The production and consumption of commercial real estate market forecasts

Whilst the vast majority of the research on property market forecasting has concentrated on statistical methods of forecasting future rents, this report investigates the process of property market forecast production with particular reference to the level and effect of judgemental intervention in this process. Expectations of future investment performance at the levels of individual asset, sector, region, country and asset class are crucial to stock selection and tactical and strategic asset allocation decisions. Given their centrality to investment performance, we focus on the process by which forecasts of rents and yields are generated and expectations formed. A review of the wider literature on forecasting suggests that there are strong grounds to expect that forecast outcomes are not the result of purely mechanical calculations

Nonuniqueness in a minimal model for cell motility

Two–phase flow models have been used previously to model cell motility, however these have rapidly become very complicated, including many physical processes, and are opaque. Here we demonstrate that even the simplest one–dimensional, two–phase, poroviscous, reactive flow model displays a number of behaviours relevant to cell crawling. We present stability analyses that show that an asymmetric perturbation is required to cause a spatially uniform, stationary strip of cytoplasm to move, which is relevant to cell polarization. Our numerical simulations identify qualitatively distinct families of travelling–wave solution that co–exist at certain parameter values. Within each family, the crawling speed of the strip has a bell–shaped dependence on the adhesion strength. The model captures the experimentally observed behaviour that cells crawl quickest at intermediate adhesion strengths, when the substrate is neither too sticky nor too slippy

A direct image of the obscuring disk surrounding an active galactic nucleus

Active galactic nuclei (AGN) are generally accepted to be powered by the release of gravitational energy in a compact accretion disk surrounding a massive black hole. Such disks are also necessary to collimate powerful radio jets seen in some AGN. The unifying classification schemes for AGN further propose that differences in their appearance can be attributed to the opacity of the accreting material, which may obstruct our view of the central region of some systems. The popular model for the obscuring medium is a parsec-scale disk of dense molecular gas, although evidence for such disks has been mostly indirect, as their angular size is much smaller than the resolution of conventional telescopes. Here we report the first direct images of a pc-scale disk of ionised gas within the nucleus of NGC 1068, the archetype of obscured AGN. The disk is viewed nearly edge-on, and individual clouds within the ionised disk are opaque to high-energy radiation, consistent with the unifying classification scheme. In projection, the disk and AGN axes align, from which we infer that the ionised gas disk traces the outer regions of the long-sought inner accretion disk.Comment: 14 pages, LaTeX, PSfig, to appear in Nature. also available at http://hethp.mpe-garching.mpg.de/Preprint