The costs of raising equity capital by Australian property trust initial public offerings

This paper reports some of the direct costs of raising equity capital by property trust initial public offerings (IPOs) in Australia from 1994 to 2004. It also documents the amount of underpricing by these IPOs. The results indicate the average fees paid to underwriters and/or stockbrokers in managing and marketing the issue was around 3.3% of the public equity capital raised. The average fees paid to legal firms, accounting firms and valuers for their professional involvement and expert reports were 0.4%, 0.2% and 0.1% respectively, totaling 0.7% of the equity raised. Other fees such as printing, listing fees, postage, distribution and advertising cost around 2.1%. The total average direct costs amounted to around 6.1% of the proceeds raised. The average underpricing by these property trust IPOs was 2.6%. This paper also investigates the hypotheses that the percentage direct capital raising costs are influenced by the size of the IPO and whether the IPO is underwritten. This study confirms that larger property trust equity capital raisings have lower percentage total direct cost;, however, it does not find that underwriting significantly influences the percentage of total direct costs for these property trust IPOs.

2nd Hand Cinema

A celebration of the offal of cinema, old films, old soundtracks, drawing directly on the film, using stamps and food-dyes to create discarded imagery. To chew film up and spit it out as painting direct.

Hierarchical recognition of intentional human gestures for sports video annotation

We present a novel technique for the recognition of complex human gestures for video annotation using accelerometers and the hidden Markov model. Our extension to the standard hidden Markov model allows us to consider gestures at different levels of abstraction through a hierarchy of hidden states. Accelerometers in the form of wrist bands are attached to humans performing intentional gestures, such as umpires in sports. Video annotation is then performed by populating the video with time stamps indicating significant events, where a particular gesture occurs. The novelty of the technique lies in the development of a probabilistic hierarchical framework for complex gesture recognition and the use of accelerometers to extract gestures and significant events for video annotation.

Small within-day increases in temperature affects boldness and alters personality in coral reef fish

Consistent individual differences in behaviour, termed personality, are common in animal populations and can constrain their responses to ecological and environmental variation, such as temperature. Here, we show for the first time that normal within-daytime fluctuations in temperature of less than 3°C have large effects on personality for two species of juvenile coral reef fish in both observational and manipulative experiments. On average, individual scores on three personality traits (PTs), activity, boldness and aggressiveness, increased from 2.5- to sixfold as a function of temperature. However, whereas most individuals became more active, aggressive and bold across temperature contexts (were plastic), others did not; this changed the individual rank order across temperatures and thus altered personality. In addition, correlations between PTs were consistent across temperature contexts, e.g. fish that were active at a given temperature also tended to be both bold and aggressive. These results (i) highlight the importance of very carefully controlling for temperature when studying behavioural variation among and within individuals and (ii) suggest that individual differences in energy metabolism may contribute to animal personality, given that temperature has large direct effects on metabolic rates in ectotherms.

Do consistent individual differences in metabolic rate promote consistent individual differences in behavior?

Consistent individual differences (CIDs) in behavior are a widespread phenomenon in animals, but the proximate reasons for them are unresolved. We discuss evidence for the hypothesis that CIDs in energy metabolism, as reflected by resting metabolic rate (RMR), promote CIDs in behavior patterns that either provide net energy (e.g. foraging activity), and/or consume energy (e.g. courtship activity). In doing so, we provide a framework for linking together RMR, behavior, and life-history productivity. Empirical studies suggest that RMR is (a) related to the capacity to generate energy, (b) repeatable, and (c) correlated with behavioral output (e.g. aggressiveness) and productivity (e.g. growth). We conclude by discussing future research directions to clarify linkages between behavior and energy metabolism in this emerging research area.

Are animal personality traits linked to life-history productivity?

Animal personality traits such as boldness, activity and aggressiveness have been described for many animal species. However, why some individuals are consistently bolder or more active than others, for example, is currently obscure. Given that life-history tradeoffs are common and known to promote inter-individual differences in behavior, we suggest that consistent individual differences in animal personality traits can be favored when those traits contribute to consistent individual differences in productivity (growth and/or fecundity). A survey of empirical studies indicates that boldness, activity and/or aggressiveness are positively related to food intake rates, productivity and other life-history traits in a wide range of taxa. Our conceptual framework sets the stage for a closer look at relationships between personality traits and life-history traits in animals.

Using repeatability to study physiological and behavioural traits: ignore time-related change at your peril

© 2015 The Association for the Study of Animal Behaviour. Broad sense repeatability, which refers to the extent to which individual differences in trait scores are maintained over time, is of increasing interest to researchers studying behavioural or physiological traits. Broad sense repeatability is most often inferred from the statistic R (the intraclass correlation, or narrow sense repeatability). However, R ignores change over time, despite the inherent longitudinal nature of the data (repeated measures over time). Here, we begin by showing that most studies ignore time-related change when estimating broad sense repeatability, and estimate R with low statistical power. Given this problem, we (1) outline how and why ignoring time-related change in scores (that occurs for whatever reason) can seriously affect estimates of the broad sense repeatability of behavioural or physiological traits, (2) discuss conditions in which various indices of R can or cannot provide reliable estimates of broad sense repeatability, and (3) provide suggestions for experimental designs for future studies. Finally, given that we already have abundant evidence that many labile traits are 'repeatable' in that broad sense (i.e. R>. 0), we suggest a shift in focus towards obtaining robust estimates of the repeatability of behavioural and physiological traits. Given how labile these traits are, this will require greater experimental (and/or statistical) control and larger sample sizes in order to detect and quantify change over time (if present).

Personality and individual differences in plasticity

In the last few years, investigators have documented individual differences in many different types of behavioral plasticity. Of particular interest are individual differences in the temporal plasticity of personality traits over extended (ontogenetic) periods of time, because of the relevance of these data to models of behavioral development. We discuss recent empirical studies of the temporal consistency of personality over ontogeny, and models that make contrasting predictions about individual differences in the developmental trajectories of behavioral traits. In addition, we consider recent advances in studies of relationships between personality traits and particular types of behavioral plasticity, including statistical methods which facilitate analyses of relationships between personality traits, contextual plasticity, temporal plasticity and intraindividual variability, and empirical tests of predicted relationships between personality traits and other types of behavioral plasticity (flexibility, learning rates). As the field of animal personality and behavioral plasticity moves from a largely descriptive to a predictive phase, we suggest that there is ample room for empirical tests of recent models that predict individual differences in behavioral developmental trajectories, and for the development of new formal models that make strong predictions about relationships between personality traits and specific types of behavioral plasticity.