Online Art Gallery

Online Art Gallery is an E-commerce website that displays artworks and connects individuals around the globe with an art and artist. This website presents a wide range of digital art, paintings, prints, sculpture and photography, and offers an organized environment for artists to display and sell their art. Online Art Gallery makes it possible for potential buyers to search for galleries based on color, artists, locations, original arts, dimensions, desired frames, or cost. This website has a database that stores data about artists, galleries and buyers. This website enables buyers to browse through the categories, artists, tags and prices for artwork. If the buyer is new, he must create an account to buy a certain artwork and the buyer will be redirected to a payment page. Reviews and comments forms will also be included after successful purchases

Three Essays on International Trade and Finance

This dissertation is composed of three essays at the intersection of international trade and finance. In the first chapter, I measure exchange rate pass-through (ERPT) for value-added exports, where intermediate input requires sharing among countries in a back-and-forth manner for producing a single final product. I derive an estimating equation for ERPT and value-added trade following a partial equilibrium model, which also leads to decomposition of the trade elasticity into the own price effect and the price index effects. From the empirical estimation, I find that ignoring the value-added trade will cause a systematic upward bias in the estimation of ERPT. I also find that there exists substantial heterogeneity in pass-through rates across sectors: sectors with high-integration into global markets functions with a lower rate of exchange in comparison to sectors with less integration. The second essay focuses on a specific market, where I examine the relationship between product attributes and ERPT. This paper estimates the ERPT by using good-level daily data on wholesale prices of imported agricultural products, where the identification is achieved by using daily data on the domestic inflation rate. The results of standard empirical analyses are in line with existing studies that employ lower frequencies of data by showing evidence for incomplete daily ERPT of about 5 percent. The key innovation is achieved when nonlinearities in ERPT are considered, where ERPT is doubled to about 10 percent when daily nominal exchange rate changes are above 0.55 percent, daily frequencies of price change are above 3.12 percent, the storage life of a product is above 10 weeks, and for the non-zero price changes, the ERPT is complete. In the final essay, I focus on the firms’ export pricing strategy: pricing-to-market strategy. To achieve this, I introduce a partial equilibrium model of firm’s pricing strategy, where the market share of a firm plays an important role in the determination of markup. The empirical estimation is that markup ranges from 1.25 to 1.5 across years and 1.25 to 51.23 across firms. I also find that markups come back to their average level within 30 to 60 days of the initial date

Evaluating the Effectiveness of Cyber Security Regulations

The rapid advancement of technology has led to an increase in the volume and sensitivity of personal and professional data stored and shared online. As a result, there is a growing need for effective cyber security regulations to protect against data breaches and ensure the confidentiality and integrity of sensitive information. The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS), and General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) are three such regulations that have been implemented to address this need. This thesis aims to evaluate the effectiveness of these regulations in protecting sensitive information and preventing data breaches. A comprehensive literature review of existing research on the topic is conducted, and case studies of the implementation and enforcement of these regulations are analyzed. The study finds that while these regulations have been successful in raising awareness and establishing standards for cyber security, there is still room for improvement in their implementation and enforcement. Additionally, the study identifies the challenges and limitations in evaluating the effectiveness of cyber security regulations. Finally, recommendations for future research are provided in this area. The study concludes that while these regulations are important steps towards improving cyber security, more research is needed to fully understand their effectiveness and potential for improvement

DETERMINING INTERSTELLAR REDDENING: A NEW APPROACH USING SPECTROSCOPY AND PHOTOMETRY

The mystery of Canis Major overdensity is addressed. We discuss concurrent methods and their limitations on the determination of interstellar reddening. We establish a new way to determine line of sight interstellear reddening by observing stellar spectral lines and UBV colors. We observe and analyze spectra of 22 stars in different open clusters. We find that Hydrogen Balmer line at 4861 angstrom can predict the stellar atmospheric parameters and intrinsic colors with reasonable accuracy. Comparing with observed colors we derive the reddening of the stars. We compare our results with standard database WEBDA and find that within 90% probability limit the standard deviation of the error is 0.102798. This is improved by taking the absolute maximum probabilities and the scatter becomes 0.0688865

IC 630: Piercing the Veil of the Nuclear Gas

IC 630 is a nearby early-type galaxy with a mass of $6 \times 10^{10} M_{\odot}$ with an intense burst of recent (6 Myr) star formation. It shows strong nebular emission lines, with radio and X-ray emission, which classifies it as an AGN. With VLT-SINFONI and Gemini North-NIFS adaptive optics observations (plus supplementary ANU 2.3m WiFeS optical IFU observations), the excitation diagnostics of the nebular emission species show no sign of standard AGN engine excitation; the stellar velocity dispersion also indicate that a super-massive black hole (if one is present) is small ($M_{\bullet} = 2.25 \times 10^{5}~M_{\odot}$). The luminosity at all wavelengths is consistent with star formation at a rate of about $1-2 M_{\odot}$/yr. We measure gas outflows driven by star formation at a rate of $0.18 M_{\odot}$/yr in a face-on truncated cone geometry. We also observe a nuclear cluster or disk and other clusters. Photo-ionization from young, hot stars is the main excitation mechanism for [Fe II] and hydrogen, whereas shocks are responsible for the H$_2$ excitation. Our observations are broadly comparable with simulations where a Toomre-unstable, self-gravitating gas disk triggers a burst of star formation, peaking after about 30 Myr and possibly cycling with a period of about 200 Myr.Comment: 32 pages, 19 figures Accepted for publication in Ap

An Analysis of Renewable Energy Usage by Mobile Data Network Operators

The exponential growth in mobile data traffic has resulted in massive energy usage and therefore has increased the carbon footprint of the Internet. Data network operators have taken significant initiatives to mitigate the negative impacts of carbon emissions (CE). Renewable Energy Sources (RES) have emerged as the most promising way to reduce carbon emissions. This article presents the role of renewable energy (RE) in minimizing the environmental impacts of mobile data communications for achieving a greener environment. In this article, an analysis of some selected mobile data network operators’ energy consumption (EC) has been presented. Based on the current statistics of different mobile network operators, the future energy values are estimated. These estimations of carbon emissions are based on the predicted data traffic in the coming years and the percentage consumption of energy from renewable sources by the network operators. The analysis presented in this article would be helpful to develop and implement energy policies that accelerate the process of increasing the renewable shares in total energy requirements. Incrementing the share of renewable energy in total energy requirements can be a way forward to reach Goal 7 of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)

International Transfers and Dutch Disease: Evidence from South Asian Countries

We investigate the Dutch Disease impact of migrant's remittances and foreign aid using a yearly panel data of eight South Asian countries for the period of 1975–2013. An increase in per capita remittances erodes international competitiveness by appreciating the real effective exchange rate, also leading to a fall in traded to non-traded goods production ratio in the economy; hardly any statistically significant impact of foreign aid on these variables is detected. These point to premature deindustrialization consequences of large remittance inflows that could slow down structural transformation towards manufacturing. Although remittances and foreign aid may have a significant impact on poverty alleviation in this region, policy planners should pay attention to more effective utilization of remittances and foreign aid