur dioxide (SO2). Randall Lutter and Dallas Burtraw argue that as a result they miss an important opportunity to cut compliance costs without reducing expected environmental protection. For a scenario where firms could use permits to emit three tons of NOx instead of one ton of SO2, we estimate that compliance costs would fall by more than $1 billion per year relative to emissions caps like those in Clear Skies. Yet expected environmental damages would not increase because the projected damages from three tons of NOx are roughly the same as from one ton of SO2. To ensure that new air pollution legislation is cost-effective, Congress should allow firms to exchange NOx and SO2 permits at a rate that reflects relative environmental damages.

Assessing Benefits of Ground-Level Ozone: What Role for Science in Setting National Air Quality Standards?

A key determinant of the fate of the Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) 1997 ozone standard is how the Agency responds to a Court of Appeals' decision that it must consider not only harmful respiratory effects, but also ozone's beneficial ability to reduce exposure to harmful ultraviolet radiation (UV-B). In January 2001, EPA Administrator Browner signed a proposed response to the Court of Appeals' decision, but it has several problems. EPA's Scientific Advisory Committee did not review the scientific basis for Browner's proposed response, although such review is required by statute and EPA's internal procedures. The proposed response also ignores earlier EPA analysis suggesting that the health benefits of ozone are not negligible. Finally, it has significant conceptual flaws that the Advisory Committee could have corrected. The existence of a tradeoff between respiratory effects and UV-B related risks means that careful science is essential to ensure that air quality standards improve public health. Before publishing a proposed response to the Court's decision, EPA should submit its assessments of UV-B related risks to its Scientific Advisory Committee. It should also seek the Committee's advice about how to set standards.