On Setting Apartment Rental Rates: A Regression-Based Approach

This study presents a regression-based analysis of apartment rents for a cross-section of properties located in an "edge city" submarket. It attempts to provide a solution for owners and managers of apartments to the thorny problem of setting a property's rental rate. The approach used in this analysis differs from previous studies in at least three important respects: (1) vacancy is treated as part of the dependent variable, (2) the property-specific rental rate generated by the regression analysis is compared to the property's actual effective rent, and (3) each property in the submarket is ranked by the difference between its actual effective rent and its characteristic-adjusted effective rent. This is then followed by several observations concerning the advantages and disadvantages of such an analysis in a practical setting.

A Fundamental Examination of Securitized and Unsecuritized Real Estate

Most studies (including this one) have found a weak statistical relationship between total returns for securitized and unsecuritized real estate equities. Some studies argue that REIT shares behave more like the stock market, than real estate. In an attempt to focus this discussion, this study examines the fundamental underlying return-generating components: dividends, investment values, and dividend yields using NAREIT and NCREIF data from 1978 through 1994. While dividends have been part of the REIT pricing calculus for some time, relatively few studies have focused upon the "dividends" paid by NCREIF properties. The short-run relationships between these fundamental components are weak and many of their distributions display significant non-normal tendencies. Even when quarterly lags of up to two years are examined, these distributions also tend to be weakly correlated with one another. Of the three fundamental components, the long-run path of prices exhibited the strongest relationship. Interestingly, the volatility of the NCREIF dividend series is approximately 150% of the NAREIT volatility, while the volatility of the NCREIF asset values is roughly 25% of the NAREIT volatility. This is contradictory: in a simplified setting, greater dividend volatility should be accompanied by greater price volatility, not less, as observed here. Nevertheless, such comparisons suffer due to the incompatibility of the data sources and, accordingly, this study should be viewed as a preliminary examination of securitized and unsecuritized real estate returns.

use of fisheye parrot bebop 2 images for 3d modelling using commercial photogrammetric software

Fisheye camera installed on-board mass market UAS are becoming very popular and it is more and more frequent the use of such platforms for photogrammetric purposes. The interest of wide-angles images for 3D modelling is confirmed by the introduction of fisheye models in several commercial software packages. The paper exploits the different mathematical models implemented in the most famous commercial photogrammetric software packages, highlighting the different processing pipelines and analysing the achievable results in terms of checkpoint residuals, as well as the quality of the delivered 3D point clouds. A two-step approach based on the creation of undistorted images has been tested too. An experimental test has been carried out using a Parrot Bebop 2 UAS by performing a flight over an historical complex located near Piacenza (Northern Italy), which is characterized by the simultaneous presence of horizontal, vertical and oblique surfaces. Different flight configurations have been tested to evaluate the potentiality and possible drawbacks of the previously mentioned UAS platform. Results confirmed that the fisheye images acquired with the Parrot Bebop 2 are suitable for 3D modelling, ensuring accuracies of the photogrammetric blocks of the order of the GSD (about 0.05 m normal to the optic axis in case of a flight height equal to 35 m). The generated point clouds have been compared to a reference scan, acquired by means of a MS60 MultiStation, resulting in differences below 0.05 in all directions

Telehealthcare for chronic obstructive pulmonary disease

BACKGROUND: Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) is a disease of irreversible airways obstruction in which patients often suffer exacerbations. Sometimes these exacerbations need hospital care: telehealthcare has the potential to reduce admission to hospital when used to administer care to the pateint from within their own home. OBJECTIVES: To review the effectiveness of telehealthcare for COPD compared with usual face‐to‐face care. SEARCH METHODS: We searched the Cochrane Airways Group Specialised Register, which is derived from systematic searches of the Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials (CENTRAL), MEDLINE, EMBASE, CINAHL, AMED, and PsycINFO; last searched January 2010. SELECTION CRITERIA: We selected randomised controlled trials which assessed telehealthcare, defined as follows: healthcare at a distance, involving the communication of data from the patient to the health carer, usually a doctor or nurse, who then processes the information and responds with feedback regarding the management of the illness. The primary outcomes considered were: number of exacerbations, quality of life as recorded by the St George's Respiratory Questionnaire, hospitalisations, emergency department visits and deaths. DATA COLLECTION AND ANALYSIS: Two authors independently selected trials for inclusion and extracted data. We combined data into forest plots using fixed‐effects modelling as heterogeneity was low (I(2) < 40%). MAIN RESULTS: Ten trials met the inclusion criteria. Telehealthcare was assessed as part of a complex intervention, including nurse case management and other interventions. Telehealthcare was associated with a clinically significant increase in quality of life in two trials with 253 participants (mean difference ‐6.57 (95% confidence interval (CI) ‐13.62 to 0.48); minimum clinically significant difference is a change of ‐4.0), but the confidence interval was wide. Telehealthcare showed a significant reduction in the number of patients with one or more emergency department attendances over 12 months; odds ratio (OR) 0.27 (95% CI 0.11 to 0.66) in three trials with 449 participants, and the OR of having one or more admissions to hospital over 12 months was 0.46 (95% CI 0.33 to 0.65) in six trials with 604 participants. There was no significant difference in the OR for deaths over 12 months for the telehealthcare group as compared to the usual care group in three trials with 503 participants; OR 1.05 (95% CI 0.63 to 1.75). AUTHORS' CONCLUSIONS: Telehealthcare in COPD appears to have a possible impact on the quality of life of patients and the number of times patients attend the emergency department and the hospital. However, further research is needed to clarify precisely its role since the trials included telehealthcare as part of more complex packages

A Fundamental Comparison of International Real Estate Returns

This study analyzes commercial real estate returns in Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States over the period 1985-95, from the perspective of a U.S. investor. Because national indices can consist of differing property mixes, this study separately analyzes the office, retail, and warehouse sectors. Moreover, these analyses also convert total returns into their fundamental components: initial yield, growth in income, and shifts in capitalization rates. The paths of currency-adjusted income and asset values and, therefore, capitalization rates are also presented. Generally speaking, the fundamental components of retail returns across the four countries exhibit greater divergence than the office and warehouse sectors. It is interesting that the U.S. property sectors showed the worst performance, while the Australian retail and the British office and warehouse sectors were the best performers (both before and after currency adjustments). Additionally, the currency-adjusted Australian returns were adversely effected by exchange rate movements, while the British returns were positively effected. Lastly, the correlation of the quarterly percentage change in income was generally lower and less statistically significant that the correlation patterns observed among the other components of return. This might suggest that more idiosyncratic risk can be found in the real estate space markets (as proxied by income changes) than in the real estate capital markets (as proxied by the pricing of the income--that is, capitalization rates), which appear to be more globally influenced.

PARTICLE SIZE EFFECT ON KINETICS AND THERMODYNAMICS OF PHASE TRANSITIONS IN MINERALS

Phase transitions in minerals are transformations naturally occurring when environmental conditions, such as pressure and temperature, change. So, studying their evolution means to understand the modifications of the physical and structural properties of a compound, which can be controlled through industrial processes and exploited in technological applications. On this ground, the present thesis is divided into two big sectors of material science: after a short overview on the basic theory of thermodynamics and kinetics (Part I), the first branch deals with traditional ceramics (Part II), where interest is focused on quartz-cristobalite-tridymite-involving reactions; after that, the field of functional ceramics is discussed in Part III, analysing the behaviour at the nano scale of two widely studied technological materials: the half-doped La and Ca manganite and the tetragonal zirconia stabilized at room temperature by size reduction. All these subjects of study are treated considering the effect of varying the particle size. It is well known, indeed, that reactions are promoted when particles have a greater surface to volume ratio. Therefore, when investigating phase transitions, solid state reactivity and kinetics must reflect the effect of the reduction of grain size. Knowing the mechanisms and the behaviour of materials undergoing high or low temperature processes is essential for industrial procedures to be developed. Thus, phase transitions of the cited compounds are here discussed, in the light of three completely different but complementary approaches: X-Ray Powder Diffraction, performing both reciprocal-space and real-space refinements, and Resonant Ultrasound Spectroscopy, investigating the elastic and anelastic properties of the material of interest

Physalis pruinosa var. argentina J.M. Toledo & Barboza

Ruta nacional nº 79: Entre su empalme con Ruta nacional nº 38 y Salina La AntiguapublishedVersio

Mobile health for cancer in low to middle income countries: priorities for research and development.

The is the accepted manuscript of an article published in the European Journal of Cancer Care (Holeman, I., Evans, J., Kane, D., Grant, L., Pagliari, C. and Weller, D. (2014), Mobile health for cancer in low to middle income countries: priorities for research and development. European Journal of Cancer Care, 23: 750–756. doi: 10.1111/ecc.12250)Many current global health opportunities have less to do with new biomedical knowledge than with the coordination and delivery of care. While basic research remains vital, the growing cancer epidemic in countries of low and middle income warrants urgent action - focusing on both research and service delivery innovation. Mobile technology can reduce costs, improve access to health services, and strengthen health systems to meet the interrelated challenges of cancer and other noncommunicable diseases. Experience has shown that even very poor and remote communities that only have basic primary health care can benefit from mobile health (or 'mHealth') interventions. We argue that cancer researchers and practitioners have an opportunity to leverage mHealth technologies that have successfully targeted other health conditions, rather than reinventing these tools. We call for particular attention to human centred design approaches for adapting existing technologies to suit distinctive aspects of cancer care and to align delivery with local context - and we make a number of recommendations for integrating mHealth delivery research with the work of designers, engineers and implementers in large-scale delivery programmes

Uav Photogrammetry: Block Triangulation Comparisons

UAVs systems represent a flexible technology able to collect a big amount of high resolution information, both for metric and interpretation uses. In the frame of experimental tests carried out at Dept. ICA of Politecnico di Milano to validate vector-sensor systems and to assess metric accuracies of images acquired by UAVs, a block of photos taken by a fixed wing system is triangulated with several software. The test field is a rural area included in an Italian Park ("Parco Adda Nord"), useful to study flight and imagery performances on buildings, roads, cultivated and uncultivated vegetation. The UAV SenseFly, equipped with a camera Canon Ixus 220HS, flew autonomously over the area at a height of 130 m yielding a block of 49 images divided in 5 strips. Sixteen pre-signalized Ground Control Points, surveyed in the area through GPS (NRTK survey), allowed the referencing of the block and accuracy analyses. Approximate values for exterior orientation parameters (positions and attitudes) were recorded by the flight control system. The block was processed with several software: Erdas-LPS, EyeDEA (Univ. of Parma), Agisoft Photoscan, Pix4UAV, in assisted or automatic way. Results comparisons are given in terms of differences among digital surface models, differences in orientation parameters and accuracies, when available. Moreover, image and ground point coordinates obtained by the various software were independently used as initial values in a comparative adjustment made by scientific in-house software, which can apply constraints to evaluate the effectiveness of different methods of point extraction and accuracies on ground check points

Channel-wise Mixed-precision Assignment for DNN Inference on Constrained Edge Nodes

Quantization is widely employed in both cloud and edge systems to reduce the memory occupation, latency, and energy consumption of deep neural networks. In particular, mixed-precision quantization, i.e., the use of different bit-widths for different portions of the network, has been shown to provide excellent efficiency gains with limited accuracy drops, especially with optimized bit-width assignments determined by automated Neural Architecture Search (NAS) tools. State-of-The-Art mixed-precision works layer-wise, i.e., it uses different bit-widths for the weights and activations tensors of each network layer. In this work, we widen the search space, proposing a novel NAS that selects the bit-width of each weight tensor channel independently. This gives the tool the additional flexibility of assigning a higher precision only to the weights associated with the most informative features. Testing on the MLPerf Tiny benchmark suite, we obtain a rich collection of Pareto-optimal models in the accuracy vs model size and accuracy vs energy spaces. When deployed on the MPIC RISC-V edge processor, our networks reduce the memory and energy for inference by up to 63% and 27% respectively compared to a layer-wise approach, for the same accuracy