Extending the Boundaries of Hospitality Education

To date, hospitality management educators have struggled to modify generic software or adapt vendor-designed industry systems as a means of bringing hospitality information systems to the classroom. Specially- designed computer-based courseware can enhance learning while extending the boundaries of the traditional hospitality classroom. The author discusses the relevance of this software to the hospitality curriculum.

Hospitality Information Systems: Intuitive, Object-Oriented, and Wireless Technology

Automated information system design and implementation is one of the fastest changing aspects of the hospitality industry. During the past several years nothing has increased the professionalism or improved the productivity within the industry more than the application of computer technology. Intuitive software applications, deemed the first step toward making computers more people-literate, object-oriented programming, intended to more accurately model reality, and wireless communications are expected to play a significant role in future technological advancement.

Re-engineering Technology: Date Mining for Clubs

With increasing competition and more demanding members, clubs need a tool to help them belter attract and retain members and predict their behavior. Data mining is such a tool. This article presents an overview of how data warehousing, data marting, and data mining can provide the foundation on which clubs can build strategies to outsmart competitors, build Ioyalty identify new members, and lower costs.

Advances in Hospitality Education: Courseware, Audiographics, and Cyberspace

Technology will play an increasingly larger role in the education of students within the hospitality curriculum. There are a significant number of emerging educational technologies aimed at changing the delivery of the entire curriculum. The development of technological platforms for multimedia instructional courseware, distance learning through audiographics, and virtual reality simulation are expected to alter and enhance the learning process while extending the boundaries of the traditional hospitality classroom.

V-Commerce: Vending Machine Technology

A Popular auxiliary service provided by hospitality businesses is automatic merchandising, more commonly known as vending. Recent advancement in vending technology (v-commerce) has changed the way vending machines are monitored, replenished, maintained, and reconciled. As the hospitality industry searches to reduce its reliance on labor intensive processes, automatic merchandising represents and effective way to provide unattended points of sale and service. Smart machines featuring quality products with high levels of auditabile control may me more appealing to the hospitality industry. While a hospitality manager does not need to have knowleds of the vending distribution channel or machine maintenance, it is important to understand available technology and the opportunity it provides for operational efficiencies and revenue enhancement.

Electronic Perception Technology Applications in Food Service

Electronic Perception Technology (EPT) enables automated equipment to gain artificial sight commonly referred to as "machine-vision” by employing specialty software and embedded sensors to create a “Visual" input field that can be used as a front-end application for transactional behavior. The authors review this new technology and present feasible future applications to the food service industry in enhancing guest services while providing a competitive advantage.

Slot Machines: Methodologies and Myths

The proliferation of legalized gaming has significantly changed the nature of the hospitality industry. While several aspects of gaming have flourished, none has become more popular, profitable, or technologically advanced as the slot machine. While more than half of all casino gambling, and earnings, is generated by slot machines, little has been written about the technology integral to these devices. The author describes the workings of computer-controlled slot machines and exposes some of the popular operating myths.

Generating an Online Bottom Line

E-commerce is an approach to achieving business goals through information technology and is quickly changing the way hospitality business is planned, monitored, and conducted. No longer do buyers and sellers need to engage in interpersonal communications for transactions to occur. The future of transaction processing, which includes cyber cash and digital checking, are directly attributable to e-commerce which provides and efficient, reliable, secure, and effective platform for conducting hospitality business on the web.

Returning to Server-Centric Hospitality System Applications

Application service provider models represent an alternative to in-house information systems and are gaining favor within the hospitality industry: The models, which place technical system components at a remote site, are described as server-centric. ASPs allow hospitality management to share investment dollars, system costs, and technical staff expenditure with an ASP operator, thereby concentrating on providing enhanced guest services. Although considered a viable alternative to in-house processing, not everyone agrees this is a favorable trend.

Radiative forcing of natural forest disturbances

Forest disturbances are major sources of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, and therefore impact global climate. Biogeophysical attributes, such as surface albedo (reflectivity), further control the climate-regulating properties of forests. Using both tower-based and remotely sensed data sets, we show that natural disturbances from wildfire, beetle outbreaks, and hurricane wind throw can significantly alter surface albedo, and the associated radiative forcing either offsets or enhances the CO2 forcing caused by reducing ecosystem carbon sequestration over multiple years. In the examined cases, the radiative forcing from albedo change is on the same order of magnitude as the CO2 forcing. The net radiative forcing resulting from these two factors leads to a local heating effect in a hurricane-damaged mangrove forest in the subtropics, and a cooling effect following wildfire and mountain pine beetle attack in boreal forests with winter snow. Although natural forest disturbances currently represent less than half of gross forest cover loss, that area will probably increase in the future under climate change, making it imperative to represent these processes accurately in global climate models.

The L-31E Surface Water Rediversion Project Final Report: Implementation, Results, and Recommendations

Throughout the Biscayne Bay watershed, existing coastal wetland communities have been cut off from sheet flow for decades. With the expectation that reconnection of these wetlands to upstream water sources would alter existing hydrologic conditions and recreate a more natural sheet flow to Biscayne National Park, a demonstration project on freshwater rediversion was undertaken. The objectives of the project were to document the effects of freshwater diversion on: (a) swamp and nearshore water chemistry and hydrology; (b) soil development processes; (c) macrophyte and benthic algal community composition, structure and production; (d) abundance of epiphytic and epibenthic invertebrates; (e) zonation, production, and phenology of primary producers in the nearshore environment, and (f) exchanges of nutrients and particulates between nearshore and mangrove ecosystems.