The Renormalization Group According to Balaban - I. Small fields

This is an expository account of Balaban's approach to the renormalization group. The method is illustrated with a treatment of the the ultraviolet problem for the scalar phi^4 model on a toroidal lattice in dimension d=3. This yields another proof of the stability bound. In this first paper we analyze the small field contribution to the partition function.Comment: 52 pages. Some corrections, additions, reorganizatio

Residential Real Estate Prices: A Room with a View

This article is the winner of the Real Estate Broker / Agency manuscript prize (sponsored by the Center for the Study of Real Estate Brokerage/ Agency at Cleveland State University) presented at the 2001 American Real Estate Society Annual Meeting. This study examines the effect that a view of Lake Erie has on the value of a home. Unlike previous studies, the current investigation is able to successfully control for view. That is, because of the unique building codes of lakefront homes in this sample, homes analyzed either do or do not have a view. Moreover, transaction-based home prices are used which is an improvement over previous studies that rely on appraisal-based data. The results indicate that square footage and lot size also significantly affect a home’s value. More importantly, having this very desirable view adds $256,544.72 (an 89.9% premium) to the value of the home.

Bounded Imaginary Powers of Differential Operators on Manifolds with Conical Singularities

We study the minimal and maximal closed extension of a differential operator A on a manifold B with conical singularities, when A acts as an unbounded operator on weighted L^p-spaces over B, 1 < p < \infty. Under suitable ellipticity assumptions we can define a family of complex powers A^z. We also obtain sufficient information on the resolvent of A to show the boundedness of the purely imaginary powers. Examples concern unique solvability and maximal regularity for the solution of the Cauchy problem for the Laplacian on conical manifolds as well as certain quasilinear diffusion equations.Comment: 27 pages, 3 figures (revised version 23/04/'02

Regret Aversion and False Reference Points in Residential Real Estate

This study empirically exams the combination of regret aversion and false reference points in a residential real estate context. Survey respondents were put in a hypothetical situation, where they had purchased an investment property several years ago. Hindsight knowledge about a foregone all time high was introduced. As hypothesized, respondents on average expressed higher regret if they had actively failed to sell at the all time high (commission scenario) than if they had simply been unaware of the potential gain (omission scenario). Women were found to be more susceptible to regret aversion and false reference points than men.

Some new results on an old controversy: is perturbation theory the correct asymptotic expansion in nonabelian models?

Several years ago it was found that perturbation theory for two-dimensional O(N) models depends on boundary conditions even after the infinite volume limit has been taken termwise, provided $N>2$. There ensued a discussion whether the boundary conditions introduced to show this phenomenon were somehow anomalous and there was a class of `reasonable' boundary conditions not suffering from this ambiguity. Here we present the results of some computations that may be interpreted as giving some support for the correctness of perturbation theory with conventional boundary conditions; however the fundamental underlying question of the correctness of perturbation theory in these models and in particular the perturbative $\beta$ function remain challenging problems of mathematical physics.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figure

Synthetic aperture radar signal processing on the MPP

Satellite-borne Synthetic Aperture Radars (SAR) sense areas of several thousand square kilometers in seconds and transmit phase history signal data several tens of megabits per second. The Shuttle Imaging Radar-B (SIR-B) has a variable swath of 20 to 50 km and acquired data over 100 kms along track in about 13 seconds. With the simplification of separability of the reference function, the processing still requires considerable resources; high speed I/O, large memory and fast computation. Processing systems with regular hardware take hours to process one Seasat image and about one hour for a SIR-B image. Bringing this processing time closer to acquisition times requires an end-to-end system solution. For the purpose of demonstration, software was implemented on the present Massively Parallel Processor (MPP) configuration for processing Seasat and SIR-B data. The software takes advantage of the high processing speed offered by the MPP, the large Staging Buffer, and the high speed I/O between the MPP array unit and the Staging Buffer. It was found that with unoptimized Parallel Pascal code, the processing time on the MPP for a 4096 x 4096 sample subset of signal data ranges between 18 and 30.2 seconds depending on options

Epitaxial undoped indium oxide thin films: Structural and physical properties.

Indium oxide thin films were grown by the pulsed electron beam deposition method on c-cut sapphire substrates at 10−2 mbar oxygen pressure and temperature up to 500 1C. Such conditions lead to the formation of dense, smooth and stoichiometric In2O3 films, with the cubic bixbyite structure. Epitaxial thin films were obtained at substrate temperatures as low as 200 1C. Pole figure measurements indicate the existence of (111) oriented In2O3 crystallites with different in-plane symmetry, i.e. three-fold and six-fold symmetry. The origin of this effect may be related to the specificities of the growth method which can induce a large disorder in the oxygen network of In2O3, leading then to a six-fold symmetry in the (111) plane of the bixbyite structure. This temperature resistivity behaviour shows metallic conductivity at room temperature and a metal– semiconductor transition at low temperature for In2O3 films grown at 200 1C, while the classical semiconductor behaviour was observed for the films grown at 400 and 500 1C. A maximum mobility of 24.7 cm2/V s was measured at 200 1C, and then it falls off with improving the crystalline quality of films. The optical transparency is high (480%) in a spectral range from 500 nm to 900 nm