Exploration Of Partitioned State Tourism: The Example Of Partitioned China

The European political state system has spread throughout the world and has become the predominant geo-political organization. However, the recent partitioning of states have generated a type of abnormal political entities: partitioned states. These partitioned states have serious implications for tourism development. Despite the uncertainty created by political strife and subdivision, many people continue to travel between partitioned states. Economic necessity, religious obligations, family ties, political negotiations, and pleasure are all relevant motivations driving the movement of people between these partitioned states. However, there is a substantial lack of systematic research on the movement of tourists between divided partitioned states. Most research has been case specific, if tourism between partitioned states has been included at all. Consequently, the nature and patterns of this unique tourism movement have not been analyzed or presented.;This dissertation starts from an examination of the geo-political context of the partitioned state globally, proceeds by means of a case study, through a review of unique political and cultural boundary conditions, and evolutionary process of partitioned states. It argues that the tourist movement between partitioned states does not fit easily into any conventional tourism classification. In the light of comparisons to conventional tourism, general conceptual frameworks and models are developed to describe the nature, patterns, and typology of partitioned state tourism.;Partitioned state tourism in partitioned China is systematically investigated, using existing data sets and an independent sample specifically conducted for the research. A series of hypotheses are tested. It is concluded that partitioned state tourism is a unique tourism phenomenon which differs from conventional tourism in many aspects, including motivation, travel behaviour, expenditure, and temporal and spatial patterns. It is shown that partitioned state tourism has important and distinct economic impacts on PRC. This dissertation represents a first step towards understanding of partitioned state tourism, and its relationship with conventional tourism. It is clear from the nature of the findings and contributions of the dissertation that further research on partitioned state tourism is needed. At a broad level, theory and models must continue to be developed and tested. Special attention must be given to the mechanism of the development of partitioned state tourism and its impacts on the improvement of bilateral relationships

Analysis of the Latest Trojans on Android Operating System

University of Technology Sydney. Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology.With the rapid advancements of electronics, the mobile operating system can accommodate various applications, which greatly facilitates people's everyday life. With a user group of more than 2 billion, the Android platform provides a diverse ecosystem for developing and publishing all sorts of applications. Although Google's official application store, Google Play, contains over 2 million apps, such a huge market also attracts hackers to make profits through distributing malware. Mobile malware has rocketed since 2009. As reported by Broadcom Inc., an industry-leading security company, 2017 witnessed an increase of new mobile malware strains, compared with the year of 2016. Additionally, more profit-driven malware emerged with the growth of underground markets. Due to the fragmentation problem of the Android platform, Android has long been the most targeted operating system suffering from attacks. To keep pace with the cutting-edge anti-malware countermeasures adopted by cyber-security businesses, malware developers have abused high-level obfuscation, virtual environment recognition, conditional execution (logic bomb), run-time payload dropping, etc., to fool their opponents (i.e., security defending products and reverse engineering tools). These techniques are usually more obvious to trace during the evolution and diversification of a malware family. In this thesis, we take a close look into both recent Android trojans and one specific family of Android banking trojan, that infiltrates banking applications to steal credentials or trick victims to type in their usernames and passwords through displaying fake login interfaces. This thesis focuses on both statically reverse engineering the samples and dissecting the programs to understand their internal logic and find the similar features that could be used to assist security analysts, and dynamically monitor their behaviors in emulators. From public and private sources, 2380 samples of trojans from 20 (sub)families have been collected. As a result of the analysis, a lucid overview and improved apprehension of Android trojans are provided. The results indicate that Android trojans evolves towards possessing more malicious capabilities and more diverse permutations without losing their core design, which would cause more limitations and ineffectiveness for modern security solutions

Probabilistic Memory Model for Visual Images Categorization

During the past decades, numerous memory models have been proposed, which focused mainly on how spoken words are studied, whereas models on how visual images are studied are still limited. In this study, we propose a probabilistic memory model (PMM) for visual images categorization which is able to mimic the workings of the human brain during the image storage and retrieval. First, in the learning phase, the visual images are represented by the feature vectors extracted with convolutional neural network (CNN) and each feature component is assumed to conform to a Gaussian distribution and may be incompletely copied with a certain probability or randomly produced in accordance to an exponential distribution. Then, in the test phase, the likelihood ratio between the test image and each studied image is calculated based on the probabilistic inference theory, and an odd value in favor of an old item over a new one is obtained based on all likelihood values. Finally, if the odd value is above a certain threshold, the Bayesian decision rule is applied for image classification. Experimental results on two benchmark image datasets demonstrate that the proposed PMM can perform well on categorization tasks for both studied and non-studied images

Resistance to crown gall disease in transgenic grapevine rootstocks containing truncated virE2 of Agrobacterium

A truncated form of the Ti-plasmid virE2 gene from Agrobacterium tumefaciens strains C58 and A6, and A. vitis strain CG450 was transferred and expressed in somatic embryos of grapevine rootstocks 110 Richter (Vitis rupestris×V. berlandieri), 3309 Couderc (V. rupestris×V. riparia) and Teleki 5C (V. berlandieri×V. riparia) via Agrobacterium-mediated transformation to confer resistance to crown gall disease. Transformation was confirmed in 98% of the 322 lines by enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay for the neomycin phosphotransferase II protein and 97% of 295 lines by polymerase chain reaction for the truncated virE2 transgene. Southern blot analysis revealed the insertion of truncated virE2 at one to three loci in a subset of seven transgenic 110 Richter lines. In vitro resistance screening assays based on inoculations of shoot internode sections showed reduced tumorigenicity and very small galls in 23 of 154 transgenic lines. Non-transformed controls had a 100% tumorigenicity rate with very large galls. Disease resistance assay at the whole plant level in the greenhouse revealed seven transgenic lines (3 lines of 110 Richter, 2 lines of 3309 Couderc and 2 lines of Teleki 5C) were resistant to A. tumefaciens strain C58 and A. vitis strains TM4 and CG450 with a substantially reduced percentage of inoculation sites showing gall as compared to controls. No association was found between the level of resistance to crown gall disease and the source Agrobacterium strain of virE2. Taken together, our data showed that resistance to crown gall disease can be achieved by expressing a truncated form of virE2 in grapevine

Unraveling the link: environmental tobacco smoke exposure and its impact on infertility among American women (18–50 years)

PurposeThe detrimental effects of environmental tobacco smoke (ETS) on women’s reproductive health have been widely recognized. However, the detailed association between exposure to environmental tobacco smoke and the incidence of infertility remains under-explored. This investigation focuses on exploring this potential connection.MethodsFor this analysis, we extracted data from the US National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) database, covering the years 2013 to 2018, focusing on individuals with recorded serum cotinine levels and infertility information. ETS exposure and fertility status were analyzed as independent and dependent variables, respectively. We applied weighted multivariate logistic regression method to evaluate the impact of ETS on infertility, including subgroup analyses for more detailed insights.ResultsThe study encompassed 3,343 participants. Logistic regression analysis revealed a notable positive correlation between ETS exposure and infertility, with an odds ratio (OR) of 1.64 (95% Confidence Interval [CI]: 1.14–2.36). We observed a non-linear relationship between ETS exposure and infertility risk. Notably, infertility risk increased by 64% in serum cotinine levels above 0.136 compared to that in serum cotinine levels below 0.011. Further, subgroup analysis and interaction tests showed consistent results across different segments, underscoring the robustness of the ETS-infertility link.ConclusionOur findings suggest that environmental tobacco smoke exposure may be a contributing factor to infertility. These results reinforce the recommendation for women in their reproductive years to avoid ETS exposure, especially when planning for pregnancy

Distribution patterns of plant communities and their associations with environmental soil factors on the eastern shore of Lake Taihu, China

Introduction: Plant communities and soil factors might interact with each other in different temporal and spatial scales, which can influence the patterns and processes of the wetland ecosystem. To get a better understanding of the distribution of plants in wetlands and analyze their associations with environmental soil factors, the structure and types of plant communities in the eastern shore area of Lake Taihu were analyzed by two-way indicator species analysis and canonical correspondence analysis (CCA) ordination. The spatial distribution patterns of vegetation and the main factors affecting the distributions were investigated.Outcomes: Sixty-six sampling sites were selected to obtain vegetation species and soil environmental factor data. Results showed that 22 species from the 66 sites could be divided into seven communities: I: Arundo donax; II: A. donax + Phragmites australis; III: Zizania latifolia + Typha orientalis; IV: P. australis + Alternanthera philoxeroides + Polygonum hydropiper; V: P. australis; VI: P. australis + Humulus scandens; and VII: Erigeron acer + Ipomoea batatas + Rumex acetosa. Plant species and soil factors in the CCA analysis showed that I. batatas, E. acer, Chenopodium album, Polygonum lapathifolium, and Acalypha australis were mainly affected by pH, whereas Echinochloa crus-galli, Setaria viridis, and H. scandens were mainly affected by soil total phosphorus. Mentha canadensis and A. donax were mainly affected by soil conductivity, A. philoxeroides was mainly affected by soil organic matter and, Z. latifolia, Metaplexis japonica and P. hydropiper were mainly affected by available phosphorus.Conclusion:These results indicated that different plants adapted to different soil environmental factors and provided basic information on the diversity of Lake Taihu wetland vegetation

Geochemical differences between subduction- and collision-related copper-bearing porphyries and implications for metallogenesis

Porphyry Cu (-Mo-Au) deposits occur not only in continental margin-arc settings (subduction-related porphyry Cu deposits, such as those along the eastern Pacific Rim (EPRIM)), but also in continent-continent collisional orogenic belts (collision-related porphyry Cu deposits, such as those in southern Tibet). These Cu-mineralized porphyries, which develop in contrasting tectonic settings, are characterized by some different trace element (e.g., Th, and Y) concentrations and their ratios (e.g., Sr/Y, and La/Yb), suggesting that their source magmas probably developed by different processes. Subduction-related porphyry Cu mineralization on the EPRIM is associated with intermediate to felsic calc-alkaline magmas derived from primitive basaltic magmas that pooled beneath the lower crust and underwent melting, assimilation, storage, and homogenization (MASH), whereas K-enriched collision-related porphyry Cu mineralization was associated with underplating of subduction-modified basaltic materials beneath the lower crust (with subsequent transformation into amphibolites and eclogite amphibolites), and resulted from partial melting of the newly formed thickened lower crust. These different processes led to the collision-related porphyry Cu deposits associated with adakitic magmas enriched by the addition of melts, and the subduction-related porphyry Cu deposits associated with magmas comprising all compositions between normal arc rocks and adakitic rocks, all of which were associated with fluid-dominated enrichment process. In subduction-related Cu porphyry magmas, the oxidation state (fO2), the concentrations of chalcophile metals, and other volatiles (e.g., S and Cl), and the abundance of water were directly controlled by the composition of the primary arc basaltic magma. In contrast, the high Cu concentrations and fO2 values of collision-related Cu porphyry magmas were indirectly derived from subduction modified magmas, and the large amount of water and other volatiles in these magmas were controlled in part by partial melting of amphibolite derived from arc basalts that were underplated beneath the lower crust, and in part by the contribution from the rising potassic and ultrapotassic magmas. Both subduction- and collision-related porphyries are enriched in potassium, and were associated with crustal thickening. Their high K2O contents were primarily as a result of the inheritance of enriched mantle components and/or mixing with contemporaneous ultrapotassic magmas

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Addressing the Modelling Precision in Evaluating the Ecosystem Services of Coastal Wetlands

Wetlands are one of the world’s most productive ecosystems, and therefore it is crucial that management decisions regarding wetlands incorporate awareness of accurate assessments of the value of their respective ecosystem services. In this paper, we seek to improve the modelling precision in the scale transform process of ecosystem service evaluation. Firstly, we selected eight services as the criteria to calculate wetland ecosystem values: substance production, flood control, carbon sequestration, gas regulation, climate regulation, wave reduction, adding new lands, recreation and education. Then, six coastal wetlands of Liaoning province were chosen as the case study areas, and their ecosystem values were calculated by empirical method. Next, we simulated ecosystem values of the six cases by two spatial-scales transform methods named meta-analysis and wavelet transform. Finally, we compared the two groups of simulated values with the empirical measured values to examine their evaluation precisions. The results indicated that the total precision of the wavelet transform model (0.968) was higher than that of meta-analysis (0.712). In addition, the simulated values of single services such as substance production, flood control, carbon sequestration, gas regulation, and climate regulation were closer to the measured values using wavelet transform model. This research contributes to identifying an evaluation model with higher precision for evaluating wetland ecosystem services in the process of scale transform