Synchronisation and commonalities in metropolitan housing market cycles

This paper examines the degree of commonalities present in the cyclical behavior of the eight largest metropolitan housing markets in Australia. Using two techniques originally in the business cycle literature we consider the degree of synchronization present and secondly decompose the series’ into their permanent and cyclical components. Both empirical approaches reveal similar results. Sydney and Melbourne are closely related to each other and are relatively segmented from the smaller metropolitan areas. In contrast, there is substantial evidence of commonalities in the cyclical behavior of the remaining cities, especially those on the Eastern and Southern coasts of Australia

A multivariate unobserved component analysis of US housing market

Common Factors, Housing Prices, Kalman Filter, Unobserved Components, State-space, E30, G0, R31,

Is speech alignment to talkers or tasks?

Speech alignment, the tendency of individuals to subtly imitate each other’s speaking style, is often assessed by comparing a subject’s baseline and shadowed utterances to a model’s utterances often through perceptual ratings. These types of comparisons provide information about the occurrence of a change in subject’s speech, but do not indicate that this change is towards the specific shadowed model. Three studies investigated whether alignment is specific to a shadowed model. Experiment 1 involved the classic baseline to shadowed comparison to confirm that subjects did, in fact, sound more like their model when they shadowed, relative to any pre-existing similarities between a subject and model. Experiment 2 tested whether subjects’ utterances sounded more similar to the model they had shadowed or to another unshadowed model. Experiment 3 examined whether subjects’ utterances sounded more similar to the model they had shadowed or to another subject who shadowed a different model. Results of all experiments revealed that subjects sounded more similar to the model they had shadowed. This suggests that shadowing-based speech alignment is not just a change; it is a change in the direction of the shadowed model, specifically

Motor control in action: using dance to explore the intricate choreography between action perception and production in the human brain

When experienced dancers watch other dancers perform, they perceive the movement in a quantifiably different manner than nondancers. Is this simply a matter of dancers paying more attention and having greater interest in watching dance, or do quantifiable differences exist within the brains of skilled dancers compared to nondancers related to years of physical practice? Previous neurophysiological research offers insight into this question through the discovery of specialized cells in the monkey brain that are active in a similar manner when monkeys perform or observe the same movement. This discovery of so-called mirror neurons established the idea of a close correspondence between action perception and production. Since this discovery, myriad studies have focused on the relationship between action production and perception in the human brain by studying the execution and observation of simple finger or hand movements. Work with dancers, however, extends such investigations to the full-body domain and helps to uncover how individual experience shapes the links between watching and performing actions. Much of this research uses neuroscientific methods to advance understanding of not only the cerebral phenomena associated with complex action learning and observation but also the neural underpinnings of aesthetic appreciation when watching dance. The results of this work are starting to inform and mutually benefit both the scientific and artistic communities