Private Placement and Share Price Reaction: Evidence from the Australian Biotechnology and Health Care Sector

This paper analyses Private Placements for the Australian biotechnology sector. Private placement is one of the favoured methods of secondary equity offering around the world. However, it is also the least studied corporate financing mechanism. A major issue around private placement is the impact of issuance to a selected group of institutional and/or high net worth sophisticated investors and the high direct costs of doing so. We first employ en event study methodology to separate out the large and small placement effects and short and long run effects. Given Australia’s weaker regulatory environment, we find significant negative cumulative abnormal return following private placements in the short term supporting the price pressure hypothesis with our main sample and with large private placement issues. Consistent with current empirical studies, mixed evidence regarding the directional impact was also observed as small issue exhibited positive price effects. We then hypothesize a model to measure and test the key factors identified in the literature. The model captures and explains strong medium term cumulative abnormal return effects and these effects are quite different between small and large placements.private placement, event study, price effect, price pressure

Alternating-Gradient Focusing of the Benzonitrile-Argon Van der Waals Complex

We report on the focusing and guiding of the van der Waals complex formed between benzonitrile molecules (C$_6$H$_5$CN) and argon atoms in a cold molecular beam using an ac electric quadrupole guide. The distribution of quantum states in the guided beam is non-thermal, because the transmission efficiency depends on the state-dependent effective dipole moment in the applied electric fields. At a specific ac frequency, however, the excitation spectrum can be described by a thermal distribution at a rotational temperature of 0.8 K. From the observed transmission characteristics and a combination of trajectory and Stark-energy calculations we conclude that the permanent electric dipole moment of benzonitrile remains unchanged upon the attachment of the argon atom to within \pm5%. By exploiting the different dipole-moment-to-mass (\mu/m) ratios of the complex and the benzonitrile monomer, transmission can be selectively suppressed for or, in the limit of 0 K rotational temperature, restricted to the complex.Comment: to be published in JC

Real Estate Equity Investments and the Institutional Lender: Nothing Ventured, Nothing Gained

We consider a setup in which the channel from Alice to Bob is less noisy than the channel from Eve to Bob. We show that there exist encoding and decoding which accomplish error correction and authentication simultaneously; that is, Bob is able to correctly decode a message coming from Alice and reject a message coming from Eve with high probability. The system does not require any secret key shared between Alice and Bob, provides information theoretic security, and can safely be composed with other protocols in an arbitrary context

Applying Process-Oriented Data Science to Dentistry

Background: Healthcare services now often follow evidence-based principles, so technologies such as process and data mining will help inform their drive towards optimal service delivery. Process mining (PM) can help the monitoring and reporting of this service delivery, measure compliance with guidelines, and assess effectiveness. In this research, PM extracts information about clinical activity recorded in dental electronic health records (EHRs) converts this into process-models providing stakeholders with unique insights to the dental treatment process. This thesis addresses a gap in prior research by demonstrating how process analytics can enhance our understanding of these processes and the effects of changes in strategy and policy over time. It also emphasises the importance of a rigorous and documented methodological approach often missing from the published literature. Aim: Apply the emerging technology of PM to an oral health dataset, illustrating the value of the data in the dental repository, and demonstrating how it can be presented in a useful and actionable manner to address public health questions. A subsidiary aim is to present the methodology used in this research in a way that provides useful guidance to future applications of dental PM. Objectives: Review dental and healthcare PM literature establishing state-of-the-art. Evaluate existing PM methods and their applicability to this research’s dataset. Extend existing PM methods achieving the aims of this research. Apply PM methods to the research dataset addressing public health questions. Document and present this research’s methodology. Apply data-mining, PM, and data-visualisation to provide insights into the variable pathways leading to different outcomes. Identify the data needed for PM of a dental EHR. Identify challenges to PM of dental EHR data. Methods: Extend existing PM methods to facilitate PM research in public health by detailing how data extracts from a dental EHR can be effectively managed, prepared, and used for PM. Use existing dental EHR and PM standards to generate a data reference model for effective PM. Develop a data-quality management framework. Results: Comparing the outputs of PM to established care-pathways showed that the dataset facilitated generation of high-level pathways but was less suitable for detailed guidelines. Used PM to identify the care pathway preceding a dental extraction under general anaesthetic and provided unique insights into this and the effects of policy decisions around school dental screenings. Conclusions: Research showed that PM and data-mining techniques can be applied to dental EHR data leading to fresh insights about dental treatment processes. This emerging technology along with established data mining techniques, should provide valuable insights to policy makers such as principal and chief dental officers to inform care pathways and policy decisions

Conformational properties of linear polymers at a porous interface : a Monte Carlo simulation study

In many separation processes e.g. electrophoresis, chromatography, and membrane ultrafiltration, polymers being separated are able to deform in order to enter a narrow pore. This has implications for, for example, molecular weight cut off (MWCO) experiments where typically linear polymers like polydextran of PEG are used to measure the pore sizes of ultrafiltration membranes. The study reported in this thesis has, therefore, concentrated on the deformation of linear polymers at their entry into a pore. Pore entry was studied by means of Monte Carlo Bias simulations. Linear, flexible chains measuring 50 repeat units were used to obtain energetic and conformation related properties of partially penetrated polymers. Their values were compared to their unconfined and completely confined values

Effects of 1,25-dihydroxyvitamin D3 and parathyroid hormone on bovine monocyte-mediated bone degradation and mitogen-induced lymphocyte DNA synthesis

1,25-Dihydroxyvitamin D[subscript]3 (calcitriol) is an immunoregulatory steriod hormone that suppresses interleukin-2 (IL-2) production and inhibits mitogen-induced DNA synthesis in lymphocytes. In these studies, I evaluated the effect of in vitro and in vivo administration of calcitriol on DNA synthesis in bovine peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBM). Calcitriol inhibited DNA synthesis of in vivo phytohemagglutinin (PHA)- and pokeweed mitogen (PWM)-stimulated PBM, but the effects of concanavalin A (ConA)-stimulated PBM were dependent on initial rates of DNA synthesis. PBM from cows with low proliferative response to ConA were stimulated significantly by calcitriol, whereas PBM from cows with high proliferative responses were unaffected by calcitriol addition. DNA synthesis was significantly enhanced by calcitriol when increasing amounts of monocytes were added to low density cultures of nonadherent PBM cells that had low initial proliferative response to ConA. DNA synthesis was inhibited by calcitriol under all conditions of monocyte additions to high density cultures of nonadherent PBM cells that had high initial proliferative response to ConA. Increasing the number of monocytes added, however, significantly attenuated the calcitriol-induced inhibition of DNA synthesis. In vivo administration of calcitriol enhanced in vitro DNA synthesis of PHA- and ConA-induced PBM, and inhibited PWM-induced PBM DNA synthesis. These studies demonstrate that calcitriol induces both stimulatory and inhibitory effects on DNA synthesis of mitogen-induced PBM that are dependent on mitogen, culture conditions, and mode of calcitriol administration;These studies also examined the effect of the bone calcium mobilizing hormones, parathyroid hormone (PTH) and calcitriol, on in vitro monocyte-mediated bond degradation. Monocytes degrade devitalized bone in vitro and are found in areas of bone-resorbing osteoclasts and chronic inflammation. PTH administration increased monocyte-mediated bone degradation, whereas calcitriol administration had no effect. PTH administration also enhanced production of hydrogen peroxide by monocytes on the same day as peak increase of monocyte-mediated bone degradation, thus suggesting an inflammatory-type mechanism for PTH induction of monocyte-mediated bone degradation

Laser-induced 3D alignment and orientation of quantum-state-selected molecules

A strong inhomogeneous static electric field is used to spatially disperse a rotationally cold supersonic beam of 2,6-difluoroiodobenzene molecules according to their rotational quantum state. The molecules in the lowest lying rotational states are selected and used as targets for 3-dimensional alignment and orientation. The alignment is induced in the adiabatic regime with an elliptically polarized, intense laser pulse and the orientation is induced by the combined action of the laser pulse and a weak static electric field. We show that the degree of 3-dimensional alignment and orientation is strongly enhanced when rotationally state-selected molecules, rather than molecules in the original molecular beam, are used as targets.Comment: 8 pages, 7 figures; v2: minor update

Piezo activated mode tracking system for widely tunable mode-hop-free external cavity mid-IR semiconductor lasers

A widely tunable, mode-hop-free semiconductor laser operating in the mid-IR comprises a QCL laser chip having an effective QCL cavity length, a diffraction grating defining a grating angle and an external cavity length with respect to said chip, and means for controlling the QCL cavity length, the external cavity length, and the grating angle. The laser of claim 1 wherein said chip may be tuned over a range of frequencies even in the absence of an anti-reflective coating. The diffraction grating is controllably pivotable and translatable relative to said chip and the effective QCL cavity length can be adjusted by varying the injection current to the chip. The laser can be used for high resolution spectroscopic applications and multi species trace-gas detection. Mode-hopping is avoided by controlling the effective QCL cavity length, the external cavity length, and the grating angle so as to replicate a virtual pivot point