Why a Neurosis?

Concluded from June, 1936 issue

Untaxed and Taxed Entities in the Market for Commercial Real Estate

This paper is a theoretical examination of untaxed and taxed entities that invest in real estate. The standard advice to real estate investors is to avoid using entities that are subject to taxation (such as C corporations in the U.S.) and employ entities that are not subject to taxation (such as limited liability companies, S corporations, and real estate investment trusts in the U.S.) in order to avoid double taxation of income. This paper shows that, in most situations, untaxed entities place a greater value of a given real estate property than does a taxed entity, which implies that taxed entities are at a distinct disadvantage at competing in the market for property. However, this conclusion is reversed if untaxed entities use a large amount of financial leverage compared to taxed entities and the borrowing rate for both is greater than the risk-free rate.Financial leverage; Asset valuation; Taxation

A comparison of score, rank and probability-based fusion methods for video shot retrieval

It is now accepted that the most effective video shot retrieval is based on indexing and retrieving clips using multiple, parallel modalities such as text-matching, image-matching and feature matching and then combining or fusing these parallel retrieval streams in some way. In this paper we investigate a range of fusion methods for combining based on multiple visual features (colour, edge and texture), for combining based on multiple visual examples in the query and for combining multiple modalities (text and visual). Using three TRECVid collections and the TRECVid search task, we specifically compare fusion methods based on normalised score and rank that use either the average, weighted average or maximum of retrieval results from a discrete Jelinek-Mercer smoothed language model. We also compare these results with a simple probability-based combination of the language model results that assumes all features and visual examples are fully independent

Fuel element concept for long life high power nuclear reactors

Nuclear reactor fuel elements have burnups that are an order of magnitude higher than can currently be achieved by conventional design practice. Elements have greater time integrated power producing capacity per unit volume. Element design concept capitalizes on known design principles and observed behavior of nuclear fuel

The Propagation of Solar Energetic Particles in Magnetic Channels

The existence of interplanetary flow systems produced by the entrainment of interplanetary transients, consisting of flare produced shocks, high speed solar wind streams and coronal mass ejection, has been established. This entrainment process produces enhanced regions of the interplanetary magnetic field that should be connected back to the solar corona. These compressed regions can provide a preferred magnetic channel for the propagation of solar cosmic rays. The characteristics of these events appear to be different from those previously reported by the NASA/University of New Hampshire team and the University of Chicago in their study of a large number of events in the region beyond 1 AU. These new events have a very flat energy spectra (with gamma = approx. 1.5) that frequently extend to energies above 100 MeV and have a significant enhancement of MeV electrons

Selling Prices/sq.ft. of Office Buildings in Downtown Chicago – How Much Is It Worth to Be an Old But Class A Building?

This paper examines office building sales in downtown Chicago for the period 1996 to 2007. Our analysis provides a conventional OLS approach and an exploration of spatial dependence. We find some evidence of spatial lag and spatial autocorrelation in our dataset but the results are similar to the OLS approach. The results indicate that high occupancy is a statistically significant factor only for Class B properties, suggesting that a low occupancy rate is a negative sign for these buildings of lower quality. Class A property receives a 44% price/ sq. ft. boost due to the premium classification. This increase becomes more pronounced (90%) for floor plate efficient, neoclassical/ revival fac¸ade and/or famous Class A properties built before 1972 when the comparison is with Class B properties of the same age.

The flux and source of energetic protons in Saturn's inner magnetosphere

The flux of energetic protons in Saturn's inner magnetosphere was observed in two channels from 48 to 63 and 63 to 160 MeV. Absorption features due to the G ring and the satellites Enceladus and Mimas were easily identifiable. The flux observed in the absorption slot of Mimas can be maintained by the decay of a cosmic ray albedo neutron flux of 0.007/sq cm/s/sr. This flux is entirely consistent with calculations of the neutron flux produced by galactic cosmic ray interactions with the rings of Saturn. The omnidirectional proton flux of 0.0082/sq cm/s at 2.734 R sub s requires a residence time of 30 years. Both the residence time and the energy spectrum are comparable to those found in the inner radiation belt of the Earth. The angular distribution is nearly isotropic in the Mimas slot and beyond 4R sub s. Otherwise the pitch angle distribution is pancake and is approximated by sin(n)theta with n in the range 2 to 7. This distribution is consistent with an isotropic neutron source in the ring plane

New Q-ball Solutions in Gauge-Mediation, Affleck-Dine Baryogenesis and Gravitino Dark Matter

Affleck-Dine (AD) baryogenesis along a d=6 flat direction in gauge-mediated supersymmetry-breaking (GMSB) models can produce unstable Q-balls which naturally have field strength similar to the messenger scale. In this case a new kind of Q-ball is formed, intermediate between gravity-mediated and gauge-mediated type. We study in detail these new Q-ball solutions, showing how their properties interpolate between standard gravity-mediated and gauge-mediated Q-balls as the AD field becomes larger than the messenger scale. It is shown that E/Q for the Q-balls can be greater than the nucleon mass but less than the MSSM-LSP mass, leading to Q-ball decay directly to Standard Model fermions with no MSSM-LSP production. More significantly, if E/Q is greater than the MSSM-LSP mass, decaying Q-balls can provide a natural source of non-thermal MSSM-LSPs, which can subsequently decay to gravitino dark matter without violating nucleosynthesis constraints. The model therefore provides a minimal scenario for baryogenesis and gravitino dark matter in the gauge-mediated MSSM, requiring no new fields.Comment: 13 pages, 9 figures. Some corrections and additional discussion. Version published in JCA