Competition and Collaboration in Higher Education: An (Auto)Ethnographic Poetic Inquiry

Higher education is in flux with more precarity, a stronger focus on effectiveness, and productivity having resulted in a competitive and hostile culture. For this article, we take a proactive approach to counteract the narrative of silencing by exploring the opportunities collaboration may afford. Drawing on our personal experiences, professional knowledge, and research, we engaged in a collaborative form of poetic inquiry. Our contribution in this article lies with the links we make between collaboration, creativity through autoethnographic poetic inquiry, and translanguaging. This approach constitutes a model for collaboration which counteracts the silencing impact of the contemporary competitive academic culture

The growth of private property vehicles in the UK: causes and conditions

The UK private indirect real estate market has seen a rapid growth in the last seven years. The gross asset value (GAV) of the private property vehicle (PPV) market has about tripled from a GAV of £22.6bn in 1998 to a GAV of £67.1 billion at the end of 2005 (OPC, 2006). Although this trend of growing syndication of real estate is not only a UK phenomenon, the rate of growth has been significantly faster in the UK. For example the German open-ended funds have grown over the same period from €50.4bn to €85.1bn (BVI, 2006). In the US the market capitalization of equity real estate investment trusts (REIT) has grown 155% since 1999 to US$ 301bn (NAREIT, 2006). Each jurisdiction is offering different formats to invest indirectly into real estate but at the core all these vehicles are the same in that they provide a different route for investors to access real estate. In the UK, although the range of ‘products’ is now quite diverse, all structures have in common the ‘wrapping’ of property assets into a multi-investor vehicle. This paper examines the nature, pattern and process of market growth in PPVs and constructs a series of associations between causes and effects to explain this market shift

Transmittance matrices and flowgraph reduction

AbstractThe subject of this paper is the computer representation and reduction of a particular graph known as a flowgraph. Basic terminology is developed in Section 1. Properties that are most pertinent to the reduction of flowgraphs are stated in Section 2. Examples of applications are given in Section 3. The structure of the reduction procedure is presented in Section 4

Private property vehicles: the valuation of interests in limited partnerships

This paper examines the extent to which the valuation of partial interests in private property vehicles should be closely aligned to the valuation of the underlying assets. A sample of vehicle managers and investors replied to a questionnaire on the qualities of private property vehicles relative to direct property investment. Applying the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) technique the relative importance of the various advantages and disadvantages of investment in private property vehicles relative to acquisition of the underlying assets are assessed. The results suggest that the main drivers of the growth of the this sector have been the ability for certain categories of investor to acquire interests in assets that are normally inaccessible due to the amount of specific risk. Additionally, investors have been attracted by the ability to ‘outsource’ asset management in a manner that minimises perceived agency problems. It is concluded that deviations from NAV should be expected given that investment in private property vehicles differs from investment in the underlying assets in terms of liquidity, management structures, lot size, financial structure inter alia. However, reliably appraising the pricing implications of these variations is likely to be extremely difficult due to the lack of secondary market trading and vehicle heterogeneity

The ORGAN Experiment: An axion haloscope above 15 GHz

We present first results and future plans for the Oscillating Resonant Group AxioN (ORGAN) experiment, a microwave cavity axion haloscope situated in Perth, Western Australia designed to probe for high mass axions motivated by several theoretical models. The first stage focuses around 26.6 GHz in order to directly test a claimed result, which suggests axions exist at the corresponding mass of $110~\mu$eV. Later stages will move to a wider scan range of 15-50 GHz ($60-210~\mu$eV). We present the results of the pathfinding run, which sets a limit on $g_{a\gamma\gamma}$ of $2.02\times 10^{-12}$eV$^{-1}$ at 26.531 GHz, or 110~$\mu$eV, in a span of 2.5 neV (shaped by the Lorentzian resonance) with $90 \%$ confidence. Furthermore, we outline the current design and future strategies to eventually attain the sensitivity to search for well known axion models over the wider mass range.Comment: 15 pages, 5 figures. V2: As published in Physics of Dark Univers

Can Institutional Investors Bias Real Estate Portfolio Appraisals? Evidence from the Market Downturn

This paper investigates the extent to which institutional investors may have influenced independent real estate appraisals during the financial crisis. A conceptual model of the determinants of client influence on real estate appraisals is proposed. It is suggested that the extent of clients’ ability and willingness to bias appraisal outputs is contingent upon market and regulatory environments (ethical norms and legal and institutional frameworks), the salience of the appraisal(s) to the client, financial incentives for the appraiser to respond to client pressure, organisational culture, the level of moral reasoning of both individual clients and appraisers, client knowledge and the degree of appraisal uncertainty. The potential of client influence to bias ostensibly independent real estate appraisals is examined using the opportunity afforded by the market downturn commencing in 2007 in the UK. During the market turbulence at the end of 2007, the motivations of different types of owners to bias appraisals diverged clearly and temporarily provided a unique opportunity to assess potential appraisal bias. We use appraisal-based performance data for individual real estate assets to test whether there were significant ownership effects on performance during this period. The results support the hypothesis that real estate appraisals in this period reflected the differing needs of clients.This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10551-015-2953-

Observing the Structure of the Landscape with the CMB Experiments

Assuming that inflation happened through a series of tunneling in the string theory landscape, it is argued that one can determine the structure of vacua using precise measurements of the scalar spectral index and tensor perturbations at large scales. It is shown that for a vacuum structure where the energy gap between the minima is constant, i.e. $\epsilon_i=i m_f^4$, one obtains the scalar spectral index, $n_s$, to be $\simeq 0.9687$, for the modes that exit the horizon 60 e-folds before the end of inflation. Alternatively, for a vacuum structure in which the energy gap increases linearly with the vacuum index, i.e. $\epsilon_i=\frac{i^2}{2} m_f^4$, $n_s$ turns out to be $\simeq 0.9614$. Both these two models are motivated within the string theory landscape using flux-compactification and their predictions for scalar spectral index are compatible with WMAP results. For both these two models, the results for the scalar spectral index turn out to be independent of $m_f$. Nonetheless, assuming that inflation started at Planckian energies and that there had been successful thermalization at each step, one can constrain $m_f<2.6069\times 10^{-5} m_P$ and $m_f<6.5396\times 10^{-7} m_P$ in these two models, respectively. Violation of the single-field consistency relation between the tensor and scalar spectra is another prediction of chain inflation models. This corresponds to having a smaller tensor/scalar ratio at large scales in comparison with the slow-roll counterparts. Similar to slow-roll inflation, it is argued that one can reconstruct the vacuum structure using the CMB experiments.Comment: v1: 8 pages, 2 figures; v2: grammatical typos corrected, results unchanged v3: To be published in JCA