Modern Slavery in Supply Chains: an Analysis of Disclosure in the UK Banking Industry

Purpose –The purpose of this dissertation is to examine how banks report on their efforts for eliminating modern slavery in their supply chain operations and to understand their approaches to disclosing information in response to the UK Modern Slavery Act 2015. Methodology– Content analysis is used to determine whether the top 100 banks operating in the UK disclose modern slavery under the Modern Slavery Act 2015.The contents of statements are secondary data, available on their websites and other databases, are examined using indicators associated with modern slavery. Findings – It shows that 23% of the 88 banks (out of top 100 banks operating in the UK) that submit modern slavery statements fail to meet the minimum requirements set out in the UK Modern Slavery Act 2015. In general, the quantity and quality of disclosures vary widely, and the content disclosed is narrative. Many firms use the same practices to detect modern slavery as for other social issues. Overall, banks do not carry much risk of modern slavery. All of them claim that no modern slavery incidents identified in their supply chains. Research limitations/implications – This dissertation is limited to banking industry, responses to the UK Modern Slavery Act 2015 and the information disclosed by the top 100 banks only. Future research could expand its focus to other industries and national contexts. Originality/value – The dissertation expands the author's understanding of modern slavery from the perspective of supply chain, and clarifies the importance of disclosure and risk avoidance in accordance with legal requirements. The author and supervisor are not aware of the research of examining the statements in response to the UK Modern Slavery Act 2015 having been undertaken prior in the field of banking which makes this original research. Keywords: Banking industry, Modern slavery, Secondary data, Content Analysis, Supply chain disclosure, Information transparenc

Randomness invalidates criminal smart contracts

A smart contract enforces specific performance on anonymous users without centralization. It facilitates payment equity in commerce by providing irreversible transactions. Smart contracts are also used for illegal activities such as money laundering and ransomware. Such contracts include criminal smart contracts (CSCs), proposed in CCS’16, that can be efficiently implemented in existing scripting languages. This aggravates concerns about the dangers of CSCs. However, PublicLeaks, a CSC for leaking private data, is conditionally implemented as it is influenced by various factors. For example, PublicLeaks does not necessarily reach a desirable terminal state for a criminal leaking private information, and other possible terminal states may invalidate the CSC. In this study, we propose a CSC based on PublicLeaks by formulating random factors such as the donation ratio. Our contract forks into five terminal states, including a unique one in PublicLeaks due to randomness. We simulated the maximal probabilities of these terminal states and found that the desirable terminal state in PublicLeaks is reachable with low probabilities (lower than 25%). The terminal state where the criminal fails to leak private information is attained with relatively high probabilities (over 65%). Therefore, our simulations show that CSCs are not always as powerful as expected, and the risk posed by them can be mitigated

Severe adult ileosigmoid intussusception prolapsing from the rectum: A case report

Intussusception is a pediatric condition that rarely presents in adults. In this article, we report a case of a 36 year-old man initially presenting with abdominal pain and rectal prolapse, however, surgical reduction of the rectal prolapse did no relief his symptoms. Physical examination, abdominal plain film, barium enema and colonoscopy confirmed the presence of a large intra-abdominal mass, but the origin of the mass was revealed only upon laparotomy. During the surgery, it was noted that the ileum and the sigmoid colon was connected by a 15 cm × 12cm mass, covered by an extremely dilated intestinal tissue. The resected tissue pathology demonstrated a 9 cm × 6 cm × 5 cm submucosal lipoma at the ileocecal junction without evidence of malignancy. The patient's post-surgical course was uneventful. Diagnostic and therapeutic problems related to adult intussusception are reviewed

A Novel Peptide Binding Prediction Approach for HLA-DR Molecule Based on Sequence and Structural Information

MHC molecule plays a key role in immunology, and the molecule binding reaction with peptide is an important prerequisite for T cell immunity induced. MHC II molecules do not have conserved residues, so they appear as open grooves. As a consequence, this will increase the difficulty in predicting MHC II molecules binding peptides. In this paper, we aim to propose a novel prediction method for MHC II molecules binding peptides. First, we calculate sequence similarity and structural similarity between different MHC II molecules. Then, we reorder pseudosequences according to descending similarity values and use a weight calculation formula to calculate new pocket profiles. Finally, we use three scoring functions to predict binding cores and evaluate the accuracy of prediction to judge performance of each scoring function. In the experiment, we set a parameter in the weight formula. By changing value, we can observe different performances of each scoring function. We compare our method with the best function to some popular prediction methods and ultimately find that our method outperforms them in identifying binding cores of HLA-DR molecules

Albumin Binding Function: The Potential Earliest Indicator for Liver Function Damage

Background. Currently there is no indicator that can evaluate actual liver lesion for early stages of viral hepatitis, nonalcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD), and cirrhosis. Aim of this study was to investigate if albumin binding function could better reflect liver function in these liver diseases. Methods. An observational study was performed on 193 patients with early NAFLD, viral hepatitis, and cirrhosis. Cirrhosis patients were separated according to Child-Pugh score into A, B, and C subgroup. Albumin metal ion binding capacity (Ischemia-modified albumin transformed, IMAT) and fatty acid binding capacity (total binding sites, TBS) were detected. Results. Both IMAT and TBS were significantly decreased in patients with NAFLD and early hepatitis. In hepatitis group, they declined prior to changes of liver enzymes. IMAT was significantly higher in cirrhosis Child-Pugh class A group than hepatitis patients and decreased in Child-Pugh class B and class C patients. Both IMAT/albumin and TBS/albumin decreased significantly in hepatitis and NAFLD group patients. Conclusions. This is the first study to discover changes of albumin metal ion and fatty acid binding capacities prior to conventional biomarkers for liver damage in early stage of liver diseases. They may become potential earliest sensitive indicators for liver function evaluation

Can oblique lateral interbody fusion (OLIF) create more lumbosacral lordosis in lumbar spine surgery than minimally invasive transforaminal interbody fusion (MIS-TLIF)?

ObjectiveTo compare the differences in the correction effect for lumbosacral lordosis and clinical outcomes between OLIF with/without posterior pedicle screw fixation (PSF) and MIS-TLIF through a retrospective cohort study.MethodThere were 98 consecutive patients originally enrolled for the study, but 15 patients were excluded due to intraoperative endplate injury or osteotomy performed for severe spinal deformity. Thus, 83 patients included in this study (36 males and 47 females, mean age 65.8 years) underwent single to three-segment OLIF (including OLIF + PSF and OLIF Standalone) or MIS-TLIF surgery from 2016 to 2018. The operation time, bleeding and blood transfusion, fusion rate, complication, pre-and postoperative visual analogue scale (VAS), Oswestry Disability Index (ODI) were evaluated. In addition, radiological parameters including lumbosacral lordosis (LL), fused segment lordosis (FSL), anterior disc height (ADH) and posterior disc height (PDH) were measured. The clinical outcomes, LL, FSL, ADH and PDH restored and were compared between the OLIF group, OLIF subgroups and MIS-TLIF group.ResultsThe average operation time and intraoperative bleeding were significantly less in the OLIF group than in the MIS-TLIF group (163 ± 68 vs. 233 ± 79 min, 116 ± 148 vs. 434 ± 201 ml, P < 0.001). There was no statistically significant difference between the OLIF group and the MIS-TLIF group in VAS and ODI improvements, fusion rate, complication, LL and FSL correction (P > 0.05). The ADH and PDH increases in the OLIF group were more than that in MIS-TLIF group (P < 0.001). The correction of LL was significantly more in the OLIF + PSF group than in the MIS-TLIF group (9.9 ± 11.1 vs. 4.2 ± 6.1deg, P = 0.034).ConclusionOLIF and MIS-TLIF are both safe and effective procedures, capable of restoring lumbosacral lordosis and disc height partly. Combined with PSF, OLIF can achieve a better correction effect of lumbosacral lordosis than MIS-TLIF

The Outcome of the 2022 Landslide4Sense Competition: Advanced Landslide Detection from Multi-Source Satellite Imagery

The scientific outcomes of the 2022 Landslide4Sense (L4S) competition organized by the Institute of Advanced Research in Artificial Intelligence (IARAI) are presented here. The objective of the competition is to automatically detect landslides based on large-scale multiple sources of satellite imagery collected globally. The 2022 L4S aims to foster interdisciplinary research on recent developments in deep learning (DL) models for the semantic segmentation task using satellite imagery. In the past few years, DL-based models have achieved performance that meets expectations on image interpretation, due to the development of convolutional neural networks (CNNs). The main objective of this article is to present the details and the best-performing algorithms featured in this competition. The winning solutions are elaborated with state-of-the-art models like the Swin Transformer, SegFormer, and U-Net. Advanced machine learning techniques and strategies such as hard example mining, self-training, and mix-up data augmentation are also considered. Moreover, we describe the L4S benchmark data set in order to facilitate further comparisons, and report the results of the accuracy assessment online. The data is accessible on Future Development Leaderboard for future evaluation at https://www.iarai.ac.at/landslide4sense/challenge/ , and researchers are invited to submit more prediction results, evaluate the accuracy of their methods, compare them with those of other users, and, ideally, improve the landslide detection results reported in this article

Regulatory Feedback Loop of Two phz Gene Clusters through 5′-Untranslated Regions in Pseudomonas sp. M18

BACKGROUND: Phenazines are important compounds produced by pseudomonads and other bacteria. Two phz gene clusters called phzA1-G1 and phzA2-G2, respectively, were found in the genome of Pseudomonas sp. M18, an effective biocontrol agent, which is highly homologous to the opportunistic human pathogen P. aeruginosa PAO1, however little is known about the correlation between the expressions of two phz gene clusters. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS: Two chromosomal insertion inactivated mutants for the two gene clusters were constructed respectively and the correlation between the expressions of two phz gene clusters was investigated in strain M18. Phenazine-1-carboxylic acid (PCA) molecules produced from phzA2-G2 gene cluster are able to auto-regulate expression itself and activate the expression of phzA1-G1 gene cluster in a circulated amplification pattern. However, the post-transcriptional expression of phzA1-G1 transcript was blocked principally through 5'-untranslated region (UTR). In contrast, the phzA2-G2 gene cluster was transcribed to a lesser extent and translated efficiently and was negatively regulated by the GacA signal transduction pathway, mainly at a post-transcriptional level. CONCLUSIONS/SIGNIFICANCE: A single molecule, PCA, produced in different quantities by the two phz gene clusters acted as the functional mediator and the two phz gene clusters developed a specific regulatory mechanism which acts through 5'-UTR to transfer a single, but complex bacterial signaling event in Pseudomonas sp. strain M18