Asset Prices, Credit Growth, Monetary and Other Policies: An Australian Case Study

The long-running debate about the role of monetary policy in responding to rising asset prices has received renewed attention in the wake of the global financial crisis.This paper contributes to this debate by describing the Australian experience of a cycle in house prices and credit from 2002 to 2004, and discussing the role played by various policies during this episode. In particular, it focuses on the efforts by the Reserve Bank of Australia to draw attention to the risks associated with large, ongoing increases in housing prices and household borrowing.asset prices; credit growth; lending standards; monetary policy; regulatory policy

NON-PLATINUM GROUP METAL OXGYEN REDUCTION CATALYSTS AND THEIR MECHANISM IN BOTH ACID AND ALKALINE MEDIA: THE EFFECT OF THE CATALYST PRECURSOR AND THE IONOMER ON OXYGEN REDUCTION

Non-platinum catalysts are an attractive strategy for lowering the cost of fuel cells, but much more development is needed in order to replace platinum, especially at the cathode where oxygen is reduced. Research groups worldwide have donated material for a study in which precursor structure to catalyst activity correlations are made. The donated samples have been divided into three classes based on their precursor; macrocyclic chelates, small molecule, and polymeric precursors. The precursor is one activity-dictating factor among many, but it is one of the most influential. It was found that macrocyclic chelates on average produced the most active catalysts, having the highest limiting, diffusion-limited, kinetic, and exchange current densities, as well as the lowest overpotentials and H2O2 production. This suggests that the M-N4 atomic structure of the precursor remains largely static throughout heat treatment, as the M-Nx motif is the accepted active site conformation. The other classes were somewhat less active, but the breadth of precursor materials that range in structure and functionality, as well as low associated costs, make them attractive precursor materials. Careful precursor selection based on this analysis was applied to a new generation of catalyst derived from iron salt and 4-aminoantipyrine. An extensive investigation of the reduction of oxygen on the material performed in both acid and alkaline media, and it was found that reduction follows a two-step pathway. While the peroxide reducing step is also very fast, the first step is so rapid that, even at low active site density, the material is almost as active as platinum if all diffusion limitations are removed. In addition to bottom-up catalyst design, the catalyst:ionomer complex, by which catalyst is incorporated into the membrane electrode assembly, also affects reductive kinetics. A series of novel anionically conductive ionomers have been evaluated using a well-described cyanamide derived catalyst, and the ionomeric influence on activity was mechanistically evaluated. It was found that the water-uptake percentage of the ionomer and the ion exchange capacity has a major role in catalyzing the reaction. The ionomer content of the complex must balance ionic and electrical charge transfer, as well as manage a certain degree of hydration at the active site. In order for a catalyst to perform optimally in an operational fuel cell, design considerations must be addressed at the precursor, support, synthesis, morphological, and ionomer-complexing levels. If any level of design is neglected, catalytic performance will be sacrificed

Assessment of the microbial communities associated with white syndrome and brown jelly syndrome in aquarium corals

Bacterial and ciliate assemblages associated with aquarium corals displaying white syndrome (WS) and brown jelly syndrome (BJS) were investigated. Healthy (n = 10) and diseased corals (WS n = 18; BJS n = 3) were analysed for 16S rRNA gene bacterial diversity, total bacterial abundance and vibrio-specific 16S rRNA gene abundance. This was conducted alongside analysis of 18S rRNA gene sequenc-ing targeting ciliates, a group of organisms largely overlooked for their potential as causal agents of coral disease. Despite significant differences between healthy and diseased corals in their 16S rRNA gene bacterial diversity, total bacterial abundance and vibrio-specific rRNA gene abundance, no domi-nant bacterial ribotypes were found consistently within the diseased samples. In contrast, one ciliate morphotype, named Morph 3 in this study (GenBank Accession Numbers JF831358 for the ciliate isolated from WS and JF831359 for the ciliate isolated from BJS) was observed to burrow into and underneath the coral tissues at the disease lesion in both disease types and contained algal endosym-bionts indicative of coral tissue ingestion. This ciliate was observed in larger numbers in BJS compared to WS, giving rise to the characteristic jelly like substance in BJS. Morph 3 varied by only 1 bp over 549 bp from the recently described Morph 1 ciliate (GenBank Accession No. JN626268), which has been shown to be present in field samples of WS and Brown Band Disease (BrB) in the Indo-Pacific. This result indicates a close relationship between these aquarium diseases and those observed in the wild

Spanning Trees of Bounded Degree Graphs

We consider lower bounds on the number of spanning trees of connected graphs with degree bounded by $d$. The question is of interest because such bounds may improve the analysis of the improvement produced by memorisation in the runtime of exponential algorithms. The value of interest is the constant $\beta_d$ such that all connected graphs with degree bounded by $d$ have at least $\beta_d^\mu$ spanning trees where $\mu$ is the cyclomatic number or excess of the graph, namely $m-n+1$. We conjecture that $\beta_d$ is achieved by the complete graph $K_{d+1}$ but we have not proved this for any $d$ greater than 3. We give weaker lower bounds on $\beta_d$ for $d\le 11$

Systematic vertical error in UAV-derived topographic models:origins and solutions

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) equipped with consumer cameras are increasingly being used to produce high resolution digital elevation models (DEMs). However, although such DEMs may achieve centimetric detail, they can also display broad-scale systematic deformation (usually a vertical ‘doming’) that restricts their wider use. This effect can be particularly apparent in DEMs derived by structure-from-motion (SfM) processing, especially when control point data have not been incorporated in the bundle adjustment process. We illustrate that doming error results from a combination of inaccurate description of radial lens distortion and the use of imagery captured in near-parallel viewing directions. With such imagery, enabling camera self-calibration within the processing inherently leads to erroneous radial distortion values and associated DEM error. Using a simulation approach, we illustrate how existing understanding of systematic DEM error in stereo-pairs (from unaccounted radial distortion) up-scales in typical multiple-image blocks of UAV surveys. For image sets with dominantly parallel viewing directions, self-calibrating bundle adjustment (as normally used with images taken using consumer cameras) will not be able to derive radial lens distortion accurately, and will give associated systematic ‘doming’ DEM deformation. In the presence of image measurement noise (at levels characteristic of SfM software), and in the absence of control measurements, our simulations display domed deformation with amplitude of 2 m over horizontal distances of 100 m. We illustrate the sensitivity of this effect to variations in camera angle and flight height. Deformation will be reduced if suitable control points can be included within the bundle adjustment, but residual systematic vertical error may remain, accommodated by the estimated precision of the control measurements. Doming bias can be minimised by the inclusion of inclined images within the image set, for example, images collected during gently banked turns of a fixed-wing UAV or, if camera inclination can be altered, by just a few more oblique images with a rotor-based UAV. We provide practical flight plan solutions that, in the absence of control points, demonstrate a reduction in systematic DEM error by more than two orders of magnitude. DEM generation is subject to this effect whether a traditional photogrammetry or newer structure-from-motion (SfM) processing approach is used, but errors will be typically more pronounced in SfM-based DEMs, for which use of control measurements is often more limited. Although focussed on UAV surveying, our results are also relevant to ground-based image capture for SfM-based modelling