Enhancing Handbag Design Through Anti-Counterfeit Technology

In recent years, the presence of counterfeit goods has become a $600 billion global industry, encompassing markets ranging from designer luxury goods to pharmaceuticals. This paper identifies the threat that this increased counterfeit presence poses on the high-end handbag market. Increased counterfeit quality is significantly contributing to the deception of consumers when attempting to purchase authentic designer handbags. In response to this increased threat, numerous designer brands have begun to adopt anti-counterfeit technologies with both track-and-trace and authentication agendas, to enhance the security of their products against the counterfeit industry. Several variations of anti-counterfeit solutions exist, and this paper specifically examines the effectiveness of the security and authentication factors of hologram, digital watermark, and Radio Frequency Identification solutions within a designer handbag application. After careful analysis of the various anti-counterfeit solutions available in the contemporary market, this paper concludes that overt and covert combination technologies with a two-factor-authentication approach are the most effective in terms of security and authentication capabilities. In conjunction with an anti-counterfeit efficacy analysis, this paper proposes an anti-counterfeit technology adaptation with the aim of elevating both security and design aesthetic. Design that favors functionality has recently gained traction in the fashion industry and incorporating anti-counterfeit technology into handbag design in a visually enhancing manner is the ultimate method of furthering both form and function in a technologically advanced world.https://scholarscompass.vcu.edu/uresposters/1282/thumbnail.jp

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe

Global tracking of marine megafauna space use reveals how to achieve conservation targets

The recent Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF) sets ambitious goals but no clear pathway for how zero loss of important biodiversity areas and halting human-induced extinction of threatened species will be achieved. We assembled a multi-taxa tracking dataset (11 million geopositions from 15,845 tracked individuals across 121 species) to provide a global assessment of space use of highly mobile marine megafauna, showing that 63% of the area that they cover is used 80% of the time as important migratory corridors or residence areas. The GBF 30% threshold (Target 3) will be insufficient for marine megafauna’s effective conservation, leaving important areas exposed to major anthropogenic threats. Coupling area protection with mitigation strategies (e.g., fishing regulation, wildlife-traffic separation) will be essential to reach international goals and conserve biodiversity

Reduced salinity increases susceptibility of zooxanthellate jellyfish to herbicide toxicity during a simulated rainfall event

Accurately predicting how marine biota are likely to respond to changing ocean conditions requires accurate simulation of interacting stressors, exposure regimes and recovery periods. Jellyfish populations have increased in some parts of the world and, despite few direct empirical tests, are hypothesised to be increasing because they are robust to a range of environmental stressors. Here, we investigated the effects of contaminated runoff on a zooxanthellate jellyfish by exposing juvenile Cassiopea sp. medusae to a photosystem II (PSII) herbicide, atrazine and reduced salinity conditions that occur following rainfall. Four levels of atrazine (0ngL−1, 10ngL−1, 2μgL−1, 20μgL−1) and three levels of salinity (35 ppt, 25 ppt, 17 ppt) were varied, mimicking the timeline of light, moderate and heavy rainfall events. Normal conditions were then slowly re-established over four days to mimic the recovery of the ecosystem post-rain and the experiment continued for a further 7 days to observe potential recovery of the medusae. Pulse-amplitude modulated (PAM) chlorophyll fluorescence, growth and bell contraction rates of medusae were measured. Medusae exposed to the combination of high atrazine and lowest salinity died. After 3 days of exposure, bell contraction rates were reduced by 88% and medusae were 16% smaller in the lowest salinity treatments. By Day 5 of the experiment, all medusae that survived the initial pulse event began to recover quickly. Although atrazine decreased YII under normal salinity conditions, YII was further reduced when medusae were exposed to both low salinity and atrazine simultaneously. Atrazine breakdown products were more concentrated in jellyfish tissues than atrazine at the end of the experiment, suggesting that although bioaccumulation occurred, atrazine was metabolised. Our results suggest that reduced salinity may increase the susceptibility of medusae to herbicide exposure during heavy rainfall events.Griffith Sciences, Griffith School of EnvironmentNo Full Tex

Chronic pesticide exposure elicits a subtle carry-over effect on the metabolome of Aurelia coerulea ephyrae

Chemical pollutants, such as pesticides, often leach into aquatic environments and impact non-target organisms. Marine invertebrates have complex life cycles with multiple life-history stages. Exposure to pesticides during one life-history stage potentially influences subsequent stages; a process known as a carry-over effect. Here, we investigated carry-over effects on the jellyfish Aurelia coerulea. We exposed polyps to individual and combined concentrations of atrazine (2.5 μg/L) and chlorpyrifos (0.04 μg/L) for four weeks, after which they were induced to strobilate. The resultant ephyrae were then redistributed and exposed to either the same conditions as their parent-polyps or to filtered seawater to track potential carry-over effects. The percentage of deformities, ephyrae size, pulsation and respiration rates, as well as the metabolic profile of the ephyrae, were measured. We detected a subtle carry-over effect in two metabolites, acetoacetate and glycerophosphocholine, which are precursors of the neurotransmitter acetylcholine, important for energy metabolism and osmoregulation of the ephyrae. Although these carry-over effects were not reflected in the other response variables in the short-term, a persistent reduction of these two metabolites could have negative physiological consequences on A. coerulea jellyfish in the long-term. Our results highlight the importance of considering more than one life-history stage in ecotoxicology, and measuring a range of variables with different sensitivities to detect sub-lethal effects caused by anthropogenic stressors. Furthermore, since we identified few effects when using pesticides concentrations corresponding to Australian water quality guidelines, we suggest that future studies consider concentrations detected in the environment, which are higher than the water quality guidelines, to obtain a more realistic scenario by possible risk from pesticide exposure

Polyps of the Jellyfish Aurelia aurita

Pesticides are a major contaminant in coastal waters and can cause adverse effects in marine invertebrates such as jellyfish. Most studies have investigated short‐term responses of organisms to unrealistically high concentrations of pesticides; however, chronic exposure to persistent low concentrations, which are more likely to occur in the environment, are rarely analyzed. Here, we tested the response of polyps of the Moon jellyfish Aurelia aurita , to environmental concentrations of the herbicide atrazine and the insecticide chlorpyrifos, individually and in combination, over nine weeks. We hypothesized that exposure to individual pesticides would reduce rates of asexual reproduction and alter polyps’ metabolite profiles, and that the results would be more severe when polyps were exposed to the combined pesticides. Polyps survived and reproduced (through budding) in all treatments and no differences among treatments were observed. Proton nuclear magnetic resonance (1H NMR) spectroscopy revealed no difference in profiles of polar metabolites of polyps exposed to the individual or combined pesticides. Our results suggest that A . aurita polyps are unaffected by chronic exposure to atrazine and chlorpyrifos at concentrations recommended as being protective by current Australian water quality guidelines.Full Tex