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The purpose of the current study is to profile Orlando and Florida culinary fans and compare them to culinary critics on several factors, including sociodemographics, psychographics, and travel behavior characteristics, and to identify potential factors that explain visitors' tendency to promote or criticize the cuisine of a destination. The study also seeks to identify the image attributes that explain the likelihood to visit for culinary fans and critics.

Online survey responses from 4,082 participants were analyzed using Qualtrics for survey design and Amazon's Mechanical Turk for data collection.

Demographic differences between culinary fans and critics were identified and significant relationships between perceptions of a destination's cuisine and various elements of the visitor experience were found.

The current study extends the literature on the characteristics of culinary tourists by showing a significant relationship between perceptions of a destination's cuisine and various elements of the visitor experience, such as destination image, satisfaction, number of past trips, and revisit intentions. Future studies should look at a greater number of distinct and geographically diverse destinations to test the generalizability of the current study's findings.

The results of this study provide implication for destination marketers in general and for those of Orlando and Florida in particular, especially in using cuisine as a potential core offering rather than a peripheral tourism product.

This study is believed to be the first to compare culinary fans and culinary critics, thereby extending the literature and demonstrating several differences between the two groups.

Marine transportation has been faced with an increasing demand for containerized cargo during the past decade. Marine container terminals (MCTs), as the facilities for connecting seaborne and inland transportation, are expected to handle the increasing amount of containers, delivered by vessels. Berth scheduling plays an important role for the total throughput of MCTs as well as the overall effectiveness of the MCT operations. This study aims to propose a novel island-based metaheuristic algorithm to solve the berth scheduling problem and minimize the total cost of serving the arriving vessels at the MCT.

A universal island-based metaheuristic algorithm (UIMA) was proposed in this study, aiming to solve the spatially constrained berth scheduling problem. The UIMA population was divided into four sub-populations (i.e. islands). Unlike the canonical island-based algorithms that execute the same metaheuristic on each island, four different population-based metaheuristics are adopted within the developed algorithm to search the islands, including the following: evolutionary algorithm (EA), particle swarm optimization (PSO), estimation of distribution algorithm (EDA) and differential evolution (DE). The adopted population-based metaheuristic algorithms rely on different operators, which facilitate the search process for superior solutions on the UIMA islands.

The conducted numerical experiments demonstrated that the developed UIMA algorithm returned near-optimal solutions for the small-size problem instances. As for the large-size problem instances, UIMA was found to be superior to the EA, PSO, EDA and DE algorithms, which were executed in isolation, in terms of the obtained objective function values at termination. Furthermore, the developed UIMA algorithm outperformed various single-solution-based metaheuristic algorithms (including variable neighborhood search, tabu search and simulated annealing) in terms of the solution quality. The maximum UIMA computational time did not exceed 306 s.

Some of the previous berth scheduling studies modeled uncertain vessel arrival times and/or handling times, while this study assumed the vessel arrival and handling times to be deterministic.

The developed UIMA algorithm can be used by the MCT operators as an efficient decision support tool and assist with a cost-effective design of berth schedules within an acceptable computational time.

A novel island-based metaheuristic algorithm is designed to solve the spatially constrained berth scheduling problem. The proposed island-based algorithm adopts several types of metaheuristic algorithms to cover different areas of the search space. The considered metaheuristic algorithms rely on different operators. Such feature is expected to facilitate the search process for superior solutions.

Peter Christian (Chris) Murphy had worked his way up the “food chain” at AT&T for 19 years, culminating in his position as Sales Center Vice President for South Florida. When he and a coworker realized there was an opportunity in the marketplace for a small, nimble company to take advantage of emerging communications technology that a stodgy, lumbering corporation would have trouble integrating into its service package, Chris decided to jump into an entrepreneurial opportunity.

Public safety personnel (law enforcement, firefighters, emergency medical services and dispatchers) face work environments which are high stress. These can lead to burnout, secondary traumatic stress and a reduction of compassion satisfaction. However, very little is known about what individual and work factors influence these negative coping mechanisms in public safety personnel. It is also unknown how perceived organizational and coworker support, debriefing methods, or individual characteristics are associated with the aforementioned coping mechanisms. The differences between these fields are also unknown. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

A cross-sectional administration of surveys to Florida public safety personnel was done. A total of 1,360 public safety individuals completed the survey. Three regression analyses were carried out, utilizing the three Professional Quality of Life Version 5 subscales as the dependent variables. The Perceived Coworker Support Survey, Survey of Perceived Organizational Support, the Brief Resilience Survey and questions regarding debriefing practices were included.

Public safety personnel cannot be treated as a singular population for many things. An exception of this was that perceived organizational support and psychological resilience were associated with positive outcomes, albeit, to varying degrees in all fields. The other individual and organizational factors had very distinct impacts on the varying fields.

There are limitations due to the nature of cross-sectional survey design and due to the sample size.

This study displays statistical relationships between factors which public safety agencies could use to increase employee job satisfaction and potentially reduce turnover. It was the only study the authors could find which include dispatchers when comparing these four public safety fields.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the decision to contract school meal services and the associated nutritional and financial impacts on school districts. Given the increase in the use of competitive contracting of public school meal services and the critical role that school meal services play in public health, this is an important subject to investigate.

A case study was performed using one US school district with privatized food service. Face-to-face interviews were conducted with school food service decision makers. Other data collection included the analysis of public documents such as the school district’s budgets and financial statement reports (the cost per lunch and breakfast meals, the cost for labor, contract, transport, supplies and food expenses) and school food service policies (contract policies). Supplementary data pertaining to district social-demographic profiles and full-time equivalent enrollment figures were also collected from state departments.

Analysis of interviews revealed that positive financial motivations and impacts were dominant factors related to contracting food services in the district. A significant finding was the relatively short turnaround in the district’s negative financial situation as a result of contracting out the food services. These findings provide valuable insight and support for rural school districts in similar negative financial situations seeking to contract out food services.

Many studies have examined contracting out of technical services, such as transport and waste management, and social services, such as correctional services and health; however, there is a lack of studies documenting the effects of contracting out of school meal services.

This study fills a gap in previous research by investigating differences between the short- and long-run aftermarket performances in a sample of emerging v. nonemerging industries.