The valuation of self-funded retirement villages in Australia

Changing demographics will see an increasing demand for self-funded sector retirement villages in Australia. As such, valuers can expect to be more involved in providing valuation advice in this sector, although the central issue remains that retirement villages are complex businesses. They have been described as management intensive operating businesses with a substantial real estate element. As a result the valuation process in this sector requires a different type of analysis, in comparison to the traditional real estate based investment.This paper provides an analysis of recent trends in the demand for retirement villages and examine current practise with respect to valuation thereof. It emphasises the need for a greater awareness of the &lsquo;business enterprise value&rsquo; component and provides a framework within which the components of value can be better understood. The purpose of the paper is to provide a foundation for a greater reliability with respect to valuation advice.<br /

Cognitive and mood assessment tools for use in stroke

No abstract available

On hidden Markov chains and finite stochastic systems

In this paper we study various properties of finite stochastic systems or hidden Markov chains as they are alternatively called. We discuss their construction following different approaches and we also derive recursive filtering formulas for the different systems that we consider. The key tool is a simple lemma on conditional expectations

An Invariance Principle for Maintaining the Operating Point of a Neuron

Sensory neurons adapt to changes in the natural statistics of their environments through processes such as gain control and firing threshold adjustment. It has been argued that neurons early in sensory pathways adapt according to information-theoretic criteria, perhaps maximising their coding efficiency or information rate. Here, we draw a distinction between how a neuron’s preferred operating point is determined and how its preferred operating point is maintained through adaptation. We propose that a neuron’s preferred operating point can be characterised by the probability density function (PDF) of its output spike rate, and that adaptation maintains an invariant output PDF, regardless of how this output PDF is initially set. Considering a sigmoidal transfer function for simplicity, we derive simple adaptation rules for a neuron with one sensory input that permit adaptation to the lower-order statistics of the input, independent of how the preferred operating point of the neuron is set. Thus, if the preferred operating point is, in fact, set according to information-theoretic criteria, then these rules nonetheless maintain a neuron at that point. Our approach generalises from the unimodal case to the multimodal case, for a neuron with inputs from distinct sensory channels, and we briefly consider this case too