Workshop on an Assessment of Gas-Side Fouling in Fossil Fuel Exhaust Environments

The state of the art of gas side fouling in fossil fuel exhaust environments was assessed. Heat recovery applications were emphasized. The deleterious effects of gas side fouling including increased energy consumption, increased material losses, and loss of production were identified

On Setting Apartment Rental Rates: A Regression-Based Approach

This study presents a regression-based analysis of apartment rents for a cross-section of properties located in an "edge city" submarket. It attempts to provide a solution for owners and managers of apartments to the thorny problem of setting a property's rental rate. The approach used in this analysis differs from previous studies in at least three important respects: (1) vacancy is treated as part of the dependent variable, (2) the property-specific rental rate generated by the regression analysis is compared to the property's actual effective rent, and (3) each property in the submarket is ranked by the difference between its actual effective rent and its characteristic-adjusted effective rent. This is then followed by several observations concerning the advantages and disadvantages of such an analysis in a practical setting.

A Fundamental Examination of Securitized and Unsecuritized Real Estate

Most studies (including this one) have found a weak statistical relationship between total returns for securitized and unsecuritized real estate equities. Some studies argue that REIT shares behave more like the stock market, than real estate. In an attempt to focus this discussion, this study examines the fundamental underlying return-generating components: dividends, investment values, and dividend yields using NAREIT and NCREIF data from 1978 through 1994. While dividends have been part of the REIT pricing calculus for some time, relatively few studies have focused upon the "dividends" paid by NCREIF properties. The short-run relationships between these fundamental components are weak and many of their distributions display significant non-normal tendencies. Even when quarterly lags of up to two years are examined, these distributions also tend to be weakly correlated with one another. Of the three fundamental components, the long-run path of prices exhibited the strongest relationship. Interestingly, the volatility of the NCREIF dividend series is approximately 150% of the NAREIT volatility, while the volatility of the NCREIF asset values is roughly 25% of the NAREIT volatility. This is contradictory: in a simplified setting, greater dividend volatility should be accompanied by greater price volatility, not less, as observed here. Nevertheless, such comparisons suffer due to the incompatibility of the data sources and, accordingly, this study should be viewed as a preliminary examination of securitized and unsecuritized real estate returns.

Assessment of Real Estate Brokerage Service Quality with a Practicing Professional's Instrument

This study explores factors that affect service quality for a large residential real estate brokerage in a diverse midwestern city. It examines the extent to which overall service quality influences homebuyers to recommend the brokerage firm and to use the firm for future transactions. A Linear Structural Relations model is fit to data using the firm's service quality instrument. Results indicate statistically significant relationships between both agent characteristics and the tangible aspects of the firm, and three measures of overall service quality. Implications for the real estate industry are discussed and suggestions for improvement and future research are provided.

Characteristics of successful interventions to reduce turnover and increase retention of early career nurses: a systematic review

Background nurse shortages have been identified as central to workforce issues in healthcare systems globally and although interventions to increase the nursing workforce have been implemented, nurses leaving their roles, particularly in the first year after qualification, present a significant barrier to building the nurse workforce. Objective to evaluate the characteristics of successful interventions to promote retention and reduce turnover of early career nurses. Design this is a systematic review Data sources Online databases including Academic Search Complete, Medline, Health Policy reference Centre, EMBASE, Psychinfo, CINAHL and the Cochran Library were searched to identify relevant publications in English published between 2001 and April 2018. Studies included evaluated an intervention to increase retention or reduce turnover and used turnover or retention figures as a measure. Review methods The review was conducted according to the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-analyses (PRISMA) guidelines. Studies were quality-assessed using the Joanna Briggs Institute Critical Appraisal tools for Quasi Experimental and Randomised Controlled Trials. Retention/turnover data were used to guide the comparison between studies and appropriate measures of central tendency and dispersion were calculated and presented, based on the normality of the data. Results A total of 11, 656 papers were identified, of which 53 were eligible studies. A wide variety of interventions and components within those interventions were identified to improve nurse retention. Promising interventions appear to be either internship/residency programmes or orientation/transition to practice programmes, lasting between 27-52 weeks, with a teaching and preceptor and mentor component. Conclusions Methodological issues impacted on the extent to which conclusions could be drawn, even though a large number of studies were identified. Future research should focus on standardising the reporting of interventions and outcome measures used to evaluate these interventions and carrying out further research with rigorous methodology. Clinical practice areas are recommended to assess their current interventions against the identified criteria to guide development of their effectiveness. Evaluations of cost-effectiveness are considered an important next step to maximise return on investment

Generation and measurement of nonstationary random processes technical note no. 3

Generation and measurement of nonstationary stochastic processes related to Monte Carlo studies with analog compute

Humpback and Fin Whaling in the Gulf of Maine from 1800 to 1918

The history of whaling in the Gulf of Maine was reviewed primarily to estimate removals of humpback whales, Megaptera novaeangliae, especially during the 19th century. In the decades from 1800 to 1860, whaling effort consisted of a few localized, small-scale, shore-based enterprises on the coast of Maine and Cape Cod, Mass. Provincetown and Nantucket schooners occasionally conducted short cruises for humpback whales in New England waters. With the development of bomb-lance technology at mid century, the ease of killing humpback whales and fin whales, Balaenoptera physalus, increased. As a result, by the 1870’s there was considerable local interest in hunting rorquals (baleen whales in the family Balaenopteridae, which include the humpback and fin whales) in the Gulf of Maine. A few schooners were specially outfitted to take rorquals in the late 1870’s and 1880’s although their combined annual take was probably no more than a few tens of whales. Also in about 1880, fishing steamers began to be used to hunt whales in the Gulf of Maine. This steamer fishery grew to include about five vessels regularly engaged in whaling by the mid 1880’s but dwindled to only one vessel by the end of the decade. Fin whales constituted at least half of the catch, which exceeded 100 animals in some years. In the late 1880’s and thereafter, few whales were taken by whaling vessels in the Gulf of Maine

Boxfishes (Teleostei: Ostraciidae) as a model system for fishes swimming with many fins: kinematics

Swimming movements in boxfishes were much more complex and varied than classical descriptions indicated. At low to moderate rectilinear swimming speeds (<5 TL s^(-1), where TL is total body length), they were entirely median- and paired-fin swimmers, apparently using their caudal fins for steering. The pectoral and median paired fins generate both the thrust needed for forward motion and the continuously varied, interacting forces required for the maintenance of rectilinearity. It was only at higher swimming speeds (above 5 TL s^(-1)), when burst-and-coast swimming was used, that they became primarily body and caudal-fin swimmers. Despite their unwieldy appearance and often asynchronous fin beats, boxfish swam in a stable manner. Swimming boxfish used three gaits. Fin-beat asymmetry and a relatively nonlinear swimming trajectory characterized the first gait (0–1 TL s^(-1)). The beginning of the second gait (1–3 TL s^(-1)) was characterized by varying fin-beat frequencies and amplitudes as well as synchrony in pectoral fin motions. The remainder of the second gait (3–5 TL s^(-1)) was characterized by constant fin-beat amplitudes, varying finbeat frequencies and increasing pectoral fin-beat asynchrony. The third gait (>5 TL s^(-1)) was characterized by the use of a caudal burst-and-coast variant. Adduction was always faster than abduction in the pectoral fins. There were no measurable refractory periods between successive phases of the fin movement cycles. Dorsal and anal fin movements were synchronized at speeds greater than 2.5 TL s^(-1), but were often out of phase with pectoral fin movements