Impacts of stock prices and interest rates on tourism consumption

Tourism industry has emerged as a leader in the U.S.\u27s service economy in the last decade. Meanwhile, stock markets and interest rates have been playing a more important role in Americans everyday lives. Prior research mainly focused on the economic impact of travel and tourism industry, but there are very few studies regarding how changes in economic factors will affect domestic tourism industry. This study focuses on measuring the impacts of stock prices and interest rates on tourism consumption. The results of this study show that stock prices and interest rates do have a certain amount of impacts on people\u27s tourism consumption

Do iatrogenic serosal tears result in small bowel perforation in a rabbit model

Introduction A common decision faced by surgeons during laparotomy is how to manage iatrogenic small bowel serosal tears. Surgical dogma dictates that serosal tears should be repaired; as not doing so may result in the bowel becoming ischemic and likely perforation. This would result in significant morbidity and potentially mortality and re -­‐ laparotomy with either repair of the perforation or bypass management options. However, we do not know if serosal tears result in a localised area of bowel ischaemia as no study has been performed to test this assumption. Methods I designed two experiments wherein I determined whether or not serosal tears result in localized bowel ischemia in a rabbit model using adult -­‐ size white rabbits. The first experiment demonstrated the intra -­‐ luminal pressure required for perforation to occur at the site of a small bowel serosal tear. In the second experiment I investigated whether delayed serosal tears occur in-­‐vivo. The WITS Animal Ethics Committee approved both experiments. The rabbit model consisted of adult -­‐ sized white rabbits were subjected to a mid – line laparotomy under ketamine -­‐ xylazine anaesthesia with the assistance of the Central Animal Service veterinary nurses and staff. Serosal tears of various lengths and circumferences were created while wearing 2.5x surgical loupes. Rabbits were euthanized at the end of the procedure. The bowel was harvested for histology to check for viability of the mucosa. iv Experiment 1. Twelve rabbits were used in this experiment. In order not to compromise the vascular supply of the bowel, the bowel was clamped approximately 3cm away on either side of the serosal tear. Two 18 gauge jelcos were inserted into the isolated bowel lumen. One jelco was used to incrementally infuse the normal saline solution. The other jelco was connected to a manometer or a pressure transducer and used to measure intraluminal pressure generated by the normal saline. Experiment 2. A mid – line laparotomy was performed as above on another ten rabbits, of which a 4 cm x 100 % circumferential serosal tear was created on a segment of small bowel. Their abdomens were closed with PDS suture and the rabbits were observed after the operation for signs of bowel perforation and then terminated at either 72 hours or 120 hours to harvest the bowel for histological examination. Results The mean intraluminal pressure for bowel perforation was: 26.4 cm H₂O for sham rabbits, 23.0 cm H₂O for 1cm serosal tears in length and 23.3 cm for 4cm in length. There is no statistically difference between the mean intraluminal pressures of 1cm and 4 cm. For serosal tears involving the circumference with 1 cm in length, the intraluminal pressure of perforation was: 27.7 cm H₂O for 25 % circumference, 30.6 cm H₂O for 50 % circumference, 23.8 cm H₂O for 75 % circumference, 25.4 cm for 100 % circumference. At normal physiological intraluminal pressure of 6 – 8 cm H₂O during peristalsis, no perforation of the serosal tear present in this experiment. Findings of the second experiment also demonstrated no obvious bowel perforation at 72 hours and 120 hours after the operation. Histological examination of the small bowel serosal tear site also showed that the mucosa and the submucosal layers, at the tear sites, were intact and viable without signs of ischemia. Conclusion In the acute setting, small bowel serosal tears up to 4 cm in length or, up to 100% of the bowel circumference did not perforate at physiological pressures of 6 -­‐ 8 cm H₂0, which are encountered during normal peristalsis. Furthermore, serosa of the small bowel does not appear to affect the tensile strength of the bowel wall nor does it contribute significantly to mucosal and submucosal blood supply. No small bowel perforation occurred within 72 -­‐ 120 hours after creating serosal tears

The impact of institutional ownership on firm performance in the hospitality industry

Institutional investors have become important players in today\u27s financial markets and their increasing importance in corporate governance in the United States (U.S.) is further evidenced by the growing volume of corporate equity they control. The ownership structure/firm performance relationship has always been a subject of debate. Similarly, in the hospitality industry as of June 2002, institutional investors were estimated to own {dollar}2.3 billion, or 66.7% of total outstanding shares in PricewaterhouseCoopers\u27 lodging universe; This dissertation examines the impact of institutional ownership on firm performance as measured by a proxy for Tobin\u27s Q in the restaurant, casino and hotel sectors from 1999-2003. Given the endogeneity of institutional ownership in the restaurant and casino sectors, firm performance in these areas is significantly dependent upon the percentage of institutional ownership, and vice versa. In the hotel sector, however, there is no significant systematic relationship between institutional ownership and firm performance, when all other firm-specific variables controlled; This dissertation contributes to the body of the hospitality finance literature, particularly in the area of corporate governance, by identifying significant relationships between institutional ownership and firm performance in the restaurant and casino sectors. In addition, this study reveals that investing institutionally in the restaurant and casino sectors may help hospitality industry investors mitigate the agency problem caused by the separation of management from ownership. This, in turn, will enhance the value of the firms in the capital market

Weakly-supervised Caricature Face Parsing through Domain Adaptation

A caricature is an artistic form of a person's picture in which certain striking characteristics are abstracted or exaggerated in order to create a humor or sarcasm effect. For numerous caricature related applications such as attribute recognition and caricature editing, face parsing is an essential pre-processing step that provides a complete facial structure understanding. However, current state-of-the-art face parsing methods require large amounts of labeled data on the pixel-level and such process for caricature is tedious and labor-intensive. For real photos, there are numerous labeled datasets for face parsing. Thus, we formulate caricature face parsing as a domain adaptation problem, where real photos play the role of the source domain, adapting to the target caricatures. Specifically, we first leverage a spatial transformer based network to enable shape domain shifts. A feed-forward style transfer network is then utilized to capture texture-level domain gaps. With these two steps, we synthesize face caricatures from real photos, and thus we can use parsing ground truths of the original photos to learn the parsing model. Experimental results on the synthetic and real caricatures demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed domain adaptation algorithm. Code is available at: https://github.com/ZJULearning/CariFaceParsing .Comment: Accepted in ICIP 2019, code and model are available at https://github.com/ZJULearning/CariFaceParsin