The association between types of food access and rising adult obesity rates is increasingly recognized, as a complement to the effects of declining physical activity. Previous studies have examined the effects on obesity of only a limited set of store types, such as grocery stores, fast food restaurants and big-box retailers, and they have ignored that certain behavioral factors, such as could ...

The success of fast food chains is used by Ritzer as a metaphor for some general trends characterizing contemporary American society.We have become a nation driven by concerns for rationality, speed, and efficiency that are so well illustrated by the McDonalds’ style of operation. Food, packaging, and service are designed to move quickly and cheaply through and out of these restaurants, giving ...

Organic scintillators are widely used for fast neutron detection and spectroscopy. Several effects complicate the interpretation of results from detectors based upon these materials. First, fast neutrons will often leave a detector before depositing all of their energy within it. Second, fast neutrons will typically scatter several times within a detector, and there is a non-proportional relati...

In a recent and storied paper, David Card and Alan Krueger (1994) claim to find evidence that the 1992 New Jersey minimum wage hike raised the level of employment in fast food restaurants in that state (although not significantly by conventional statistical standards). In a response widely-cited in the press, David Neumark and William Wascher (1995), using data on payroll hours, claim to show t...

We present a simple and robust method for computing skeletons for arbitrary planar objects and centerlines for 3D objects. We augment the Fast Marching Method (FMM) widely used in level set applications 11 by computing the paramterized boundary location every pixel came from during the boundary evolution. The resulting parameter field is then thresholded to produce the skeleton branches created...

The relatively service-driven restaurant industry is becoming more important in generating income for many Asian countries and hence the service performance of the restaurants must be well understood and managed. The key determinants for restaurant service quality need to be identified, especially for the important segment such as youth customers. Therefore, this paper aims to explore the impor...

A novel approach for scalable length Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) in single Processing Element (single PE) architecture has been developed. Scalable length FFT design meets the different lengths requirement of FFT operation in OFDM system [1]. An efficient mechanism that named Interleaved Rotated Data Allocation (IRDA) to replace multiple-port memory with single-port memory has also been propos...

This paper discusses the need and suitability for an Empirical Modelling approach for the provision of business optimisation support. This is with particular reference to the fast food industry, with a model of this environment being created. Its limitations, and those of EM as a whole in this area are also discussed.