The Importance of Social Sustainability Practices in the Post-pandemic Context

Consumer perceptions regarding social sustainability practices within the hospitality industry are ever more important for hospitality businesses. Consumers are increasingly conscious of whether a business pursues sustainable practices, both in its treatment of employees and in supply chain purchases. Consumers\u27 views on how well a business performs on these indicators can impact on consumer decisions and business viability. UCF Rosen College of Hospitality Management researcher Dr. Cynthia Mejia and collaborators have undertaken a study to understand how much importance restaurant consumers attach to specific social sustainability actions, and the way in which consumers perceive restaurants to be performing in the areas most important to them

The Role of the Green Champion in Influencing Green Technology Use in Hospitality

Historically, the hospitality industry has been slow to adopt green innovations and technologies. However, as the marketability and cost-saving benefits of green technology become ever more apparent, organizations are now more motivated to investigate ways to speedily and affordably implement sustainable tech. Dr. Cynthia Mejia from UCF Rosen College of Hospitality Management looked at the primary mechanisms that influence the implementation and use of green technologies in the hospitality industry

Essential Worker Heroes

The COVID-19 pandemic brought with it untold disruptions to the hospitality and related services industries, and it also prompted a dramatic shift in public perceptions towards line-level workers. Normally associated with unskilled and ‘dirty’ labor, these workers were embraced as ‘heroes’ by providing essential services in the face of a severe and frightening public health threat. This phenomenon provided a rare opportunity for researchers in the fields of hospitality and psychology to examine how those workers, and the society they served, made sense of this perceptive shift

Utilizing Slow Reading Techniques to Promote Deep Learning

Slow reading has long been viewed as a teaching technique that engages students more deeply with course readings. Little systematic research, however, has been done to understand how this pedagogical strategy works in college classrooms. This study investigated how slow reading techniques promoted deep learning among undergraduate college students across two disciplines. Utilizing two food essays as the basis for a reading assignment, students in two courses participated in an intentionally scaffolded and paced slow reading exercise designed to encourage deeper personal engagement with course concepts. Theoretical implications from the research demonstrate connections between slow reading techniques and the existing literature on both significant and deep learning. More practically, this study found that slow reading techniques fostered personal storytelling as a means of developing deeper connections to assigned texts, presenting an opportunity for instructors hoping to facilitate the meaningful integration of course concepts into students’ lives

An entry level managerial training program for hourly hospitality employees

The purpose of this paper is to develop an entry-level managerial training program for line-level hospitality employees. An analysis of the current literature regarding training and motivation will be used as the foundation for the proposed training program. In addition, two central issues will be addressed to ensure the success of the participants in the managerial training program: a) The identification and resolution of perceived obstacles employees face when contemplating advancement, and b) the practice of developing internal employees to increase retention, and thereby reduce the high costs associated with middle management turnover

Student Engagement and Satisfaction with Online Labs

Hospitality and tourism is a ‘people business.’ So what happened when the need for social isolation as a result of COVID-19 forced hospitality educators to rethink their pedagogical strategies and move previously face-to-face courses online? In one of the first studies of its kind, Marissa Orlowski, Cynthia Mejia, Robin Back and Jason Fridrich from UCF Rosen College of Hospitality Management researched student engagement and satisfaction in online culinary and beverage labs

Perspectives for the use of silver nanoparticles in dental practice

Hacemos una revisión de la perspectiva del uso a futuro de las nanopartículas de plata en práctica dental.Nanotechnology has been used for medical applications in several forms, including dental practice with the development of silver nanoparticles (Ag NPs) as a useful tool. The aim of this review was to identify the properties and appliances of Ag NPs in dental practice. Silver compounds and NPs have already been used as dental restorative material, endodontic retrofill cements, dental implants and caries inhibitory solution. Despite the effectiveness that Ag NPs has showed in dental practice, Ag NPs remain a controversial area of research with respect to their toxicity in biological and ecological systems. Therefore any application of Ag NPs in dentistry requires more studies. In order to avoided the toxicity of these materials Ag NPs can be temporarily used in dentistry

Motor phenotype of LRRK2 G2019S carriers in early-onset Parkinson disease

Objective: To determine the motor phenotype of LRRK2 G2019S mutation carriers. LRRK2 mutation carriers were previously reported to manifest the tremor dominant motor phenotype, which has been associated with slower motor progression and less cognitive impairment compared with the postural instability and gait difficulty (PIGD) phenotype. Design: Cross-sectional observational study. Setting: Thirteen movement disorders centers. Participants: Nine hundred twenty-five early-onset Parkinson disease cases defined as age at onset younger than 51 years. Main Outcome Measures: LRRK2 mutation status and Parkinson disease motor phenotype: tremor dominant or PIGD. Demographic information, family history of Parkinson disease, and the Unified Parkinson's Disease Rating Scale score were collected on all participants. DNA samples were genotyped for LRRK2 mutations (G2019S, I2020T, R1441C, and Y1699C). Logistic regression was used to examine associations of G2019S mutation status with motor phenotype adjusting for disease duration, Ashkenazi Jewish ancestry, levodopa dose, and family history of Parkinson disease. Results: Thirty-four cases (3.7%) (14 previously reported) were G2019S carriers. No other mutations were found. Carriers were more likely to be Ashkenazi Jewish (55.9% vs 11.9%; P < .001) but did not significantly differ in any other demographic or disease characteristics. Carriers had a lower tremor score (P = .03) and were more likely to have a PIGD phenotype (92.3% vs 58.9%; P = .003). The association of the G2019S mutation with PIGD phenotype remained after controlling for disease duration and Ashkenazi Jewish ancestry (odds ratio, 17.7; P < .001). Conclusion: Early-onset Parkinson disease G2019S LRRK2 carriers are more likely to manifest the PIGD phenotype, which may have implications for disease course

SeamlessM4T-Massively Multilingual & Multimodal Machine Translation

What does it take to create the Babel Fish, a tool that can help individuals translate speech between any two languages? While recent breakthroughs in text-based models have pushed machine translation coverage beyond 200 languages, unified speech-to-speech translation models have yet to achieve similar strides. More specifically, conventional speech-to-speech translation systems rely on cascaded systems that perform translation progressively, putting high-performing unified systems out of reach. To address these gaps, we introduce SeamlessM4T, a single model that supports speech-to-speech translation, speech-to-text translation, text-to-speech translation, text-to-text translation, and automatic speech recognition for up to 100 languages. To build this, we used 1 million hours of open speech audio data to learn self-supervised speech representations with w2v-BERT 2.0. Subsequently, we created a multimodal corpus of automatically aligned speech translations. Filtered and combined with human-labeled and pseudo-labeled data, we developed the first multilingual system capable of translating from and into English for both speech and text. On FLEURS, SeamlessM4T sets a new standard for translations into multiple target languages, achieving an improvement of 20% BLEU over the previous SOTA in direct speech-to-text translation. Compared to strong cascaded models, SeamlessM4T improves the quality of into-English translation by 1.3 BLEU points in speech-to-text and by 2.6 ASR-BLEU points in speech-to-speech. Tested for robustness, our system performs better against background noises and speaker variations in speech-to-text tasks compared to the current SOTA model. Critically, we evaluated SeamlessM4T on gender bias and added toxicity to assess translation safety. Finally, all contributions in this work are open-sourced and accessible at https://github.com/facebookresearch/seamless_communicatio

A collaboratively derived environmental research agenda for Galapagos

Galápagos is one of the most pristine archipelagos in the world and its conservation relies upon research and sensible management. In recent decades both the interest in, and the needs of, the islands have increased, yet the funds and capacity for necessary research have remained limited. It has become, therefore, increasingly important to identify areas of priority research to assist decision-making in Galápagos conservation. This study identified 50 questions considered priorities for future research and management. The exercise involved the collaboration of policy makers, practitioners and researchers from more than 30 different organisations. Initially, 360 people were consulted to generate 781 questions. An established process of preworkshop voting and three rounds to reduce and reword the questions, followed by a two-day workshop, was used to produce the final 50 questions. The most common issues raised by this list of questions were human population growth, climate change and the impact of invasive alien species. These results have already been used by a range of organisations and politicians and are expected to provide the basis for future research on the islands so that its sustainability may be enhanced. </jats:p