THE CHALLENGE FOR DETERMINATION OF GLOBAL FRAUD LOSS – A QUALITATIVE STUDY

The high profile fraud incidents have captured the attention of people around the world about the real cost of accounting fraud. The business world is undeniably brimmed with scams and frauds that removed illegitimately billions of dollars. With the increasing number of high-profile scandals, the topic of fraud has attracted unprecedented attention in recent history. The direct losses from fraud and the impact of fraud have grown significantly and simply too costly which conveniently cannot be overlooked. Accordingly, the implications for the global determination of fraud loss has gained ground and has risen to prominence during recent years. The present study aims to examine why it is crucial to measure economic crimes or fraud and how the figure of global fraud loss can be quantifiable. Assessing and identifying the scale of loss from fraud is an important first step toward building a strategy for combating fraud. Equally important to developing a methodology for the accurate measurement of fraud loss globally. This paper explores how a better measurement is critical to a properly designed and strategic response to fraud. Better measurement of global fraud loss can provide a benchmark for exercising anti-fraud strategies, how the programs and activities can work to advantage. How to overcome data quality of global fraud loss and how to ensure the accuracy in exercising the collection methodologies. The methodology applied in this study is a qualitative case study method. The qualitative approach is aimed to determine, define, and investigate research problems. There is no denying the truth that there is no consistent and robust measure across global jurisdictions for determining fraud loss and error. The objective of measuring global fraud and error can be accomplished by implementing and legislating a global standard. The proposed changes are being envisaged as a guide to a global standard to measure the global loss from fraud

Assessment of Dengue Fever Severity Through Liver Function Test

Objective: To assess the utility of liver function tests (LFTs) for early recognition and prediction of severity of dengue fever in hospitalized patients. Study Design: An analytical study. Place and duration of study: Services Institute of Medical Science and Fatima Memorial Hospital, Lahore, from September to December 2010. Methodology: Admitted cases of dengue fever were divided into three groups: mild, moderate, and severe increases in aminotransferases. Elevation in LFTs was co-related with good or bad outcome i.e. (survival or complication free stay) or (death or complications). Results were analyzed in SPSS version 18. Results: Out of the 353 patients with mean age of 37.12 ± 15.45 years, 245 (69.4%) were males and 108 (30.6%) were females. Seventy five patients (21.2%) had mild elevation of aminotransferases (twofold increases), 265 patients (75.1%) had moderate increases (three to fourfold), and 13 (3.7%) had severe (>4 fold increase). Alanine transaminase (ALT) was statistically higher in patients with septicemia, hepatic, and renal failure (p-value ≤0.05). Aspartate transaminase (AST) was higher in almost all complications. Prolonged hospital stay was associated with raised LFTs and greater complications and mortality. AST was found to be twice as much raised as ALT. Conclusion: AST and ALT were statistically higher in patients with worse outcome thus can lead to early recognition of high risk cases

Denial of service attack detection through machine learning for the IoT

Sustained Internet of Things (IoT) deployment and functioning are heavily reliant on the use of effective data communication protocols. In the IoT landscape, the publish/subscribe-based Message Queuing Telemetry Transport (MQTT) protocol is popular. Cyber security threats against the MQTT protocol are anticipated to increase at par with its increasing use by IoT manufacturers. In particular, IoT is vulnerable to protocol-based Application layer Denial of Service (DoS) attacks, which have been known to cause widespread service disruption in legacy systems. In this paper, we propose an Application layer DoS attack detection framework for the MQTT protocol and test the scheme on legitimate and protocol compliant DoS attack scenarios. To protect the MQTT message brokers from such attacks, we propose a machine learning-based detection framework developed for the MQTT protocol. Through experiments, we demonstrate the impact of such attacks on various MQTT brokers and evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed framework to detect these malicious attacks. The results obtained indicate that the attackers can overwhelm the server resources even when legitimate access was denied to MQTT brokers and resources have been restricted. In addition, the MQTT features we have identified showed high attack detection accuracy. The field size and length-based features drastically reduced the false-positive rates and are suitable in detecting IoT based attacks

An improved non-dimensional model of wet-cooling towers

Abstract: A general non-dimensional mathematical model of cooling towers is improved by including evaporation of water. The solution still consists of adjusting the assumed straight air-saturation line to the real air-saturation data, but a new constant (H) is added as well. Two solutions are proposed and the accuracy of each method is checked against data from the literature and also compared with the original solution. The first method shows a maximum decrease of 4.4 per cent in error, whereas in the second method, the maximum error was found to be 3.3 and 6.8 per cent when the inlet air was unsaturated and saturated, respectively. Keywords: cooling tower, non-dimensional model, evaporatio

Dengue fever in Northern Pakistan: The Hepatic Implications

Background: To gauge the clinical spectrum of dengue fever in northern Pakistan and to assess its hepatic implications Methods: This prospective study was conducted at Rawalpindi General Hospital (now BBH), Rawalpindi from 1st Oct 2006 to 31st Dec 2008. It included all 264 patients suffering from dengue fever who presented during this period. Dengue infection was suspected if two or more of the following features in addition to fever were present: headache, retro-orbital pain, myalgias/arthralgias, scarlet/maculopapular rash, vomiting/epigastric pain and haemorrhagic manifestations. Blood samples were sent for dengue virus IgM. A blood complete picture, liver function tests, serum urea and creatinine, and urine R/E were also obtained. Specific evidence of liver involvement was also sought on examination. Results: The 264 patients comprised of 146 males and 118 females. Age of patients ranged from 14 to 80 years. 220 patients were seen in the last three months of 2006, the time of the dengue epidemic. Fever and myalgias were present in all patients. Vomiting was seen in 223 (85%) and abdominal pain in 163 (62%) patients. A skin rash was present in 148 (56%) while 56 (21%) complained of joint pains and 53 (20%) of retro-orbital pain. 26 (10%) patients had a bleeding disposition and jaundice was noted in 6 (2%). Leukopenia and thrombocytopenia were present in all patients, while 254 (96%) had proteinuria. ALT was elevated in 163 (62%) and AST was raised in 135 (51%) patients. Conclusion: The liver is affected in a large number of cases of dengue fever. Liver function tests are useful to evaluate the degree of liver damage and markers such as AST and ALT may be used as parameters to assess severit

Second-law-based performance evaluation of cooling towers and evaporative heat exchangers

Abstract In this paper, we present thermodynamic analysis of counter flow wet cooling towers and evaporative heat exchangers using both the first and second laws of thermodynamics. A parametric study is carried out to determine the variation of second-law efficiency as well as exergy destruction as a function of various input parameters such as inlet wet bulb temperature. Irreversible losses are determined by applying an exergy balance on each of the systems investigated. In this regard, an engineering equation solver (EES) program, with built-in functions for most thermodynamic and transport properties, is used. The concept of total exergy as the sum of thermomechanical and chemical parts is employed in calculating the flow exergies for air and water vapor mixtures. For the different input variables investigated, efficiencies were, almost always, seen to increase or decrease monotonically. We notice that an increase in the inlet wet bulb temperature invariably increases the second-law efficiency of all the heat exchangers. Also, it is shown that Bejan’s definition of second-law efficiency is not limited in evaluating performance. Furthermore, it is understood that the variation in the dead state does not significantly affect the overall efficiency of the system. © 2006 Elsevier Masson SAS. All rights reserved. Keywords: Exergy; Evaporative cooler; Evaporative condenser; Dead stat

A comprehensive design and rating study of evaporative coolers and condensers. Part II. Sensitivity analysis

Abstract Sensitivity analysis can be used to identify important model parameters, in particular, normalized sensitivity coefficients; by allowing a one-on-one comparison. Regarding design of evaporative coolers, the sensitivity analysis shows that all sensitivities are unaffected by varying the mass flow ratio and that outlet process fluid temperature is the most important factor. In rating evaporative coolers, effectiveness is found to be most sensitive to the process fluid flow rate. Also, the process fluid outlet temperature is most sensitive to the process fluid inlet temperature. For evaporative condensers, the normalized sensitivity coefficient values indicate that the condensing temperature is the most sensitive parameter and that these are not affected by the value of the mass flow ratio. For evaporative condenser design, it was seen that, for a 53% increase in the inlet relative humidity, the normalized sensitivity of the surface area increased 1.8 times in value and, for a 15 8C increase in the condenser temperature, the sensitivity increased by 3.5 times. The performance study of evaporative condensers show that, for a 72% increase in the inlet relative humidity, the normalized sensitivity coefficient for effectiveness increased 2.4 times and, for a 15 8C increase in the condenser temperature, it doubled in value. q 2005 Elsevier Ltd and IIR. All rights reserved. Keywords: Refrigeration; Air conditioning; Cooling tower; Evaporative condenser; Modelling; Research; Paramete

A comprehensive design and rating study of evaporative coolers and condensers. Part I. Performance evaluation

Abstract The mathematical models of evaporative fluid coolers and evaporative condensers are studied in detail to perform a comprehensive design and rating analysis. The mathematical models are validated using experimental as well as numerical data reported in the literature. These models are integrated with the fouling model presented in an earlier paper, using the experimental data on tube fouling. In this paper, we use the fouling model to investigate the risk based thermal performance of these evaporative heat exchangers. It is demonstrated that thermal effectiveness of the evaporative heat exchangers degrades significantly with time indicating that, for a low risk level (pZ0.01), there is about 66.7% decrease in effectiveness for the given fouling model. Furthermore, it is noted that there is about 4.7% increase in outlet process fluid temperature of the evaporative fluid cooler. Also, a parametric study is performed to evaluate the effect of elevation and mass flow rate ratio on typical performance parameters such as effectiveness for rating calculations while surface area for design calculations. q 2005 Elsevier Ltd and IIR. All rights reserved. Keywords: Refrigeration; Air conditioning Cooling tower; Evaporativ