The efficiency of the Tokyo housing market

We take advantage of annual micro data sets which we have compiled from individual listings in the widely-circulated real estate advertisement magazine. A data set compiled from the "properties for investment" section lists both asking (purchase) prices and rents for the same property. With this data, the price-rent ratio is directly observable and expected capital gains before tax and commissions are found to be just less than 90 percent in ten years. The "repeatedly-listed properties for investment" data set, a subset of the first data set, contains only those units in the same buildings after a one-year interval. In this data set, price, rent, and ex post capital gains are all observable. They are used to show that ex post returns on housing investment in the last four years were actually rather modest. The data set for "housing for purchase" and the data set for "housing for rent" data sections were separately used for hedonic regressions, from which we constructed the hedonic price index and the hedonic rent index. Those regressions show the effects of various determinants for housing prices and rents. The time (year) dummy variables in the hedonic regressions give that estimate of increases in prices and rents in the last eleven years in Tokyo. According to these estimates, prices increased 85 to 90 percent over the 1981-92 period, while rents increased about 65 percent during the same period. The price-(annual) rent ratio rents appears to have fluctuated around a constant ratio between 17 and 32. Finally, the weak-form efficiency of excess returns on housing is rejected. However, the conclusion is tentative considering the small sample of our data

Laboratory Analysis of Silicate Stardust Grains of Diverse Stellar Origins

Silicate dust is ubiquitous in a multitude of environments across the cosmos, including evolved oxygen-rich stars, interstellar space, protoplanetary disks, comets, and asteroids. The identification of bona fide silicate stardust grains in meteorites, interplanetary dust particles, micrometeorites, and dust returned from comet Wild 2 by the Stardust spacecraft has revolutionized the study of stars, interstellar space, and the history of dust in the Galaxy. These stardust grains have exotic isotopic compositions that are records of nucleosynthetic processes that occurred in the depths of their now extinct parent stars. Moreover, the chemical compositions and mineralogies of silicate stardust are consequences of the physical and chemical nature of the stellar condensation environment, as well as secondary alteration processes that can occur in interstellar space, the solar nebula, and on the asteroid or comet parent body in which they were incorporated. In this talk I will discuss our use of advanced nano-scale instrumentation in the laboratory to conduct coordinated isotopic, chemical, and mineralogical analyses of silicate stardust grains from AGB stars, supernovae, and novae. By analyzing the isotopic compositions of multiple elements in individual grains, we have been able to constrain their stellar sources, explore stellar nucleosynthetic and mixing processes, and Galactic chemical evolution. Through our mineralogical studies, we have found these presolar silicate grains to have wide-ranging chemical and mineral characteristics. This diversity is the result of primary condensation characteristics and in some cases secondary features imparted by alteration in space and in our Solar System. The laboratory analysis of actual samples of stars directly complements astronomical observations and astrophysical models and offers an unprecedented level of detail into the lifecycles of dust in the Galaxy

Factors Affecting Customer's Perception of Service Quality: Comparing Differences Among Countries - Case Study: Beauty Salons in Bandung and Tokyo

This paper examines a holistic study of analyzing several factors affecting service quality andtheir correlation with characteristic of customers based on value and life style. Furthermore,customer's perception of service quality can be drawn from those relationships. Exploratoryfactor analysis and quantitative analysis is employed with case study of beauty salon serviceat Bandung and Tokyo. The results indicate how the quality of services is perceived differentlyby customers who have different value and life style, and also describe significant relationshipbetween value and life style with the affecting factors of service quality

Effect of biotic and abiotic factors on in vitro proliferation, encystment, and excystment of Pfiesteria piscicida

Pfiesteria spp. are mixotrophic armored dinoflagellates populating the Atlantic coastal waters of the United States. They have been a focus of intense research due to their reported association with several fish mortality events. We have now used a clonal culture of Pfiesteria piscicida and several new environmental isolates to describe growth characteristics, feeding, and factors contributing to the encystment and germination of the organism in both laboratory and environmental samples. We also discuss applied methods of detection of the different morphological forms of Pfiesteria in environmental samples. In summary, Pfiesteria, when grown with its algal prey, Rhodomonas sp., presents a typical growth curve with lag, exponential, and stationary phases, followed by encystment. The doubling time in exponential phase is about 12 h. The profiles of proliferation under a standard light cycle and in the dark were similar, although the peak cell densities were markedly lower when cells were grown in the dark. The addition of urea, chicken manure, and soil extracts did not enhance Pfiesteria proliferation, but crude unfiltered spent aquarium water did. Under conditions of food deprivation or cold (4°C), Pfiesteria readily formed harvestable cysts that were further analyzed by PCR and scanning electron microscopy. The germination of Pfiesteria cysts in environmental sediment was enhanced by the presence of live fish: dinospores could be detected 13 to 15 days earlier and reached 5- to 10-times-higher peak cell densities with live fish than with artificial seawater or f/2 medium alone. The addition of ammonia, urea, nitrate, phosphate, or surprisingly, spent fish aquarium water had no effect.Facultad de Ciencias Exacta

Msx2 and Sp6 Regulate Follistatin

Background: Ameloblasts are epithelially derived cells responsible for enamel formation through a process known as amelogenesis. Amongst the several transcription factors that are expressed during amelogenesis, both Msx2 and Sp6 transcription factors play important role. Msx2 and Sp6 mouse mutants, exhibit similar amelogenesis defects, namely enamel hypoplasia, while humans with amelogenesis imperfecta (AI) carry mutations in the human homologues of MSX2 or SP6 genes. These across species similarities in function indicate that these two transcription factors may reside in the same developmental pathway. In this paper, we test whether they work in a coordinated manner to exert their effect during amelogenesis. Methods: Two different dental epithelial cell lines, the mouse LS8 and the rat G5 were used for either overexpression or silencing of Msx2 or Sp6 or both. Msx2 mutant mouse embryos or pups were used for in vivo studies. In situ hybridization, semi-quantitative and quantitative real time PCR were employed to study gene expression pattern. MatInspector was used to identify several potential putative Msx2 binding sites upstream of the murine Sp6 promoter region. Chromatin Immunoprecipitation (chIP) was used to confirm the binding of Msx2 to Sp6 promoter at the putative sites. Results: Using the above methods we identified that (i) Msx2 and Sp6 exhibit overlapping expression in secretory ameloblasts, (ii) Sp6 expression is reduced in the Msx2 mouse mutant secretoty ameloblasts, and (iii) that Msx2, like Sp6 inhibits follistatin expression. Specifically, our loss-of function studies by silencing Msx2 and/or Sp6 in mouse dental epithelial (LS8) cells showed significant downregulation of Sp6 but upregulation of Fst expression. Transient transfection of Msx2 overexpression plasmid, up-regulated Sp6 and downregulated Fst expression. Additionally, using MatInspector, we identified several potential putative Msx2 binding sites, 3.5 kb upstream of the murine Sp6 promoter region. By chIP, we confirmed the binding of Msx2 to Sp6 promoter at these sites, thus suggesting that Sp6 is a direct target of Msx2. Conclusion: Collectively, these results show that Sp6 and Msx2 work in a concerted manner to form part of a network of transcription factors that operate during later stages of tooth development controlling ameloblast life cycle and amelogenesis

Forgotten Pictures of Jessie Tarbox Beals

The years between the Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition in 1876 and World War I were a period of dramatic change in the United States. People were eager to understand what was happening around them. Suddenly the world seemed much bigger. The United States had conquered the West and extended its territory to the Philippines. Strangers from Eastern Europe and from Asia were pouring in, bringing totally new cultures with them. In this paper I focus on Jessie Tarbox Beals, the "first woman news photographer", as her biographer, Alexander Alland called her. She brought vital information to a public seeking to comprehend the changes swirling in its midst. Her career, however, was forgotten for a very long time. While her subject matter highlighted the inequities of the new era, she was not able to produce one collective image of America. Yet it is the very range of the subjects that marks her as a first.rate photographer, a witness to the breadth and diverse complexity of an era. Through Beal\u27s experiences as a photographer, her connections with people at Byrdcliffe, the Lower East Side to Greenwich Village, I would like to show how the course of a pioneer photographer helped us understand the nature of the United States.

The Transformation of Kate Sanborn (1838-1917) : Humor as a Prescription to Face a Vanishing America.

Few would argue against the observation that the years between the Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition and World War I were a period of dramatic change in the United States. The United States had conqueredthe West and extended its territory to overseas. Strangers from Eastern Europe and from Asia were pouring in, bringing totally new cultures to the ""New World.""This paper focuses on the roles and the efforts of Kate Sanborn, a female itinerant lecturer, to respond to this cultural change of the late nineteenth century. Long before there were radio and television audiences, Sanborn was able to fill lecture halls presenting informationabout "current" subjects. Not only through her lectures, but throughother communication tools, such as photo books, calendars, travel books,she offered information people wanted and gave advice on how to adapt and cope with the changing world. She was reaffirming the tradition of self−help and self−realization of a white and in her case female farmer, on the one hand and preparing for the dawn of the commercial age, on the other. In so doing she liberated herself from her New England tradition to become a female humorist, drawing on a much wider Americanexperience

Economic-driving : a sustainable issue

The approach proposed in this paper considered benefits of a one-stop facility, and the regional transport impacts of relocating all or some of the processing functions to alternative sites. A three-tier approach to assessing economic outcomes was proposed; namely including a conventional cost-benefit assessment; a macro-economic impact assessment; and a wider economic development impact assessment.Paper presented at the 34th Annual Southern African Transport Conference 6-9 July 2015 "Working Together to Deliver - Sakha Sonke", CSIR International Convention Centre, Pretoria, South Africa.The Minister of Transport, South AfricaTransportation Research Board of the US

Bound H-dibaryon in Flavor SU(3) Limit of Lattice QCD

The flavor-singlet H-dibaryon, which has strangeness -2 and baryon number 2, is studied by the approach recently developed for the baryon-baryon interactions in lattice QCD. The flavor-singlet central potential is derived from the spatial and imaginary-time dependence of the Nambu-Bethe-Salpeter wave function measured in N_f=3 full QCD simulations with the lattice size of L = 2, 3, 4 fm. The potential is found to be insensitive to the volume, and it leads to a bound H-dibaryon with the binding energy of 30 - 40 MeV for the pseudo-scalar meson mass of 673 - 1015 MeV.Comment: 5 pages, 3 figuers, add arguments, results unchange