Responding to the Impending Repossessions Crisis

This paper was commissioned by Communities and Local Government in November 2008 in response to the rise in repossessions. It addresses the macroeconomic and social impacts of repossessions and makes recommendations for government action

Pathos and patter in real estate parlance

This paper presents the first systematic analysis of estate agent language and employs Aristotle’s ponderings on the art of persuasion as a means of classifying the peculiar parlance of property peddlers. “Des. Res.”, “rarely available”, “viewing essential” – these are all part of the peculiar parlance of housing advertisements. The question is whether the selling agent’s penchant for rhetoric is uniform across a single urban system or whether there are variations, even within a relatively limited geographical area. We are also interested in how the use of superlatives varies over the market cycle. For example, are estate agents more inclined to use hyperbole when the market is buoyant or when it is flat? This paper attempts to answer these questions by applying textual analysis to a unique dataset of 49,926 records of real estate transactions in the West of Scotland over the period 1999 to 2006. Our analysis has implications for our understanding of the agency behaviour of housing market professionals and endeavours to open up a new avenue of research into the market-impact of rhetoric in the language of selling

Spinning particles in 2+12+1 dimensions

Lagrangian and Hamiltonian formulations of a free spinning particle in 2+1-dimensions or {\it anyon} are established, following closely the analysis of Hanson and Regge. Two viable (and inequivalent) Lagrangians are derived. It is also argued that one of them is more favourable. In the Hamiltonian analysis non-triviaal Dirac Brackets of the fundamental variables are computed for both the models. Important qualitative differences with a recently proposed model for anyons are pointed out.Comment: Tex file, No. of pages 12, G.H.College/HEP-94-0

How AD Can Help Solve Differential-Algebraic Equations

A characteristic feature of differential-algebraic equations is that one needs to find derivatives of some of their equations with respect to time, as part of so called index reduction or regularisation, to prepare them for numerical solution. This is often done with the help of a computer algebra system. We show in two significant cases that it can be done efficiently by pure algorithmic differentiation. The first is the Dummy Derivatives method, here we give a mainly theoretical description, with tutorial examples. The second is the solution of a mechanical system directly from its Lagrangian formulation. Here we outline the theory and show several non-trivial examples of using the "Lagrangian facility" of the Nedialkov-Pryce initial-value solver DAETS, namely: a spring-mass-multipendulum system, a prescribed-trajectory control problem, and long-time integration of a model of the outer planets of the solar system, taken from the DETEST testing package for ODE solvers