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Because of increased pressure to find high-value capital investment opportunities within a climate of declining state support, dissatisfaction with the availability of relevant data to inform management decisions, challenges with integrating space planning components within institutional master plans, and perceived discontinuity between master plans and resulting capital projects, the USG chancellor launched an initiative to rethink the system's approach to space utilization through a study with six pilot institutions. The major space types are classrooms; laboratories (including teaching labs, open or computing labs, and research labs); offices; study (including library); specialized (a non-thematic collection including athletics, animal, clinical, greenhouse, demonstration, and other spaces); general use (predominantly student-life spaces including assembly, exhibition, dining, lounge, merchandising, and recreation); support (including parking structures); health care; and residential.

Loyalty programs are extremely common relationship marketing tools. Their popularity continues to grow, despite limited insight as to what makes some loyalty programs overwhelmingly successful while others fail to prove their worth to managers. Composed of two essays, this dissertation aims to build knowledge on the effectiveness of loyalty programs. The first essay is positioned at the confluence of two literature streams: loyalty programs and service failure and recovery. The essay identifies deficiencies shared by these research streams and explores the influence of loyalty program membership on customer outcomes following service failures. The empirical findings suggest that loyalty program membership attenuates the negative impact of service failures. That is, loyalty program members react to service failures less negatively than nonmember customers. The second essay addresses calls for research examining the influence of cultural factors on consumer preferences surrounding loyalty programs. In this essay, status is viewed as a personal value that is prioritized to a varying degree across individual consumers. The empirical findings show that consumers who prioritize the achievement of status have a stronger preference for brands and firms that offer loyalty programs. Overall, this dissertation extends the understanding of how and under what circumstances loyalty programs effectively influence customer attitudes and purchase behavior.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to promote a broadened view of service research and to demonstrate a path for integrating interdisciplinary perspectives with services marketing. Design/methodology/approach Two major streams of service literature are reviewed, highlighting key conceptual developments in each. Through synthesis of prior literature, a research framework and agenda are developed. Findings The findings indicate that major service research areas have been extensively explored, yet service literature is fragmented on key concepts. This can make it challenging to collaborate across disciplines. This work develops a framework for integrating concepts across disciplines to foster more impactful work. Originality/value This work presents a unique framework for integrating interdisciplinary perspectives with services marketing. Moreover, a research agenda for the specific purpose of promoting collaboration across disciplines is presented.

Given a self-similar structure in codes and de Bruijn sequences, recursive techniques may be used to analyze and construct them. Batch codes partition the indices of code words into m buckets, where recovery of t symbols is accomplished by accessing at most tau in each bucket. This finds use in the retrieval of information spread over several devices. We introduce the concept of optimal batch codes, showing that binary Hamming codes and first order Reed-Muller codes are optimal. Then we study batch properties of binary Reed-Muller codes which have order less than half their length.Cartesian codes are defined by the evaluation of polynomials at a subset of points in Fqμ. We partition Fqμ into buckets defined by the quotient with a subspace V. Several properties equivalent to V ∩ = 0 for all i,j between 1 and mu are explored. With this framework, a code in Fqμ-1 capable of reconstructing mu indices is expanded to one in Fqμ capable of reconstructing mu+1 indices. Using a base case in Fq3, we are able to prove batch properties for codes in Fqμ. We generalize this to Cartesian Codes with a limit on the degree mu of the polynomials.De Bruijn sequences are cyclic sequences of length qn that contain every q-ary word of length n exactly once. The pseudorandom properties of such sequences make them useful for stream ciphers. Under a particular homomorphism, the preimages of a binary de Bruijn sequence form two cycles. We examine a method for identifying points where these sequences may be joined to make a de Bruijn sequence of order n. Using the recursive structure of this construction, we are able to calculate sums of subsequences in O(n4 log(n)) time, and the location of a word in O(n5 log(n)) time. Together, these functions allow us to check the validity of any potential toggle point, which provides a method for efficiently generating a recursive specification. Each successful step takes O(k5 log(k)), for k from 3 to n.

The process depended on multiple peer review sessions during which approaches were compared, synthesized, and made uniform and preliminary results were reviewed, compared, and fine-tuned. 3.0 THE GEORGIA DATA 3.1 TAXONOMY Traditional space planning methods divide college and university spaces into distinct categories at the level of individual rooms, based on the room's primary use, using the Postsecondary Education Facilities Inventory and Classification Manual (FICM) (Cyros and Korb 2006). [...]while the 350/680 distinction remains at the FICM level-and is therefore available when specific institutions need to plan spaces for individual units-these categories are merged at the overlay level so that the distinction is irrelevant from a strategic space utilization perspective.\\n Our first argument hinges on evidence that the United States has a fundamental over-supply of universities.

This dissertation takes a distributional approach to examining dietary quality in the United States. Diet quality is a direct input to health, is often used as a proxy for well-being, and is an outcome variable for a wide variety of economic interventions. This makes diet quality a particularly important, yet understudied, outcome for program evaluation and describing food bundles that individuals choose. The first chapter describes the evolution of adult dietary quality in the U.S. over the last two decades. Contrary to popular wisdom, there have been statistically significant improvements at all levels of diet quality. For the population as a whole, we find significant improvements across all levels of diet quality. Further, we find improvements for both low-income and higher-income individuals alike. Counterfactual distributions of dietary quality are constructed to investigate the extent to which observed improvements can be attributed to changes in the nutritional content of foods and to changes in population characteristics. We find that 63% of the improvement for all adults can be attributed to changes in food formulation and demographics. Changes in food formulation account for a substantially larger percentage of the dietary improvement within the lower-income population (19.6%) as compared to their higher-income counterpart (6.4%). The sheer myriad of overlapping policies and public awareness initiatives during this time period make it difficult to pin down the exact causes behind such improvements. This chapter motivates two program evaluation studies in the two chapters that follow. The second chapter estimates distributional effects of food consumed at school and away from home on child dietary quality. Using a fixed-effects quantile estimator, two non-consecutive days of food intake are used to identify the effect of eating away from home and at school. I find considerable heterogeneity in the estimated impacts. The study finds that food away from home, as compared to home-prepared food, has a negative impact on the distribution of dietary quality except at low quantiles. Main results suggest that school food has both positive and negative impacts across the distribution of dietary quality. I find positive impacts on dietary quality at low quantiles of the outcome distribution, whereas food from school has a negative impact at the upper end of the distribution of diet quality. While food consumed under the National School Lunch and Breakfast Programs may not benefit every child, especially the average child, it does improve the diets of many children who otherwise would have poorer dietary quality. The implication is that U.S. schools are fertile grounds to improve nutrition skill formation, especially for the most nutritionally disadvantaged. This final chapter estimates the effect of replacing food assistance benefits, which typically come in the form of a food voucher, for an equal value of cash on the quantity and quality of food consumed in a household. We utilize an experiment in which a portion of beneficiaries were chosen at random to receive their benefits in the form of cash. We take a distributional approach because we believe it is important to analyze low-consuming households separate from high-consuming households. We find some evidence that a cash system would increase kilocalorie consumption in the portion of the distribution below recommended levels of consumption and decrease consumption in the portion of the distribution well above any reasonable threshold. This finding implies that a cash transfer system may both alleviate food insecurity and decrease overconsumption. The cash system appears to have a positive impact on the distribution of dietary quality in quantiles above 40. Virtually all of the improvement in quality comes from a decrease in consumption of less-healthy foods by the cash receiving group. Overall, these findings imply that beneficiaries are no worse off under a cash transfer system and in fact, may be better off.

The nuclear organelle is the defining feature of eukaryotic organisms. Besides harboring the genome, the nucleus separates fundamental nuclear activities occurring in the nucleoplasm, including gene regulation, DNA repair, and RNA processing, from the cytoplasm. The nucleus also shows a high degree of internal spatial organization and it is becoming increasing clear that knowledge of nuclear organization is vital for a comprehensive understanding of diverse nuclear processes. Certain cell types are correlated with specific nuclear shapes and nuclear volumes. Routine nuclear morphological differentiation is tied to cell specialization and is thought to be an integral component of developmental gene expression programs. In plants a wide array of nuclear morphologies are present within a single tissue, and in certain cell types nuclei migrate bi-directionally throughout the cell. However, very little is known about the molecular determinants of nuclear morphology, organization and dynamics in plants. The Arabidopsis LINC (LITTLE NUCLEI) genes encode a novel family of plant-specific coiled-coil proteins that are important determinants of nuclear morphology and organization. A loss-of-function genetic analysis of the LINC genes has revealed that certain higher-order linc mutants, e.g., linc1-1 linc2-1, linc1-1 linc3-1, and lincl-1 linc3-1 linc4-1 exhibit a range of whole-plant morphological phenotypes. linc1-1 and linc2-1 mutations also cause nuclear abnormalities, including reduced nuclear size, altered nuclear shape, and decreased numbers of heterochromatin-rich chromocenters. In addition, the LINC proteins influence the coupling of nuclear DNA content with nuclear volume, as shown by an increase in nuclear DNA density in the linc1-1 linc2-1 double mutant. Analysis of LINC1 and LINC2 gene expression patterns reveals strong expression within proliferating tissues, suggesting the LINC proteins function at an early stage in nuclear development. All LINC proteins examined localize to the nucleus; however, individual LINC proteins maintain unique sub-nuclear localizations reflecting a range of possible nuclear functions. Furthermore, the linc1 mutation was utilized to address the causal relationship between nuclear migration and differentiation. Despite a block in nuclear shape differentiation, linc1 mutant nuclei still migrate normally. The results described here provide some of the first steps toward a more complete understanding of nuclear morphology and organization in plants.

Cabinet and Downing Street papers from 1976 are released from the National Archive today. Examines what they reveal about: the IMF crisis and the scrapping of Polaris; relations with Argentina over the Falklands Islands; political advisers; and official residences. (Author abstract - amended)