Overseas Property: An Answer to the Pensions Crisis

Two centuries ago the founding father of rigorous economic analysis, David Ricardo, argued that land is unique type of asset, subject to forces quite different from those determining other prices; and he sought to show that these forces make land a uniquely good long-term investment. In life, he even practised what he preached, using the profits that he had accumulated as a London banker to buy a large estate in Norfolk. In modern economic, Ricardo has often been deride for his theory. The theory of ‘efficient markets’ tells them that the underlying returns on all kinds of assets, adjusted for risk, will tend to equate; so land is just one asset amongst many. But most modern English men and women, inexpert in economics, seem to be closet Ricardians in their behaviour, believing that money tied up in ‘bricks and mortar’ is especially secure and profitable. And they too practise what they preach, regarding property investment as the best way of providing for their old age. Thus in the past decade growing numbers of people on quite modest incomes have purchased second properties within Britain , using the rental income to cover the mortgage payments; and even greater numbers have purchased houses for their own use which are far larger than they would otherwise want or require, believing that they can provide for their retirement by ‘trading down’. In addition, perhaps two or three millions – the exact number is unknown – have bought properties abroad, not only as holiday homes, but as long-term investments. This paper will argue that Ricardo and his present-day disciples are right. More particularly, it will propose that overseas property offers one answer – and perhaps the only answer – to the crisis that now confronts UK pensions. The first part will analyze the underlying causes of the pensions crisis, pointing to five paradoxes in which retirement saving is trapped. The second part will show how overseas property offers an escape from these paradoxes. The final part will describe a particular way in which the current law relating to pensions can be used to facilitate such an escape

Double Poisson Cohomology of Path Algebras of Quivers

In this note, we give a description of the graded Lie algebra of double derivations of a path algebra as a graded version of the necklace Lie algebra equipped with the Kontsevich bracket. Furthermore, we formally introduce the notion of double Poisson-Lichnerowicz cohomology for double Poisson algebras, and give some elementary properties. We introduce the notion of a linear double Poisson tensor on a quiver and show that it induces the structure of a finite dimensional algebra on the vector spaces V_v generated by the loops in the vertex v. We show that the Hochschild cohomology of the associative algebra can be recovered from the double Poisson cohomology. Then, we use the description of the graded necklace Lie algebra to determine the low-dimensional double Poisson-Lichnerowicz cohomology groups for three types of (linear and non-linear) double Poisson brackets on the free algebra in two variables. This allows us to develop some useful techniques for the computation of the double Poisson-Lichnerowicz cohomology.Comment: 42 pages. Final version, to appear in Journal of Algebr

Formal structures and representation spaces

M. Kapranov introduced and studied in math.AG/9802041 the noncommutative formal structure of a smooth affine variety. In this note we show that his construction is a special case of microlocalization and extend it in a functorial way to representation schemes of affine algebras. We describe the formal completion in the case of path algebras of quivers and initiate the study of their finite dimensional representations

Smooth order singularities

In this paper we give methods to classify the central singularities of Cayley-Hamilton smooth orders up to smooth equivalence in arbitrary central dimension. We prove that there is just one type in dimension 3 (the conifold singularity), three types in dimension 4, ten types in dimension 5 and 53 types in dimension 6. As the classification in dimension 5 and 6 is xy-pic intensive, we refer for the details to the full version of this paper, available at ftp://wins.uia.ac.be/pub/preprints/02/SOSfull.pd

The pan-NLR'ome of Arabidopsis thaliana

Plants are the major nutritional component of the human diet, provide us with shel- ter, fuel, and enjoyment. Substantial yield loss is caused by plant diseases transmitted by bacteria, fungi, and oomycete pathogens. Plants have an elaborate innate immune system to fight threatening pathogens, relying to a great extend on highly variable re- sistance (R) genes. R genes often encode intracellular nucleotide-binding leucine-rich repeat receptors (NLRs) that directly or indirectly recognize pathogens by the presence or the activity of effector proteins in the plants’ cells. NLRs contain variable N-terminal domains, a central nucleotide-binding (NB) domain, and C-terminal leucine-rich repeats (LRRs). The N-terminal domains can be used to distinguish between the evolutionary conserved NLR classes TNL (with a toll/interleucin-1 receptor homology (TIR) domain), CNL (with a coiled-coil (CC) domain), and RNL (with an RPW8 domain). The archi- tectural diversity is increased by additional integrated domains (IDs) found in different positions. Plant species have between a few dozen and several hundred NLRs. The intraspecific R gene diversity is also high, and the still few known NLRs responsible for long-term resistance are often accession-specific. Intraspecific NLR studies to date suffer from several shortcomings: The pan-NLR’omes (the collection of all NLR genes and alleles occurring in a species) can often not be comprehensively described because too few accessions are analyzed, and NLR detection is essentially always guided by reference genomes, which biases the detection of novel genes and alleles. In addition, inappropriate or immature bioinformatics analysis pipelines may miss NLRs during the assembly or annotation phase, or result in erroneous NLR annotations. Knowing the pan-NLR’ome of a plant species is key to obtain novel resistant plants in the future. I created an extensive and reliable database that defines the near-complete pan-NLR’ome of the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana. Efforts were focused on a panel of 65 diverse accessions and applied state-of-the-art targeted long read sequencing (SMRT RenSeq). My analysis pipeline was designed to include optimized methods that could be applied to any SMRT RenSeq project. In the first part of my thesis I set quality control standards for the assembly of NLR-coding genomic fragments. I further introduce a novel and thorough gene annotation pipeline, supported by careful manual curation. In the second part, I present the manuscript reporting the saturated near-complete A. thaliana pan- NLR’ome. The species-wide high NLR diversity is revealed on the domain architecture level, and the usage of novel IDs is highlighted. The core NLR complement is defined and presence-absence polymorphisms in non-core NLRs are described. Furthermore, haplotype saturation is shown, selective forces are quantified, and evolutionary coupled co-evolving NLRs are detected. The method optimization results show that final NLR assembly quality is mainly influenced by the amount and the quality of input sequencing data. The results further show that manual curation of automated NLR predictions are crucial to prevent frequently occurring misannotations. The saturation of an NLR’ome has not been shown in any plant species so far, thus this study provides an unprecedented view on intraspecific NLR variation, the core NLR complement, and the evolutionary trajectories of NLRs. IDs are more frequently used than known before, suggesting a pivotal role of noncanonical NLRs in plant-pathogen interactions. This work sets new standards for the analysis of gene families at the species level. Future NLR’ome projects applied to important crop species will profit from my results and the easy-to-adopt anal- ysis pipeline. Ultimately, this will extend our knowledge of intraspecific NLR diversity beyond few reference species or genomes, and will facilitate the detection of functional NLRs, to be used in disease resistance breeding programs

Serum micronutrient concentrations in western Canadian beef cattle at pre-breeding and pregnancy testing

This thesis described the results of two studies that measured the concentrations of serum micronutrients in western Canadian beef cows at key production points, and examined associations between reproductive outcomes and micronutrient concentrations. The first study reported the serum copper and molybdenum concentrations at pregnancy testing time in cows from 66 cow-calf herds that were enrolled in a study of factors affecting productivity in 205 herds from western Canada. A relatively small proportion of cows had serum copper and molybdenum concentrations outside of adequate levels (16.2% of cows had below adequate serum copper, 0.10 ppm). There were no associations between copper and molybdenum concentrations measured at the end of the grazing season and reproductive outcomes measured in these cows, with the exception that cows with the lowest serum copper concentrations at pregnancy testing were more likely to be pregnant than cows with higher copper concentrations. The practice of comparing serum copper and molybdenum concentrations between pregnant and non-pregnant animals in the fall as a tool in investigating poor pregnancy rates was not supported by this study. In the second study, serum micronutrient concentrations of beef cows (n = 791) in southern Saskatchewan were measured before placement onto summer grazing and breeding pastures and again at the end of the grazing season. Pre-breeding serum copper concentrations were less than adequate (< 0.60 ppm) in 75% of cows. High concentrations of serum molybdenum („d 0.10 ppm) were present in 19% of cows at pre-breeding. Cows < 10 years of age with lower pre-breeding serum copper concentrations were at increased odds of nonpregnancy. The greatest effect on pregnancy rates was observed for pre-breeding serum copper concentrations < 0.4 ppm. Season of measurement influenced the concentrations of serum micronutrients in these cows. Copper and vitamins A and E were higher in the fall, and molybdenum and selenium concentrations were lower in the fall. These studies described serum micronutrient concentrations from healthy cows in western Canada at two production points, pre-breeding placement onto grazing pastures and pregnancy testing when cows are removed from grazing pasture. Identifying increased odds of nonpregnancy in cows with below adequate serum copper at pre-breeding emphasizes the importance of ensuring adequate copper concentrations in breeding females during this critical production phase