A-REIT bidder returns : an evaluation of public and private targets and method of payment

This study examines the wealth effects of fifty-six Australian Real Estate Investment Trusts (A-REITS) acquirers around the announcement date of a merger and acquisition over the period of 1996 to 2010. This study extends Ratcliffe et al (2009) by examining mergers and acquisitions of private entity targets as well as public targets and confirms recent US REIT work in this field. Utilising event study methodology we find that bidding A-REITs earn positive and significant cumulative abnormal returns (CARs) of +0.966% around the three-day announcement period [-1, +1]. Analysis also indicates bidding firms earn higher CARs when the acquisition is financed by scrip and/or a combination of scrip and cash. Consistent with prior REIT research, event study results show that A-REIT acquirers earn higher excess returns when the target is private as compared to a public target, +2.834% and +0.457% respectively. Further investigation, employing regression analysis, shows book-to-market ratio has a negative impact on bidding firms CARs, suggesting that investors penalise high book-to-market A-REITs in an M&A due to their higher risk characteristics. We also find that both specialisation by property type and relative size of the bidder compared to the target has a positive and significant influence on bidder excess returns. Finally, our results show support for the method of payment findings in the event study, with method of payment returning a negative and significant impact on the bidder CARs.

Commentary : Obesity - why governments must act

The commercial drivers of the obesity epidemic are so influential that obesity can be considered a robust sign of commercial success – consumers are buying more food, more cars, and more energy-saving machines (1). It is unlikely that these powerful economic forces will change sufficiently in response to consumer desires to eat less and move more, or to corporate desires to be more socially responsible. When the 'free market' creates substantial population detriments and health inequalities, government policies are needed to change the ground-rules in favour of population benefits.

From estrangement to a sense of place …

Maggie MacKellar in her book Core of my Heart, my Country writes 'What is sense of place? Why is relationship with place so fundamental to our identity as individuals and as communities?' MacKellar rightly acknowledges that 'A sense of place is a complex connection between land and self. Place is both inside and outside; it takes us beyond ourselves, yet allows us to make sense of ourselves. Attachments to place are born into us, but they are also formed through movement, through labour, through words.' My mother Maria Radzimirski-Herzog considered herself truly Swiss and thoroughly Australian. Through one migrant's story this paper explores something of the complex intertwining of place, memory and identity. It grapples with the notion of belonging to one's country of birth and one's adopted country via a rich understanding of place. In Maria's case, place becomes inextricably bound with who she became as a person. In the early 1940s, Maria explored Switzerland on bike and on foot during war-time restrictions on cars and she came to know it intimately. She photographed the land and the mountains; she documented her journeys. Spirn writes perceptively that 'Significance does not depend on human perception or imagination alone.' For Maria significance was, to use Spirn's words, 'there to be discovered, inherent and ascribed, shaped by what senses perceive, what instinct and experience read as significant, what minds know'. For Maria, Landscape was not 'mere scenery'. The ability to see, to listen, to be present in place, stood her in good stead in her adopted country, Australia. Maria called place into being for her children: through her lived experiences, her memories, her story telling, through language, traditions and history, Maria shared her Swiss identity with her children. But imperceptibly she also taught them how to understand her new homeland Australia, their birth country. How did Maria become Australian? Was that her creative response to exile from Switzerland? How did she come to feel at home in both countries, to understand both places? How did they seep into her and she into them? Through my own research on place I have discovered that assessing 'sense of place' is not an exact science but a creative analysis of the attributes of a place. The methodology I have adopted to explore the complex interrelationships between place, memory and identity allows recovery and reclamation, rediscovery, juxtaposing the subjective and the objective, the co-presence of different evidence. This paper draws on place research, on personal papers, letters and photographs, and the author's own experiences and memories. Through story and narrative it interweaves autobiography and biography with theoretical scholarship, to illuminate one migrant's journey from estrangement to a sense of place in her adopted country, Australia.

Expansion of congested railway capacity using triple-track line operation based on hourly passenger demand

This paper proposes a method of improving level of service in congested urban railways by means of a triple-track line operation for a highly dense urban area with special travel demand characteristics. Where the future travel demand forecasts show sluggish growth or no growth at all, there is little to no incentives for heavy railway investments like quadruple-track extension and construction of new railway routes to alleviate current railway congestion problems. In such a situation, triple-track line operation can be the best alternative due to its moderate investment cost and ease in land acquisition for just an additional single track along the existing tracks. Our simulation investigation in one of the congested railway lines in Tokyo showed that triple track line operation increases railway capacity by 26% and shortens travel time by 38% in peak direction during morning peak hours. These results are encouraging and are useful for removing current railways problems in Tokyo and in similar urban situations elsewhere.

Frank Will - Backyard innovation

Frank Will has invented the OVER7 system to reduce fuel consumption in common family cars.

Setback distances as a conservation tool in wildlife-human interactions : testing their efficacy for birds affected by vehicles on open-coast sandy beaches

In some wilderness areas, wildlife encounter vehicles disrupt their behaviour and habitat use. Changing driver behaviour has been proposed where bans on vehicle use are politically unpalatable, but the efficacy of vehicle setbacks and reduced speeds remains largely untested. We characterised bird-vehicle encounters in terms of driver behaviour and the disturbance caused to birds, and tested whether spatial buffers or lower speeds reduced bird escape responses on open beaches. Focal observations showed that: i) most drivers did not create sizeable buffers between their vehicles and birds; ii) bird disturbance was frequent; and iii) predictors of probability of flushing (escape) were setback distance and vehicle type (buses flushed birds at higher rates than cars). Experiments demonstrated that substantial reductions in bird escape responses required buffers to be wide (> 25 m) and vehicle speeds to be slow (< 30 km h-1). Setback distances can reduce impacts on wildlife, provided that they are carefully designed and derived from empirical evidence. No speed or distance combination we tested, however, eliminated bird responses. Thus, while buffers reduce response rates, they are likely to be much less effective than vehicle-free zones (i.e. beach closures), and rely on changes to current driver behaviour

The role of external influences in high involvement purchase behaviour

Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to discover the consumer decision-making style clusters within the context of automobile purchases in Australia. It also examines the differences between consumer decision-making styles in terms of the importance given to external influences, such as importance of dealers, importance of friends/family members, number of cars test driven, time spent researching final decision and importance of information sources (e.g. internet, magazines, TV ads, word of mouth, etc.), prior to making their final purchase decision.

Design/methodology/approach
Data were collected from 209 respondents using self-administered questionnaires. Cluster analysis and ANOVA were employed to identify and analyse the differences between consumer decision-making style clusters. Consumer Styles Inventory (CSI; Sproles and Kendall, 1986) was used to measure respondents’ consumer decision-making styles in relation to automobile purchases.

Findings
Three clusters were identified from the analysis, namely “innovative informed”, “rational confused”, and “traditional habitual”. Significant differences were found between the clusters in terms of the average time they spent with each car dealer, the time they spent on researching final decision and the importance of consulting with family members prior to making their final purchase decision.

Practical implications
The paper found that some consumers rely heavily on friends/families and dealers as the most important sources of information. Other sources of information consumers use include television advertisements, newspapers, billboards and magazines. Based on the findings, marketers should focus on providing similar types of information/messages by using these above-mentioned sources when communicating with this type of consumers. Dealers could be trained to spend time explaining product features and benefits in full with these consumers and their friends and family members whom they are likely to bring along before making the final purchase decision.

Originality/value
The findings of this study have extended the knowledge by determining the impact of external influences on consumer decision-making styles using the CSI in context of specific product which is yet to be known in relation to Australian automobile consumers.

Occupational light vehicle use: characterising the at-risk population

Previous occupational light vehicle research has concentrated on employees using cars. The aim of this study was to identify and characterise the total occupational light vehicle-user population and compare it with the privately-used light vehicle population. Occupational light vehicle and private light vehicle populations were identified through use-related 2003 registration categories from New South Wales Roads and Traffic Authority data. Key groups of occupational light vehicle registration variables were comparatively assessed as potential determinants of occupational light vehicleuser risks. These comparisons were expressed as odds ratios with 95% Confidence Intervals. The occupational light vehicle population vehicles (n=646,201) comprised 18% of all light vehicle registrations. A number of statistical differences emerge between the two populations. For instance, 86% of occupational light vehicle registrants were male versus 65% of private registrants, and 56% of the occupational users registered load shape vehicles versus 20% of the private registrants. Occupational light vehicles registered for farming or taxi use were more than six times more likely to belong to sole-traders than organisations. Sole-traders were nearly twice as likely to register light-trucks, and twice as likely to register older vehicles, than organisations. This study demonstrates that the occupational light vehicle user population is larger and more diverse than previously shown with characteristics likely to increase the relative risks of motor vehicle crashes. More occupational light vehicles were load shapes and therefore likely to have poorer crashworthiness ratings than cars. Occupational light vehicles are frequently used by sole-traders for activities with increased OHS risks including farming and taxi use. Further exploration of occupational light vehicle-user crash risks should include all vehicle types, work arrangements and small ‘fleets’.

A cross-disciplinary analysis of rhetorical structure of dissertation abstracts

The teaching rhetorical structure of various academic genres has been recognized as a practical, pedagogical tool in both ESL and EFL academic settings. However, assigning a unitary structure for different fields of study might poses problems for novice writers. In this study, the rhetorical structure of 120 abstracts (ninety ‘masters’ theses and thirty ‘doctoral’ dissertations) from six disciplines were investigated. In this exploratory study, four rhetorical structures were found: IMRC/D, CARS, Mixed, and None (which means the texts lack any rhetorical structure). The conclusion is that nonnative speakers require more than grammatical knowledge at the clause level. They need to be familiarized with the discourse grammar with the functional tokens attached to it in order to be successful in their academic writing.

A four week randomised control trial of adjunctive medroxyprogesterone and tamoxifen in women with mania

Emerging research has suggested that hormone treatments such as selective oestrogen receptor modulators (SERMs) or progestins may be useful in the treatment of mania. The current pilot study compared the use of the SERM tamoxifen and the progestin medroxyprogesterone acetate (MPA), as an adjunct to mood stabiliser medications, for the treatment of mania symptoms in 51 women in a 28-day double blind, placebo controlled study. The primary outcome was the change between baseline and day 28 mania scores as measured by the Clinician Administered Rating Scale for Mania (CARS-M). Adjunctive MPA treatment provided greater and more rapid improvement in mania symptoms compared with adjunctive placebo and tamoxifen treatment. Adjunctive therapy with MPA may be a potentially useful new treatment for persistent mania, leading to a greater and more rapid resolution of symptoms compared with mood stabiliser treatment alone.

Efficient and accurate set-based registration of time-separated aerial images

This paper addresses the task of time-separated aerial image registration. The ability to solve this problem accurately and reliably is important for a variety of subsequent image understanding applications. The principal challenge lies in the extent and nature of transient appearance variation that a land area can undergo, such as that caused by the change under illumination conditions, seasonal variations, or the occlusion by non-persistent objects (people, cars). Our work introduces several major novelties (i) unlike previous work on aerial image registration, we approach the problem using a set-based paradigm; (ii) we show how image space local, pair-wise constraints can be used to enforce a globally good registration using a constraints graph structure; (iii) we show how a simple holistic representation derived from raw aerial images can be used as a basic building block of the constraints graph in a manner which achieves both high registration accuracy and speed; (iv) lastly, we introduce a new and, to the best of our knowledge, the only data corpus suitable for the evaluation of set-based aerial image registration algorithms. Using this data set, we demonstrate (i) that the proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art for pair-wise registration already, achieving greater accuracy and reliability, while at the same time reducing the computational cost of the task and (ii) that the increase in the number of available images in a set consistently reduces the average registration error, with a major difference already for a single additional image.

We are in danger

Genre films are constructed out of narrative patterns and plot points that involve or are predicted on crisis, on danger. This is the logic of much if not all mainstream genre cinema: drama has to take place for there to be a story to be told, and for pleasure and identification to be arrested and enthused. Forms of threatening disequilibrium can be personal, domestic, familial, local, external, supernatural and murderous; a way of life can be threatened as well as life itself. There are ideological dimensions at play; the crisis threatens to destabilize patriarchy, heterosexuality, social norms and expectations. Feelings and modes of affect are set in dangerous motion as the crisis unfolds. Trouble may emerge from a wayward or transgressive family member, or it may arrive in town on horses, stagecoaches, trains, cars, spaceships, and on the wind and in the water. The main (and minor) characters in the film are at the center of this storm, and that places viewers at the epicenter of the danger, also. The genre film places us all in danger. The genre film, then, has phenomenal, phenomenological and bio-political potential as a site of cognitive, ideological and carnal endangerment.

Predictive data mining for converged internet of things: a mobile health perspective

Mobile Health (mHealth) is now emerging with Internet of Things (IoT), Cloud and big data along with the prevalence of smart wearable devices and sensors. There is also the emergence of smart environments such as smart homes, cars, highways, cities, factories and grids. Presently, it is difficult to quickly forecast or prevent urgent health situations in real-time as health data are analyzed offline by a physician. Sensors are expected to be overloaded by demands of providing health data from IoT networks and smart environments. This paper proposes to resolve the problems by introducing an inference system so that life-threatening situations can be prevented in advance based on a short and long term health status prediction. This prediction is inferred from personal health information that is built by big data in Cloud. The inference system can also resolve the problem of data overload in sensor nodes by reducing data volume and frequency to reduce workload in sensor nodes. This paper presents a novel idea of tracking down and predicting a personal health status as well as intelligent functionality of inference in sensor nodes to interface IoT networks

Groupwise registration of aerial images

This paper addresses the task of time separated aerial image registration. The ability to solve this problem accurately and reliably is important for a variety of subsequent image understanding applications. The principal challenge lies in the extent and nature of transient appearance variation that a land area can undergo, such as that caused by the change in illumination conditions, seasonal variations, or the occlusion by non-persistent objects (people, cars). Our work introduces several novelties: (i) unlike all previous work on aerial image registration, we approach the problem using a set-based paradigm; (ii) we show how local, pairwise constraints can be used to enforce a globally good registration using a constraints graph structure; (iii) we show how a simple holistic representation derived from raw aerial images can be used as a basic building block of the constraints graph in a manner which achieves both high registration accuracy and speed. We demonstrate: (i) that the proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art for pair-wise registration already, achieving greater accuracy and reliability, while at the same time reducing the computational cost of the task; and (ii) that the increase in the number of available images in a set consistently reduces the average registration error.