Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The Time-Varying Impact of Uncertainty Shocks on the Comovement of Regional Housing Prices of the United Kingdom

The housing markets in districts across the United Kingdom (UK) co-move over time. We use the dynamic factor model to decompose the co-movement in house prices of the smallest possible geographical unit into national, regional, and idiosyncratic factors. Using the Bayesian time-varying parameter VAR (TVP-VAR) model, we study the dynamic impact of uncertainty shocks on the synchronization in housing markets. We find that the estimated national factor accurately tracks the overall housing market cycles in the UK and explains nearly all the variations in East, SouthEast, and SouthWest districts. Furthermore, the results from TVP-VAR indicate that the estimated response of the national factor to uncertainty shocks is negative. However, the magnitude of the effect is more pronounced and persists longer in the case of housing price uncertainty shocks compared to overall economic uncertainty. Overall, our results suggest that uncertainty about house prices is a primary driver of the national factor.
The effect of cell-size, cross-linking ratio, and force fields on the determination of properties of epoxy crosslinked by heuristic protocol

This research explores the effect of the cell size, cross-linking ratio, and the force fields used in the molecular dynamic simulation for determining the mechanical and thermal properties of cross-linked epoxy formed with a heuristic cross-linking procedure. The effects of the abovementioned variables on density, Young’s modulus, shear modulus, bulk modulus, and glass transition temperature values by molecular dynamics (MD) simulation were evaluated. Epoxy resin diglycidyl ether of bisphenol A and hardener diethyl toluene diamine were used in modeling the epoxy. A Heuristic method for reactive molecular dynamics (REACTER) protocol was used as the cross-linking procedure. Firstly, six structure cells were prepared in different cell sizes with a crosslinking ratio of 75%, and a mechanical analysis of all cells was performed. Then, the largest cell was prepared for three different crosslink ratios and its mechanical and thermal properties were calculated. Finally, the mechanical properties of the largest cell were calculated using the three different force fields namely the COMPASS, DREIDING, and UNIVERSAL. The results were also compared with the molecular dynamic simulation results performed using the other crosslinking procedures, and experimental results available in the literature. In comparison, it was observed that the results obtained with MD simulations coincided with the experimental data. It has been concluded that using the largest cell gives closer results to the experimental data but the processing time is also increasing rapidly. Moreover, it was also observed that the increase in the crosslinking ratio caused an increase in the mechanical properties of the epoxy and a significant increase in the glass transition temperature. Finally, compared to other force fields, it is seen that the mechanical analysis results obtained with the COMPASS force field comply more with the experimental data.
Bio-inspired soft bistable actuator with dual actuations

Soft bending actuators, as one of the most important components of soft robotics, have attracted significantly increasing attention due to their robustness, compliance, inherent safety, and ease of manufacture. However, the key disadvantages can be the low output force, slow response speed, large deformation and vibration, which can potentially be addressed by introducing a bistable mechanism enabled by a prestressed steel shell. This work proposes a novel soft actuator with bistable property, which can maintain the predefined initial state and enhance bending motion at the corresponding stable state. A novel dual-actuation mechanism, which utilises pneumatic pressure for closing and tendon-driven for opening process, is proposed for autonomous transition between both states, and for a fast response. Mathematical model is proposed and compared with the experimental result for triggering pressure, which serves as a threshold to activate the transition of the stable state. Experimental results also indicate that closing and opening speeds are enhanced by 9.82% and more than ten times, respectively, as compared with the existing pneumatic bistable reinforced actuator design. Mathematical and experimental results suggest that a programmable bending angle at the second stable state can also be achieved by adjusting the preset tendon extension. The tendon arrangement also acts as a passive damping mechanism to reduce the oscillation while closing. The damping ratio is increased by more than four times, indicating that the oscillation decay is significantly accelerated for quick stabilization. Finally, a three-finger soft gripper is developed based on the proposed actuator design, which demonstrates promising performance in grasping objects with various shapes and sizes. The experimental results also show that the proposed bistable gripper can grasp the object with a weight up to 2067 g, which is more than 17 times heavier than that of three actuators.
The utilization of agro-industrial waste for soil amendment and liquid biofertilizer mixed bacterial antagonist in eggplant production

This research aimed to improve soil fertility with soil amendment, prepared from agro-industrial waste, and application of antagonistic bacteria for controlling bacterial wilt disease. The experiments were tested on sandy-to-sandy loam soil with low organic matter and nutrients for planting eggplants. Besides the soil improvement with spent mushroom waste and mango peel mixed kernel, the results showed that soil pH, soil organic matter, nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium increased as available levels. Also, two species of bacterial antagonist named Bacillus subtilis and B. amyloliquifaciens were cultured and mixed in liquid biofertilizer. It was spiked for soil preparation before planting and during crop growth every week, which was affected by eggplant survival from bacterial wilt by 100% and 97% in plot and field-tested, respectively. The results from testing on sandy loam with the use of liquid biofertilizer three times/week showed that Ralstonia solanacearum in soil suppressed to the reduction of 1,000-10,000 times. The yield increased by 25.9%. The optimum harvesting time was 12-15 days of fruit growth with the antioxidant activity. Finally, this study has excellent potential to be extended for farmers who organically grown.
Identi cation of Ferroptosis-Related Gene Signatures Associated With Multiple Sclerosis Using Weighted Gene Co-expression Network Analysis

Sichun Gu Department of Neurology, Longhua Hospital, Shanghai University of Traditional Chinese Medicine, 725 South Wanping Road, Shanghai, 200032, China. Yan Zhang Longhua Hospital, Shanghai University of Traditional Chinese Medicine, 725 South Wanping Road, Shanghai, 200032, China; Spine Institute, Shanghai University of Traditional Chinese Medicine, 1200 Cailun Road, Shanghai, 201203, China. Chao Gu Department of Neurology, Longhua Hospital, Shanghai University of Traditional Chinese Medicine, 725 South Wanping Road, Shanghai, 200032, China. Can-Xing Yuan (  cxyuan1964@163.com ) Shanghai University of TCM: Shanghai University of Traditional Chinese Medicine https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8893-8161
Definition of Residential Power Load Profiles Clusters Using Machine Learning and Spatial Analysis

This study presents a novel approach for discovering actionable knowledge and exploring data-based models from data recorded by household smart meters. The proposed framework is supported by a machine learning architecture based on the application of data mining methods and spatial analysis to extract temporal and spatial restricted clusters of characteristic monthly electricity load profiles. In addition, it uses these clusters to perform short-term load forecasting (1 week) using recurrent neural networks. The approach analyses a database with measurements of 1000 smart meters gathered during 4 years in Guayaquil, Ecuador. Results of the proposed methodology led us to obtain a precise and efficient stratification of typical consumption patterns and to extract neighbour information to improve the performance of residential energy consumption forecasting.
MUDirect: Protecting P2P IoT Devices with MUD

Manufacturer Usage Description (MUD) is a new, whitelist-based cybersecurity standard that was recently proposed by the IETF to cope with the huge attack surface and a constantly increasing number of IoT devices connected to the Internet. MUD allows the IoT manufacturers themselves to publish the legitimate communication patterns of their devices, making it easier for security devices to enforce this policy, filter out non-complying traffic, and block a device in case it has been compromised. Typically, MUD includes a set of legitimate endpoints, specified either by domain names or by IP addresses, along with the legitimate port numbers and protocols. While these descriptions are adequate when IoT devices connect (as clients) to servers (e.g., services in the cloud), they cannot adequately describe the cases where IoT devices act as servers to which endpoints connect. These endpoints (e.g., users' mobile devices) typically do not have fixed IP addresses, nor do they associate with a domain name. In this case, accounting for 78 % of IoT devices we have surveyed, MUD degrades nowadays to allow all possible endpoints and cannot mitigate any attack. In this work, we evaluate this phenomenon and show it has a high prevalence today, thus harming dramatically the MUD framework security efficiency. We then present a solution, MUDirect, which en-hances the MUD framework to deal with these cases while preserving the current MUD specification. Finally, we have implemented our solution (extending the existing osMUD implementation) and showed that it enables P2P IoT devices protection while having minimal changes to the osMUD code.
PRELIMINARY AND INCOMPLETE: DO NOT CITE Connecting Theory to Data in Analyzing Social Insurance∗

We survey the literature on social insurance, focusing on recent work that has connected theory to evidence to make quantitative statements about welfare. Our review contains two parts. We first discuss motives for government intervention in private insurance markets, focusing primarily on selection. We review the original theoretical arguments for government intervention in the presence of adverse selection , and describe how recent empirical work documenting the importance of preference heterogeneity and loading factors suggests refinements or reversals to the original theoretical conclusions. We then describe recent empirically work that seeks to test whether or not selection exists in insurance markets and to document the welfare costs of this selection and the welfare consequences of potential public policy interventions. In the second part of the paper, we review work on optimal social insurance policies. We discuss formulas for the optimal level of insurance benefits in terms of empirically estimable parameters. We then consider the consequences of relaxing the key assumptions underlying these formulas, such as allowing for fiscal externalities or behavioral biases. We also review recent work on other dimensions of optimal policy, such as mandated savings accounts and the optimal path of benefits. Finally, we discuss some of the major challenges that remain in understanding optimal social insurance policy. ∗We are grateful to Alan Auerbach and Liran Einav for helpful comments. Heather Sarsons provided excellent research assistance. We gratefully acknowledge support from the NIA R01 AG032449 (Finkelstein) and the National Science Foundation SES 0645396 (Chetty).
Physiological characters of four lowland chilli varieties (Capsicum annum L.) with root cutting

The root system plays some vital roles in overall plant development, promoting plant anchorage, absorption of nutrients and water, and hormone production. Cutting is an attempt to root regeneration and enhance the plant's metabolism capability, including canopies and roots for high yielding. Non-hybrid chilli can be used as a model plant because Indonesia's chilli yield has not been maximal yet. This research was aimed to determine the physiological characters of four lowland chilli varieties with root cutting. This study was designed using a randomized, complete block design (RCBD) with two factors: root cutting and varieties. The root cutting factor consisted of 4 levels: root cutting in seeding, root cutting in ridging, root cutting in seedling and ridging, and non-cutting. The varieties factor consisted of 4 levels, namely Lembang, Kencana, Tanjung, dan Ungu. The results showed that root cutting in ridging for Kencana, Lembang, and Ungu increased stomatal conductance, transpiration rate, CO2 intercellular, chlorophyll accumulation, photosynthesis rate, and improved fruit yield per plant. However, Tanjung did not respond to root cutting treatment because it did not improve plant physiology characters and fruit yield than non-cutting treatment. It is concluded that root cutting in ridging can be improved plant physiology, which contributes to increasing yield on Kencana, Lembang, and Ungu.
Using of Social Media as An Account to The Information Needs

The mobility of modern society is fast and massive, mass transportation is considered as solution in resolving mobility. One of the mass transportation commonly used in Jabodetabek is KRL. KRL Commuter Line is a commuter Electric Train service operated by PT Kereta Commuter Indonesia (PT KCI). By implementing the digital platform, seeks to develop and improve services to the community with the popularity of social media. This research uses a quantitative method with a survey. The population was taken from the followers of the @commuterline Instagram account. The results showed that the relationship between the message content variable (X1) to the information needs fulfillment variable (Y) was moderate, the relationship between the timeliness variable (X2) and the information needs fulfillment variable (Y) was weak, the relationship between the effectiveness variable ( X) on the cognitive needs variable (Y1) was high, the relationship between the effectiveness variable (X) and the affective needs variable (Y2) was moderate, and the relationship between the effectiveness variable (X) and the information needs fulfillment variable (Y) was high The conclusion of this study is that there is a relationship between the use of Instagram @commuterline social media accounts with the fulfillment of information needs for followers, PT KCI's Instagram account is able to provide answers to information needs for its customers. The suggestion that can be considered is that the management of the Instagram @commuterline PT. KCI account can be faster in updating the information disseminated to customers and could immediately.
The TAL Speech Synthesis System for Blizzard Challenge 2021

This paper introduces the TAL speech synthesis system for Bliz-zard Challenge 2021 which aims to synthesize voice as similar as the provided target speaker. We built a Spanish speech synthesis system based on the pre-trained BERT model, GST and HiFi-GAN for task 2021-SH1. First, we use a modiﬁed open source Spanish front-end to generate Spanish phoneme sequences from the input Spanish text. Then, we constructed a modiﬁed GST model which condition the encoder on linguistic features. The acoustic model is trained on two speakers, and then ﬁne-tune on the target speaker from provided corpus. To speed up the synthesis process and maintain the speech quality, we use HiFi-GAN, an efﬁcient and high ﬁdelity GAN-based vocoder, to synthesize mel-spectrogram into speech waveform. The evaluation results shows that our system performs well especially in the word error rates evaluation.
Textures vs Non-Textures: A Simple Computational Method for Classifying Perceived ‘Texturality’ in Natural Images

The visual system represents textural image regions as simple statistics that are useful for the rapid perception of scenes and surfaces. What images ‘textures’ are, however, has so far mostly been subjectively defined. The present study investigated the empirical conditions under which natural images are processed as texture. We first show that ‘texturality’ – i.e., whether or not an image is perceived as a texture – is strongly correlated with the perceived similarity between an original image and its Portilla-Simoncelli (PS) synthesized image. We found that both judgments are highly correlated with specific PS statistics of the image. We also demonstrate that a discriminant model based on a small set of image statistics could discriminate whether a given image was perceived as a texture with over 90% accuracy. The results provide a method to determine whether a given image region is represented statistically by the human visual system.
Effect of molasses addition as biodegradable material on phenol removal under anaerobic conditions

The link between the concentration of biodegradable organic matter and the rate of phenol removal in anaerobic conditions was examined in this work. This study was undertaken using a laboratory scale anaerobic stabilization pond and five closed reactors at two retention times, 2 and 5 days. The initial concentration of phenol and soluble COD decreased in the anaerobic pond effluent and the reactors with increasing hydraulic retention time; 98.6 % phenol removal was observed in reactors after 50 days and in the presence of 1000 mg/L COD, while 98.8 % removal was obtained after 5 days in the anaerobic stabilization pond system in the presence of 500 mg/L COD. Two-way ANOVA test with Scheffe post-hoc confirmed that phenol removal was optimal for 1000-2000 mg/L biodegradable COD and 50 days retention time in the reactors and with 500 mg/L biodegradable COD and 5 days retention time in the anaerobic pond.
Is colonoscopic surveillance necessary after curative resection of colorectal cancer in elderly patients?

Background: Surveillance colonoscopy is routinely offered to patients who have undergone curative resections for colorectal cancer (CRC). The purpose of this study is to investigate the early detection of metachronous tumors or anastomotic recurrences. Few studies have investigated the utility of surveillance scopes in the elderly population. Objective: To investigate the incidence of metachronous cancer or anastomotic recurrence in patients over the age of 80 years who underwent resection of CRC with curative intent. Design: This is a retrospective study of a prospectively maintained database. Setting: University Hospital Geelong. Patients and Methods: All patients ≥80 years of age who underwent resection of CRC with curative intent at University Hospital Geelong between January 2002 and December 2014 were studied. Demographic information, comorbidities (Charlson score), types of surgery, postoperative complications (Clavien–Dindo), tumor staging, and details regarding postoperative colonoscopies were recorded. Patients were followed up for life whenever possible. The mean length of hospital stay and follow-up were determined. Survival analysis was done using the Kaplan–Meier method. The incidence of metachronous and locally recurrent CRC was calculated. Main Outcome Measures: Incidence of metachronous or locally recurrent CRC. Sample Size: One hundred and eighty-three patients. Results: Ninety-nine patients (54%) were female and 147 (80%) had elective resections. Seventy-one (39%) patients had moderate-to-severe comorbidities (Charlson Comorbidity Index ≥3). There were 139 patients who had had colon cancer and 44 with rectal cancer who had been resected with curative intent. Stages I, II, and III cancers comprised 16%, 47%, and 37%, respectively. The mean length of hospital stay was 13.3 days. The mean duration of follow-up was 3.43 years. Median survival after surgery by stage was 93 months (Stage I), 92 months (Stage II), and 72 months (Stage III). A total of 26 surveillance colonoscopies were performed on 24 patients. After a total of 627.21 patient-years of follow up, one metachronous CRC was detected, but no local recurrences were observed. Conclusion: It is extremely uncommon to detect clinically significant metachronous tumors in patients aged over 80. Limitation: Small cohort size. Conflict of Interest: None.
EVALUATION OF AQUACROP PERFORMANCE IN SIMULATING WHEAT AND MAIZE CROPS PRODUCTION IN EGYPT

he objective of this study was to evaluate the performance of the AquaCrop model in simulating the production of wheat and maize crops in old lands in the Nile valley and the Delta region of Egypt, by using fully irrigated system. Multi-year field experimental data from 2000 to 2016 were used to calibrate the model for simulating grain yield under full irrigation conditions. The model performance was evaluated using normalized root mean square error (NRMSE). The best calibrated crop files had 8.7% and 3.9% of NRMSE for wheat and maize respectively, for the relationship between the observed and the simulating grain yield. The performance of the model was evaluated to simulate eight irrigation scheduling scenarios for each crop, which may be applied by the farmers. The model reflected a good performance in simulated those scenarios with NRMSE less than 10%. The better simulation results were observed with applying six and seven irrigation events for wheat and maize, respectively. In conclusion, this calibration process is a step to further applications of AquaCrop model as a simulation tool in supporting the agricultural decisions planning, in order to face the current and future challenges of water shortage and irrigation systems improvement.
The Effects of Mutual Fund Decarbonization on Stock Prices and Carbon Emissions

This study seeks to determine whether mutual fund decarbonization affects the stock prices of divested firms and contributes to the reduction of these firms’ carbon emissions. Using a new methodology to identify equity mutual funds’ decarbonization trades, we calculate a metric of decarbonization selling pressure (DSP) on stocks. Controlling for endogeneity and selection bias, we find that high DSP sustainably pressures stock prices downwards. Furthermore, we find that divested firms experiencing a stock price decline subsequently reduce their carbon emissions compared to non-divested firms. This finding is consistent with theoretical predictions. Various tested alternative explanations, such as shareholder intervention and financial selling pressure, cannot diminish these results. Overall, our findings support the divestment movement’s hope that a critical mass of investors is able to reduce carbon emissions.
The Effects of Voter Partisanship on Economic Redistribution: Evidence from Gerrymandering

We study how voter partisanship affects economic redistribution in a representative democracy. We develop a stylized model to show that a district-level shift in voter ideology toward the incumbent representative's party will induce the representative to a) cater more to her party's partisan base, and b) reduce her efforts in serving her constituents' economic interests. We test the model's predictions by exploiting the predictability of partisan gerrymandering in the redistricting of the U.S. House of Representatives. We show that, in states where a single party controls the redistricting process, the redistricting party shifts the voter partisan balance in favor of the incumbent in districts narrowly held by its own party's candidate and against the incumbent in districts narrowly held by the opposing party's candidate. Using this discontinuity in local partisan alignment between voters and their representative, we find that incumbents insulated by partisan gerrymandering become more partisan in their congressional voting behavior and bring less discretionary federal spending to their districts.