Irish Property Price Estimation Using A Flexible Geo-spatial Smoothing Approach: What is the Impact of an Address?

Accurate and efficient valuation of property is of utmost importance in a variety of settings, such as when securing mortgage finance to purchase a property, or where residential property taxes are set as a percentage of a property's resale value. Internationally, resale based property taxes are most common due to ease of implementation and the difficulty of establishing site values. In an Irish context, property valuations are currently based on comparison to recently sold neighbouring properties, however, this approach is limited by low property turnover. National property taxes based on property value, as opposed to site value, also act as a disincentive to improvement works due to the ensuing increased tax burden. In this article we develop a spatial hedonic regression model to separate the spatial and non-spatial contributions of property features to resale value. We mitigate the issue of low property turnover through geographic correlation, borrowing information across multiple property types and finishes. We investigate the impact of address mislabelling on predictive performance, where vendors erroneously supply a more affluent postcode, and evaluate the contribution of improvement works to increased values. Our flexible geo-spatial model outperforms all competitors across a number of different evaluation metrics, including the accuracy of both price prediction and associated uncertainty intervals. While our models are applied in an Irish context, the ability to accurately value properties in markets with low property turnover and to quantify the value contributions of specific property features has widespread application. The ability to separate spatial and non-spatial contributions to a property's value also provides an avenue to site-value based property taxes.

An age-structured SEIR model for COVID-19 incidence in Dublin, Ireland with framework for evaluating health intervention cost.

Strategies adopted globally to mitigate the threat of COVID-19 have primarily involved lockdown measures with substantial economic and social costs with varying degrees of success. Morbidity patterns of COVID-19 variants have a strong association with age, while restrictive lockdown measures have association with negative mental health outcomes in some age groups. Reduced economic prospects may also afflict some age cohorts more than others. Motivated by this, we propose a model to describe COVID-19 community spread incorporating the role of age-specific social interactions. Through a flexible parameterisation of an age-structured deterministic Susceptible Exposed Infectious Removed (SEIR) model, we provide a means for characterising different forms of lockdown which may impact specific age groups differently. Social interactions are represented through age group to age group contact matrices, which can be trained using available data and are thus locally adapted. This framework is easy to interpret and suitable for describing counterfactual scenarios, which could assist policy makers with regard to minimising morbidity balanced with the costs of prospective suppression strategies. Our work originates from an Irish context and we use disease monitoring data from February 29th 2020 to January 31st 2021 gathered by Irish governmental agencies. We demonstrate how Irish lockdown scenarios can be constructed using the proposed model formulation and show results of retrospective fitting to incidence rates and forward planning with relevant "what if / instead of" lockdown counterfactuals. Uncertainty quantification for the predictive approaches is described. Our formulation is agnostic to a specific locale, in that lockdown strategies in other regions can be straightforwardly encoded using this model.

An index of decline or recovery following nonimpact and impact mTBI.

This study investigated the degree to which litigants/insurance claimants sustaining Nonimpact mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI) in motor vehicle accidents differed from compensation-seeking motor vehicle accident victims that suffered Impact mTBI in terms of neuropsychological decline/recovery, using as a control litigants/insurance claimants that did not experience mTBI in motor vehicle accidents. A clinical index (C-Voc) was employed as the dependent measure for decline/recovery, consisting of T-score algebraic differences between a highly sensitive neurocognitive measure (Category Test) and a relatively insensitive "hold" measure (Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale Vocabulary subtest). Nonimpact mTBI subjects showed significantly greater neurocognitive decline than Impact mTBI participants and, interestingly, Impact mTBI individuals did not differ significantly from individuals with no diagnosis of mTBI. These findings suggest that Nonimpact subjects may experience significantly greater persistent neurocognitive residua of mTBI than Impact participants.

Halstead-Reitan characteristics of nonimpact and impact mTBI litigants and insurance claimants.

The purpose of this study was to investigate possible neuropsychological differences in Halstead-Reitan characteristics between motor vehicle accident litigants and insurance claimants that sustained uncomplicated mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI) and did or did not sustain direct impact to the head (i.e., Impact vs. Nonimpact mTBI), and to compare these clinical groups with a control group that did not suffer mTBI (No mTBI). The Tactile Form Recognition Test (TFR) was the only level of performance test in the Halstead-Reitan Battery (HRB) that generated statistically significant differences. The TFR resembles a complex reaction time test. TFR response time was significantly longer for Nonimpact mTBI patients than for Impact mTBI and No mTBI participants. Frequency comparisons of abnormal score patterns demonstrated that Nonimpact patients produced significantly more aberrant Impairment Index vs. FSIQ score patterns than Impact and No mTBI participants. Given the components of the score pattern, this finding suggests that Nonimpact patients may experience less recovery from neuropsychological deficits than Impact participants. Complex perceptual reaction times and score patterns comparing sensitive and "hold" test results may represent heuristic avenues of future research in the study of compensation-seeking Nonimpact and Impact mTBI patients.

Evaluation of a proposal for reliable low-cost grid power with 100% wind, water, and solar.

A number of analyses, meta-analyses, and assessments, including those performed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, and the International Energy Agency, have concluded that deployment of a diverse portfolio of clean energy technologies makes a transition to a low-carbon-emission energy system both more feasible and less costly than other pathways. In contrast, Jacobson et al. [Jacobson MZ, Delucchi MA, Cameron MA, Frew BA (2015) Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 112(49):15060-15065] argue that it is feasible to provide "low-cost solutions to the grid reliability problem with 100% penetration of WWS [wind, water and solar power] across all energy sectors in the continental United States between 2050 and 2055", with only electricity and hydrogen as energy carriers. In this paper, we evaluate that study and find significant shortcomings in the analysis. In particular, we point out that this work used invalid modeling tools, contained modeling errors, and made implausible and inadequately supported assumptions. Policy makers should treat with caution any visions of a rapid, reliable, and low-cost transition to entire energy systems that relies almost exclusively on wind, solar, and hydroelectric power.

Halstead-Reitan Deficit Scores in Assessment of Nonimpact Head Injury.

Comparisons were made between neuropsychological deficit scores generated by the Reitan-Wolfson system of interpretation (1993) and the computerized Revised Comprehensive Norms for an Expanded Halstead-Reitan Battery (Heaton, Miller, Taylor, Grant, & PAR Staff, 2005 ). The scores were obtained from seat-belted litigants and insurance claimants subjected to extreme physical forces in motor vehicle accidents. Subjects had not sustained direct impact to the head but met criteria for mild traumatic brain injury. The word "nonimpact" has been used to describe this form of head injury. Consistent with previous studies, the Reitan-Wolfson system generated deficit scores suggestive of a greater degree of impairment than the Revised Comprehensive Norms. Demographic characteristics of the normative data used in each interpretive system and the operational definition of impairment were scrutinized. Likely or possible determinants of deficit score discrepancies were identified. On the basis of this information, a method of using the two interpretive procedures in an integrated manner to assess nonimpact head injury was suggested.

The exclusion of (failed) asylum seekers from housing and home: towards an oppositional discourse.

"Housing" - the practical provision of a roof over one's head - is experienced by users as "home" - broadly described as housing plus the experiential elements of dwelling. Conversely, being without housing, commonly described as "homelessness", is experienced not only as an absence of shelter but in the philosophical sense of "ontological homelessness" and alienation from the conditions for well-being. For asylum seekers, these experiences are deliberately and explicitly excluded from official law and policy discourses. This article demonstrates how law and policy is propelled by an "official discourse" based on the denial of housing and the avoidance of "home" attachments, which effectively keeps the asylum seeker in a state of ontological homelessness and alienation. We reflect on this exclusion and consider how a new "oppositional discourse" of housing and home - taking these considerations into account - might impact on the balancing exercise inherent to laws and policies concerning asylum seekers.

Patient note deidentification using a find-and-replace iterative process.

Medical research relies on access to clinical data. Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act regulations require that patient information required for clinical research not have data that can be used to identify the patients from whose medical records the information has been derived. The only exception would be an institutional review board (IRB)-approved study for which the researcher has obtained a waiver to use patient data for a research study. Before requesting an IRB waiver, however, the researcher may want to search the clinical data for particular characteristics or determine whether the quantity of data warrant obtaining IRB approval. The application, the Simple PAtient Note Scrubber, or SPANS, reviews and changes line content through an iterative process. At each iteration, SPANS analyzes changes made during the previous pass and reviews changes in relation to terms adjacent to the newly altered data. Knowledge of the document domain, encompassing the different types of documents to be scrubbed, is the key to making this type of process effective.