As New Yorkers take to staying indoors to combat the spread of the coronavirus, these residents are taking a different approach.

At Stuyvesant High School in Manhattan, the city’s most selective public high school, only 10 black students and 20 Latino students got admissions offers, out of nearly 800 students accepted, data shows.

The coronavirus outbreak is exposing weaknesses in our planning for such disasters, and offers a chance to rethink how we do many things.

Four fire engines were at the scene

Part of the shop was damaged by the fire

Five fire engines and around 35 firefighters attended

firefighters attend cooking fire

Part of the balcony of a flat on the first floor was damaged by fire.

Six fire engines were at the scene

Part of a flat on the third floor of the building was damaged by the fire

Firefighters led one woman to safety

Part of a flat on the ground floor was damaged by fire

Ten fire engines were at the scene

The Brigade's 999 Control Officers took 22 calls to the fire

Seven people left the building before the Brigade arrived

Firefighters rescued one man from an adjacent garage

Firefighters tackle fire in two flats

One man was treated on scene

Six fire engines attended the scene

The Brigade's 999 Control Officers took 51 calls to the fire

Homeowners in neighborhoods zoned for single-family residences now have great ability to build accessory homes — sometimes dubbed "granny flats" — as a way to creatively address the region's housing shortage. Here's a look inside a few ADUs and some design tips from residents who've taken the plunge.

The U.S. government's highway safety agency will not force automakers to recall 56 million newer Takata air bag inflators, citing industry research that shows the devices are safe.

Have we overdone it with city centre flats? Or apartments as they are often called in the sales literature. Arrive at almost any railway station - from Norwich to Nottingham - and you can't help but be struck by how...

Whatever meager gains Trump’s trade deals represent hardly look worth the pain we endured getting here.

“Flatten the curve” is a rallying call for social distancing amid the global Covid-19 pandemic. What curve? What does it mean? Why is flattening important? In a nutshell, the curve refers to the number of patients infected with the novel […]

Tom Patterson and Bojan Savric discuss the Equal Earth projection map that they created with Bernhard Jenny.

The projected private flat supply for the next three to four years is 95,000 units, 2,000 more than the previous estimate.

The Transport & Housing Bureau today said there were 10,000 unsold units in completed projects at the end of March.

There were 60,000 units under construction, excluding those pre-sold by developers, and 25,000 units from disposed sites where construction can start any time.

The number of flats under construction in the first quarter was 900, while the number of units completed for the period was 4,200.

Click here for details.

Banks and financial institutions taking part in providing mortgage loans for the Housing Authority Subsidised Sale Flats Scheme (SSFS) may offer a mortgage principal moratorium plan to the scheme’s mortgagors.

The authority today wrote to these institutions to confirm and agree that such a plan is applicable for SSFS flats.

Principal repayment may be deferred for a maximum 12-month period and the mortgage loan repayment period may be extended correspondingly by a maximum of 12 months.

The principal moratorium period may commence by December 31 this year at the latest.

The arrangement is applicable to the Home Ownership Scheme, the Private Sector Participation Scheme, the Buy or Rent Option Scheme, the Tenants Purchase Scheme and the Green Form Subsidised Home Ownership Scheme in the primary market and under the Secondary Market Scheme.

To encourage participating financial institutions to provide mortgage loans and better mortgage terms for SSFS flat purchasers, the authority provides a mortgage default guarantee for them.

It undertakes to meet the shortfall in repayment in the event of default by the borrowers under specified circumstances during the guarantee period.

Due to the requirements in the guarantee deed on the mortgage loan period and the monthly instalment amount, participating financial institutions may not be able to offer a mortgage principal moratorium plan to SSFS flat owners.

In light of the economic downturn arising from the COVID-19 outbreak, the authority confirmed today that a mortgage principal moratorium plan is applicable for SSFS flats.

The move will encourage participating financial institutions to offer such a plan to SSFS flat owners, reducing their burden of mortgage repayment.

Oil prices were near flat early Thursday in what was seen as a pause after gains in the two previous sessions, as traders considered geopolitical developments.

700g minced lamb 30g pine nuts, roughly chopped 1/4 cup flat-leaf parsley, finely chopped 1/2 onion, diced 1 garlic clove, finely chopped 1 tsp cumin 1 tsp ground coriander 1/2 tsp dried chilli flakes (optional) zest of 1/2 lemon pinch of salt and pepper 3 tbsp. oil Lemon Flatbread 1 cup plain flour 1 1/2 tsp baking powder pinch of salt 3/4 cup plain yoghurt zest of 1/2 lemon

Federal watchdogs find that Utah inflated its high school graduation rate in the last of a series of reports warning states not to make end runs around the rules for calculating graduation rates.

Weiping Zhang, Jiangli Wang, Fang Qian, Yu Chen.

Source: Brazilian Journal of Probability and Statistics, Volume 34, Number 1, 35--50.

Abstract:
Longitudinal zero-inflated count data are widely encountered in many fields, while modeling the correlation between measurements for the same subject is more challenge due to the lack of suitable multivariate joint distributions. This paper studies a novel mean-correlation modeling approach for longitudinal zero-inflated regression model, solving both problems of specifying joint distribution and parsimoniously modeling correlations with no constraint. The joint distribution of zero-inflated discrete longitudinal responses is modeled by a copula model whose correlation parameters are innovatively represented in hyper-spherical coordinates. To overcome the computational intractability in maximizing the full likelihood function of the model, we further propose a computationally efficient pairwise likelihood approach. We then propose separated mean and correlation regression models to model these key quantities, such modeling approach can also handle irregularly and possibly subject-specific times points. The resulting estimators are shown to be consistent and asymptotically normal. Data example and simulations support the effectiveness of the proposed approach.

Boyu Ren, Sergio Bacallado, Stefano Favaro, Tommi Vatanen, Curtis Huttenhower, Lorenzo Trippa.

Source: The Annals of Applied Statistics, Volume 14, Number 1, 494--517.

Abstract:
Detecting associations between microbial compositions and sample characteristics is one of the most important tasks in microbiome studies. Most of the existing methods apply univariate models to single microbial species separately, with adjustments for multiple hypothesis testing. We propose a Bayesian analysis for a generalized mixed effects linear model tailored to this application. The marginal prior on each microbial composition is a Dirichlet process, and dependence across compositions is induced through a linear combination of individual covariates, such as disease biomarkers or the subject’s age, and latent factors. The latent factors capture residual variability and their dimensionality is learned from the data in a fully Bayesian procedure. The proposed model is tested in data analyses and simulation studies with zero-inflated compositions. In these settings and within each sample, a large proportion of counts per microbial species are equal to zero. In our Bayesian model a priori the probability of compositions with absent microbial species is strictly positive. We propose an efficient algorithm to sample from the posterior and visualizations of model parameters which reveal associations between covariates and microbial compositions. We evaluate the proposed method in simulation studies, and then analyze a microbiome dataset for infants with type 1 diabetes which contains a large proportion of zeros in the sample-specific microbial compositions.

Brian Neelon.

Source: Bayesian Analysis, Volume 14, Number 3, 849--875.

Abstract:
Motivated by a study examining spatiotemporal patterns in inpatient hospitalizations, we propose an efficient Bayesian approach for fitting zero-inflated negative binomial models. To facilitate posterior sampling, we introduce a set of latent variables that are represented as scale mixtures of normals, where the precision terms follow independent Pólya-Gamma distributions. Conditional on the latent variables, inference proceeds via straightforward Gibbs sampling. For fixed-effects models, our approach is comparable to existing methods. However, our model can accommodate more complex data structures, including multivariate and spatiotemporal data, settings in which current approaches often fail due to computational challenges. Using simulation studies, we highlight key features of the method and compare its performance to other estimation procedures. We apply the approach to a spatiotemporal analysis examining the number of annual inpatient admissions among United States veterans with type 2 diabetes.

Lei Liu, Ya-Chen Tina Shih, Robert L. Strawderman, Daowen Zhang, Bankole A. Johnson, Haitao Chai.

Source: Statistical Science, Volume 34, Number 2, 253--279.

Abstract:
Zero-inflated nonnegative continuous (or semicontinuous) data arise frequently in biomedical, economical, and ecological studies. Examples include substance abuse, medical costs, medical care utilization, biomarkers (e.g., CD4 cell counts, coronary artery calcium scores), single cell gene expression rates, and (relative) abundance of microbiome. Such data are often characterized by the presence of a large portion of zero values and positive continuous values that are skewed to the right and heteroscedastic. Both of these features suggest that no simple parametric distribution may be suitable for modeling such type of outcomes. In this paper, we review statistical methods for analyzing zero-inflated nonnegative outcome data. We will start with the cross-sectional setting, discussing ways to separate zero and positive values and introducing flexible models to characterize right skewness and heteroscedasticity in the positive values. We will then present models of correlated zero-inflated nonnegative continuous data, using random effects to tackle the correlation on repeated measures from the same subject and that across different parts of the model. We will also discuss expansion to related topics, for example, zero-inflated count and survival data, nonlinear covariate effects, and joint models of longitudinal zero-inflated nonnegative continuous data and survival. Finally, we will present applications to three real datasets (i.e., microbiome, medical costs, and alcohol drinking) to illustrate these methods. Example code will be provided to facilitate applications of these methods.

Paper by Mr Luiz Awazu Pereira da Silva, Deputy General Manager of the BIS, Enisse Kharroubi, Emanuel Kohlscheen and Benoît Mojon based on remarks at the University of Basel, 5 May 2019.

Exiting low inflation traps by "consensus": nominal wages and price stability - Speech by Luiz A Pereira da Silva and Benoît Mojon, based on the keynote speech at the Eighth High-level Policy Dialogue between the Eurosystem and Latin American Central Banks, Cartagena de Indias, Colombia, 28-29 November 2019.

Some New Brunswick business owners already facing a cash crunch because of COVID-19 have received an unwelcome shock from NB Power: electricity bills that don’t take into account how little energy they’ve been consuming.

Inflation pressure could be weak even after consumer demand for non-discretionary goods and services begins to grow as the economy gets back on its feet.

The post SOLIDWORKS Electrical Formula SAE Tutorial: How to flatten the route and creating reports appeared first on SOLIDWORKS Education Blog.

Inflation pressure could be weak even after consumer demand for non-discretionary goods and services begins to grow as the economy gets back on its feet.

Bank of Italy Working Papers by Concetta Rondinelli and Roberta Zizza

Bank of Finland Research Discussion Papers by Gene Ambrocio

Central Bank of Chile Working Papers by Benjamín García and Juan Guerra-Salas

German translation of the BIS press release about the BIS Quarterly Review, September 2017

Dear Editor,Maybe I'm talking too soon, but when we see a spike in the numbers we become alarmists and when we see a dip in the numbers we downplay it. As of now we have 478 positive cases of the coronavirus in Jamaica.

HOUSING bosses in Scotland’s capital have finally moved all homeless families with children out of unsuitable B&Bs after Airbnb properties and hotel rooms were left empty by the coronavirus lockdown.

A previous study of inflatable bouncer–related fractures has shown that upper extremity fractures are most common, and many fractures are caused by collisions; however, no study has examined nonfracture injuries or used nationally representative data to investigate inflatable bouncer–related injuries.

This is the first study to use nationally representative data to calculate national injury rates, assess risk factors, and examine trends for pediatric inflatable bouncer–related injuries treated in US emergency departments over a 21-year period (1990–2010). (Read the full article)