The spatial and temporal patterns of residential house prices and housing affordability in England

Housing affordability is one of the most urgent issues facing the world. It has been a key political concern in the UK since the 1960s. The UK housing policy challenge is to reduce the gap between house prices and the housing people can afford. A more nuanced understanding of the housing affordability issues in England is essential to create a prosperous and equal country over the next century. Housing affordability is determined by two aspects, one is residential house price and the other is household income. The drivers behind the changes in the cost and affordability of housing are complex and operate at different scales. This research explores spatial and temporal patterns of housing affordability in England through an in-depth analysis of residential house price variations at small geographic levels. This research overcomes the difficulty of understanding house price and housing affordability variation in England at small geographic scales where house price data and income data are imperfect and the process is complex. A comprehensive geo-referenced housing price database is constructed, along with a systematic analysis of the house price variation at multi-geographic levels and further separate at different time scales. Through modelling and visualisation we can gain a deeper understanding of the spatial and temporal variations in house prices. The following research specifically focusses on the local authority level with annual time categorizations. Then by combining and comparing house price variation at local authority level and household housing budget for different types of buyers, this research creates a new method for understanding housing affordability, while highlighting housing affordability spatial-temporal patterns in England at small geographic scales and for different types of buyers. Suggestions regarding housing policy and planning are offered at the end in order to ease housing affordability issues in England

The Supersymmetric Standard Models with a Pseudo-Dirac Gluino from Hybrid F−F- and D−D-Term Supersymmetry Breakings

We propose the Supersymmetric Standard Models (SSMs) with a pseudo-Dirac gluino from hybrid $F-$ and $D-$term supersymmetry (SUSY) breakings. Similar to the SSMs before the LHC, all the supersymmetric particles in the Minimal SSM (MSSM) obtain the SUSY breaking soft terms from the traditional gravity mediation and have masses within about 1 TeV except gluino. To evade the LHC SUSY search constraints, the gluino also has a heavy Dirac mass above 3 TeV from $D-$term SUSY breaking. Interestingly, such a heavy Dirac gluino mass will not induce the electroweak fine-tuning problem. We realize such SUSY breakings via an anomalous $U(1)_X$ gauge symmetry inspired from string models. To maintain the gauge coupling unification and increase the Higgs boson mass, we introduce extra vector-like particles. We study the viable parameter space which satisfies all the current experimental constraints, and present a concrete benchmark point. This kind of models not only preserves the merits of pre-LHC SSMs such as naturalness, dark matter, etc, but also solves the possible problems in the SSMs with Dirac gauginos due to the $F$-term gravity mediation.Comment: 6 pages,3 figures,revised versio

Detrended fluctuation analysis on the correlations of complex networks under attack and repair strategy

We analyze the correlation properties of the Erdos-Renyi random graph (RG) and the Barabasi-Albert scale-free network (SF) under the attack and repair strategy with detrended fluctuation analysis (DFA). The maximum degree k_max, representing the local property of the system, shows similar scaling behaviors for random graphs and scale-free networks. The fluctuations are quite random at short time scales but display strong anticorrelation at longer time scales under the same system size N and different repair probability p_re. The average degree , revealing the statistical property of the system, exhibits completely different scaling behaviors for random graphs and scale-free networks. Random graphs display long-range power-law correlations. Scale-free networks are uncorrelated at short time scales; while anticorrelated at longer time scales and the anticorrelation becoming stronger with the increase of p_re.Comment: 5 pages, 4 figure

Proteoglycan-Mediated Axon Degeneration Corrects Pretarget Topographic Sorting Errors

SummaryProper arrangement of axonal projections into topographic maps is crucial for brain function, especially in sensory systems. An important mechanism for map formation is pretarget axon sorting, in which topographic ordering of axons appears in tracts before axons reach their target, but this process remains poorly understood. Here, we show that selective axon degeneration is used as a correction mechanism to eliminate missorted axons in the optic tract during retinotectal development in zebrafish. Retinal axons are not precisely ordered during initial pathfinding but become corrected later, with missorted axons selectively fragmenting and degenerating. We further show that heparan sulfate is required non-cell-autonomously to correct missorted axons and that restoring its synthesis at late stages in a deficient mutant is sufficient to restore topographic sorting. These findings uncover a function for developmental axon degeneration in ordering axonal projections and identify heparan sulfate as a key regulator of that process

An Implementation of List Successive Cancellation Decoder with Large List Size for Polar Codes

Polar codes are the first class of forward error correction (FEC) codes with a provably capacity-achieving capability. Using list successive cancellation decoding (LSCD) with a large list size, the error correction performance of polar codes exceeds other well-known FEC codes. However, the hardware complexity of LSCD rapidly increases with the list size, which incurs high usage of the resources on the field programmable gate array (FPGA) and significantly impedes the practical deployment of polar codes. To alleviate the high complexity, in this paper, two low-complexity decoding schemes and the corresponding architectures for LSCD targeting FPGA implementation are proposed. The architecture is implemented in an Altera Stratix V FPGA. Measurement results show that, even with a list size of 32, the architecture is able to decode a codeword of 4096-bit polar code within 150 us, achieving a throughput of 27MbpsComment: 4 pages, 4 figures, 4 tables, Published in 27th International Conference on Field Programmable Logic and Applications (FPL), 201