Reformed county government structure and service delivery performance: An integrated study of Florida counties

The most fundamental and challenging function of government is the effective and efficient delivery of services to local taxpayers and businesses. Counties, once known as the ���dark continent��� of American government, have recently become a major player in the provision of services. Population growth and suburbanization have increased service demands while the counties' role as service provider to incorporated residents has also expanded due to additional federal and state mandates. County governments are under unprecedented pressure and scrutiny to meet citizens' and elected officials' demands for high quality, and equitable delivery of services at the lowest possible cost while contending with anti-tax sentiments, greatly decreased state and federal support, and exceptionally costly and complex health and public safety problems. ^ This study tested the reform government theory proposition that reformed structures of county government positively correlate with efficient service delivery. A county government reformed index was developed for this dissertation comprised of form of government, home-rule status, method of election, number of government jurisdictions, and number of elected officials. The county government reform index and a measure of relative structural fragmentation were used to assess their impact on two measures of service output: mean county road pavement condition and county road maintenance expenditures. The study's multi-level design triangulated results from different data sources and methods of analysis. Data were collected from semi-structured interviews of county officials, secondary archival sources, and a survey of 544 elected and appointed officials from Florida's 67 counties. The results of the three sources of data converged in finding that reformed Florida counties are more likely than unreformed counties to provide better road service and to spend less on road expenditures. The same results were found for unfragmented Florida counties. Because both the county government reform index and the fragmentation variables were specified acknowledging the reform theory as well as elements from the public-choice model, the results help explain contradicting findings in the urban service research. ^ Therefore, as suggested by the corroborated findings of this dissertation, reformed as well as unfragmented counties are better providers of road maintenance service and do so in a less costly manner. These findings hold although the variables were specified to capture theoretical arguments from the consolidated as well as the public-choice theories suggesting a way to advance the debate from the consolidated-fragmented dichotomy of urban governance. ^

The Impact of Hotel Size and Service Type on Employee Job Satisfaction

There has been no research on the impact of hotel size and service type on employee satisfaction. Yet the distinction between service types (limited service and full service) has become commonplace and the dynamics and organization of these hotels are decidedly different. This study finds that differences are evident in certain aspects of employee satisfaction based on size and service type.

Timeshare Owner Preferences - An Analysis of Program and Service Relationships during Recessionary Times

Since the 1970s various industry studies have indicated that the vacation ownership industry has enjoyed unprecedented growth in unit sales, resort growth, and the number of owners (American Resort Devleopment Association [ARDA], 2007; ARDA, 2009a; ARDA, 2009b). However, due to the recent economic downturn these growth metrics are no longer obtainable. This external impact has caused developers to retrench and therefore reflect upon their existing product and service offerings, financial metrics, and consumer markets (ARDA, 2010a; ARDA 2010b). The crux of these findings indicates that the industry has shifted to maintaining and enhancing product and service offerings as a reaction to changing economic conditions. The findings reported in the body of this manuscript represent product and service preferences as collected from a random data pull of their existing ownership base. The study also revealed current preferences of timeshare owners with relation to services provided and products/amenities offered. Management implications and limitations of the current study are discussed.

The Influence of Social Responsibility Image Relative to Product and Service Quality on Brand Loyalty: An Exploratory Study of Quick-service Restaurants

Social responsibility (SR) is becoming an increasingly significant component of many firms��� strategic planning decisions. Research has shown that consumers tend to reward socially responsible behavior. However, there has been little testing of the construct in the hospitality industry. Additionally, when other important variables that influence consumer brand loyalty are considered, will brand social responsibility image (BSRI) still play a significant role? This study investigates the importance of SR and its impact on brand loyalty, relative to product quality and service quality in the quick-service restaurant industry. The authors were also interested to learn whether BSRI impacted consumers' image of product and service quality. It was found that BSRI had a positive impact on brand loyalty, product quality, and service quality. However, product quality was a significantly stronger predictor of brand loyalty than BSRI. Where the vast majority of studies of SR have utilized scenario analysis of hypothetical firms, this study utilizes consumers' perceptions of a real-world firm.

Event mining for system and service management

Modern IT infrastructures are constructed by large scale computing systems and administered by IT service providers. Manually maintaining such large computing systems is costly and inefficient. Service providers often seek automatic or semi-automatic methodologies of detecting and resolving system issues to improve their service quality and efficiency. This dissertation investigates several data-driven approaches for assisting service providers in achieving this goal. The detailed problems studied by these approaches can be categorized into the three aspects in the service workflow: 1) preprocessing raw textual system logs to structural events; 2) refining monitoring configurations for eliminating false positives and false negatives; 3) improving the efficiency of system diagnosis on detected alerts. Solving these problems usually requires a huge amount of domain knowledge about the particular computing systems. The approaches investigated by this dissertation are developed based on event mining algorithms, which are able to automatically derive part of that knowledge from the historical system logs, events and tickets. ^ In particular, two textual clustering algorithms are developed for converting raw textual logs into system events. For refining the monitoring configuration, a rule based alert prediction algorithm is proposed for eliminating false alerts (false positives) without losing any real alert and a textual classification method is applied to identify the missing alerts (false negatives) from manual incident tickets. For system diagnosis, this dissertation presents an efficient algorithm for discovering the temporal dependencies between system events with corresponding time lags, which can help the administrators to determine the redundancies of deployed monitoring situations and dependencies of system components. To improve the efficiency of incident ticket resolving, several KNN-based algorithms that recommend relevant historical tickets with resolutions for incoming tickets are investigated. Finally, this dissertation offers a novel algorithm for searching similar textual event segments over large system logs that assists administrators to locate similar system behaviors in the logs. Extensive empirical evaluation on system logs, events and tickets from real IT infrastructures demonstrates the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed approaches.^

The Performance and Service Life Prediction of High Performance Concrete in Sulfate and Acidic Environments

Concrete substructures are often subjected to environmental deterioration, such as sulfate and acid attack, which leads to severe damage and causes structure degradation or even failure. In order to improve the durability of concrete, the High Performance Concrete (HPC) has become widely used by partially replacing cement with pozzolanic materials. However, HPC degradation mechanisms in sulfate and acidic environments are not completely understood. It is therefore important to evaluate the performance of the HPC in such conditions and predict concrete service life by establishing degradation models. This study began with a review of available environmental data in the State of Florida. A total of seven bridges have been inspected. Concrete cores were taken from these bridge piles and were subjected for microstructural analysis using Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM). Ettringite is found to be the products of sulfate attack in sulfate and acidic condition. In order to quantitatively analyze concrete deterioration level, an image processing program is designed using Matlab to obtain quantitative data. Crack percentage (Acrack/Asurface) is used to evaluate concrete deterioration. Thereafter, correlation analysis was performed to find the correlation between five related variables and concrete deterioration. Environmental sulfate concentration and bridge age were found to be positively correlated, while environmental pH level was found to be negatively correlated. Besides environmental conditions, concrete property factor was also included in the equation. It was derived from laboratory testing data. Experimental tests were carried out implementing accelerated expansion test under controlled environment. Specimens of eight different mix designs were prepared. The effect of pozzolanic replacement rate was taken into consideration in the empirical equation. And the empirical equation was validated with existing bridges. Results show that the proposed equations compared well with field test results with a maximum deviation of �� 20%. Two examples showing how to use the proposed equations are provided to guide the practical implementation. In conclusion, the proposed approach of relating microcracks to deterioration is a better method than existing diffusion and sorption models since sulfate attack cause cracking in concrete. Imaging technique provided in this study can also be used to quantitatively analyze concrete samples.

Soviet and Western bloc competition in the less developed world and the collapse of D��tente

The purpose of my dissertation was to examine the competition between the U.S.-led Western bloc and the Soviet bloc in the less developed world during D��tente. I assessed whether or not the Soviet bloc pushed for strategic gains in the less developed world in the middle-to-late 1970's and whether this contributed to the U.S. decision to abandon D��tente in 1979. I made the attempt to test the international relations theory of balance of threat realism (Walt, 1992). I accomplished the test in two ways. First, I measured the foreign aid allocations (military and economic) made by each respective bloc towards the Third World by using a quantitative approach. Second, I examined U.S. archives using the process-tracing/historical method. The U.S. archives gave me the ability to evaluate how U.S. decision-makers and U.S. intelligence agencies interpreted the actions of the Soviet bloc. They also gave me the chance to examine the U.S. response as we evaluated the policies that were pushed by key U.S. decision-makers and intelligence agencies. On the question of whether or not the Soviet bloc was aggressive, the quantitative evidence suggested that it was not. Instead, the evidence found the Western-bloc to have been more aggressive in the less developed world. The U.S. archives also showed Soviet actions to have been defensive. Key U.S. decision-makers and intelligence agencies attested to this. Finally, the archives show that U.S. officials pushed for aggressive actions against the Third World during the final years of D��tente. Thus, balance of threat realism produced an incorrect assessment that U.S. aggression in the late 1970's was a response to Soviet aggression during D��tente. The evidence suggests structural Marxism and domestic politics can better explain U.S./Western actions. The aggressive foreign aid allocations of the West, coupled with evidence of U.S. decision-makers/agencies vehemently concerned about the long-term prospects of the West, strengthened structural Marxism. Domestic politics can also claim to explain the actions of U.S. decision-makers. I found extensive archival evidence of bureaucratic inter-agency conflict between the State Department and other intelligence agencies in areas of strategic concern to the U.S.