Conceptualising 'residential investment': separating the inseparable in asset-based economies

The growth in residential real estate investment internationally since 2008 has led to an explosion of research on residential investment, across economics, sociology, housing and urban studies, geography and planning. But there remains an underlying question of what exactly is meant when we talk about ‘residential investment’. This paper analyses the way that ‘residential investment’ is used as an analytical category within different theoretical approaches to mean slightly different things, with different implications for policymakers. Further to this, we show how these different conceptualisations of investment are related to one another, in the case of the UK. The paper uses empirical material drawn from archive research on the development of the UK housing system to reflect on the vast literature on financing, financialising and investing in residential real estate. This paper makes two key contributions. Theoretically, it clarifies and questions the conceptual divisions created between different forms of residential investment. Methodologically, we demonstrate the benefits of a historical approach, which we argue reveals the path dependent nature of residential investment processes and practices

Long-Term, Seasonal, and Event-Driven Sediment Movement on East Beach, San Salvador Island, Bahamas

East Beach is a modern, medium-energy shoreline located on the northeast coast of San Salvador Island, Bahamas. Stake and horizon profiles were made at 9 sites along a 1-km section of the beach in June, 1990, and every six months thereafter through January,1992. These observations appear to confirm that East Beach is a prograding shoreline, building onto the eastern shelf of the island. Seasonally corrected volume calculations indicate that between June, 1990 and January, 1992 approximately 14,000 m3 of new sand per kilometer were added to the East Beach system, with most of the sand likely derived from the nearshore shelf area. Visual evidence for progradation could be seen in the formation of a heavily vegetated berm along the backshore, that by June, 1991 had reached a maximum height of 40 cm before its destruction by the powerful storm that hit San Salvador in late October, 1991. Seasonal topographic measurements and volume calculations indicate a minimum of 8,600 m3/km of sediment moving offshore in response to higher average wave energies in the winter, and returning to build a wide foreshore and pronounced berm during the summer months. The late October storm battered East Beach with waves that entrained meter-sized blocks of coral, cut back the primary dune line by an average of 5.1 m, and washed over approximately 1,500 m3of sediment into the primary dune swale. Storm damage was measurably less severe at northern stations, possibly because of sheltering by Northeast Point and Man Head Cay, or by baffling action of the dense patch reefs offshore, or both

Black hole collisions from Brill-Lindquist initial data: predictions of perturbation theory

The Misner initial value solution for two momentarily stationary black holes has been the focus of much numerical study. We report here analytic results for an astrophysically similar initial solution, that of Brill and Lindquist (BL). Results are given from perturbation theory for initially close holes and are compared with available numerical results. A comparison is made of the radiation generated from the BL and the Misner initial values, and the physical meaning is discussed.Comment: 11 pages, revtex3.0, 5 figure

Entropy in Black Hole Pair Production

Pair production of Reissner-Nordstrom black holes in a magnetic field can be described by a euclidean instanton. It is shown that the instanton amplitude contains an explicit factor of $e^{A/4}$, where $A$ is the area of the event horizon. This is consistent with the hypothesis that $e^{A/4}$ measures the number of black hole states.Comment: 24 pages (harvmac l mode

Phase transitions in LaFeAsO: structural, magnetic, elastic, and transport properties, heat capacity and Mossbauer spectra

We present results from a detailed experimental investigation of LaFeAsO, the parent material in the series of "FeAs" based oxypnictide superconductors. Upon cooling this material undergoes a tetragonal-orthorhombic crystallographic phase transition at ~160 K followed closely by an antiferromagnetic ordering near 145 K. Analysis of these phase transitions using temperature dependent powder X-ray and neutron diffraction measurements is presented. A magnetic moment of ~0.35 Bohr magnetons per iron is derived from Mossbauer spectra in the low temperature phase. Evidence of the structural transition is observed at temperatures well above the structural transition (up to near 200 K) in the diffraction data as well as the polycrystalline elastic moduli probed by resonant ultrasound spectroscopy measurements. The effects of the two phase transitions on the transport properties (resistivity, thermal conductivity, Seebeck coefficient, Hall coefficient), heat capacity, and magnetization of LaFeAsO are also reported, including a dramatic increase in the magnitude of the Hall coefficient below 160 K. The results suggest that the structural distortion leads to a localization of carriers on Fe, producing small local magnetic moments which subsequently order antiferromagnetically upon further cooling. Evidence of strong electron-phonon interactions in the high-temperature tetragonal phase is also observed.Comment: Revised and expanded magnetization and Mossbauer spectroscopy section. Clarified sample preparation description. This paper contains some results from arXiv:0804.0796. 10 figure

Large N Phases, Gravitational Instantons and the Nuts and Bolts of AdS Holography

Recent results in the literature concerning holography indicate that the thermodynamics of quantum gravity (at least with a negative cosmological constant) can be modeled by the large N thermodynamics of quantum field theory. We emphasize that this suggests a completely unitary evolution of processes in quantum gravity, including black hole formation and decay; and even more extreme examples involving topology change. As concrete examples which show that this correspondence holds even when the space-time is only locally asymptotically AdS, we compute the thermodynamical phase structure of the AdS-Taub-NUT and AdS-Taub-Bolt spacetimes, and compare them to a 2+1 dimensional conformal field theory (at large N) compactified on a squashed three sphere, and on the twisted plane.Comment: 20 pages, three figures. (uses harvmac.tex and epsf.tex

Charged AdS Black Holes and Catastrophic Holography

We compute the properties of a class of charged black holes in anti-de Sitter space-time, in diverse dimensions. These black holes are solutions of consistent Einstein-Maxwell truncations of gauged supergravities, which are shown to arise from the inclusion of rotation in the transverse space. We uncover rich thermodynamic phase structures for these systems, which display classic critical phenomena, including structures isomorphic to the van der Waals-Maxwell liquid-gas system. In that case, the phases are controlled by the universal `cusp' and `swallowtail' shapes familiar from catastrophe theory. All of the thermodynamics is consistent with field theory interpretations via holography, where the dual field theories can sometimes be found on the world volumes of coincident rotating branes.Comment: 19 pages, revtex, psfig, 6 multicomponent figures, typos, references and a few remarks have been repaired, and adde