Factors Affecting the Formation, Severity and Location of White Spot Lesions during Orthodontic Treatment with Fixed Appliances

Date of Acceptance: 24/02/2014 Copyright © Khalaf K. Published in the JOURNAL OF ORAL & MAXILLOFACIAL RESEARCH (http://www.ejomr.org), 1 April 2014. This is an open-access article, first published in the JOURNAL OF ORAL & MAXILLOFACIAL RESEARCH, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License, which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work and is properly cited. The copyright, license information and link to the original publication on (http://www.ejomr.org) must be included. Acknowledgements: The author report no conflicts of interest related to this study. The author would like to thank Kim-Weng Tan (Dental School, University of Aberdeen) for his help in the collection of some of the data and Dr. Tatiana Macfarlane (Dental School, University of Aberdeen) for her comments on the manuscript.Non peer reviewedPublisher PD

Minor groove binders: some recent research in drug development

The role of the naturally occurring polyamides distamycin and netropsin as antibacterial agents is described. Also, the importance of the modifications to the lipophilic and hydrophobic moieties is discussed. It has also been shown that these DNA minor groove binding compds. can be used to treat other diseases such as sleeping sickness when the right modifications have been employed. Examples of the synthetic strategy of these polypyrroles are also highlighted in this review

An improved agent-based adaptive protection model for distributed denial of service flooding attack and flash crowd flooding traffic

Recently, a serious disturbance for network security could be a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack. The advent of technological era has also brought along the threat of DDoS attacks for a variety of services and applications that use the Internet. Firms can incur huge financial losses even if there is a disruption in services for a fraction of period. Similar to a DDoS attack is the Flash Crowd (FC) flooding traffics, in which a particular service is assessed by many legitimate users concurrently, which results in the denial of service. Overloading of network resources is a common issue associated with both of these events, which impact CPU, available bandwidth, and memory for legitimate users, thereby leading to limited accessibility. To address this issue, this thesis proposes an adaptive agent-based protection model known as Adaptive Protection of Flooding Attacks (APFA) specific for DDoS attacks and FC flooding traffics. The APFA model is aimed to protect the Network Application Layer (NAL) against such attacks. The APFA model consists of analysis, detection, decision and filter modules. The main contribution of this work in the APFA model is the decision module that employs a software agent to adapt and recognize the DDoS attacks (Demons and Zombies) and FC flooding traffics. The agent is equipped with three analysis functions that operate on three parameters of normal traffic intensity, traffic attack behavior, and IP address history log. The agent accordingly reacts on each of these attacks with different types of filtering actions as required. APFA model was implemented and tested by applying different attack scenarios using CIDDS standard dataset. The APFA model testing results achieve an accuracy of 99.64%, a precision of 99.62% and sensitivity of 99.96%. The APFA model results outperform similar models of the related work and the adaptive agent is able to distinguish between demons and zombies of the DDoS attacks with high accuracy of 99.91%

Simulation Based Inference in Simultaneous Equations

In the context of multivariate regression (MLR) and simultaneous equations (SE), it is well known that commonly employed asymptotic test criteria are seriously biased towards over-rejection. In this paper, we propose exact likelihood based tests for possibly nonlinear hypotheses on the coefficients of SE systems. We discuss a number of bounds tests and Monte Carlo simulation based tests. The latter involves maximizing a randomized p-value function over the relevant nuisance parameter space which is done numerically by using a simulated annealing algorithm. We consider limited and full information models, in which case we introduce a multi-equation Anderson-Rubin-type test. Illustrative Monte Carlo experiments show that: (i) bootstrapping standard instrumental variable (IV) based criteria fails to achieve size control, especially (but not exclusively) under near non-identification conditions, and (ii) the tests based on IV estimates do not appear to be boundedly pivotal and so no size-correction may be feasible. By contrast, likelihood ratio based tests work well in the experiments performed.

Impact of Financial Liberalization on Financial Depth in Iraq

This paper examines the Mackinnon-Show hypothesis i.e. financial liberalization promotes financial depth in case of Iraq. Iraq launched a comprehensive program of economic and financial liberalization since 2003. Thus, this paper aims to answer the key question that “is financial liberalization stimulated the financial depth in Iraq?”. By applying the ARDL Autoregressive Distributed Lag model on quarterly data during the period 2005- 2010, the paper finds that the liberalization of interest rates as a proxy of financial liberalization stimulated the financial depthonly in the long-run in the case of Iraq.

Estimating New Keynesian Phillips Curves Using Exact Methods

The authors use simple new finite-sample methods to test the empirical relevance of the New Keynesian Phillips curve (NKPC) equation. Unlike tests based on the generalized method of moments, the generalized Anderson-Rubin (1949) tests are immune to the presence of weak instruments and allow, by construction, the identification status of a model to be assessed. The authors illustrate their results using Gali and Gertler's (1999) NKPC specifications and data, as well as a survey-based inflation-expectation series from the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia. The test the authors use rejects Gali and Gertler's estimates (conditional on the latters' choice of instruments). Nevertheless, and in contrast with results obtained by Ma (2002), the authors do obtain relatively informative confidence sets. This provides support for NKPC equations and illustrates the usefulness of using exact procedures in estimations based on instrumental variables. The authors' results also reveal that the least well-identified parameter is w; namely, the proportion of firms that do not adjust their prices in period t.Econometric and statistical methods; Inflation and prices

Structural Change in Covariance and Exchange Rate Pass-Through: The Case of Canada

The authors address empirically the implications of structural breaks in the variance-covariance matrix of inflation and import prices for changes in pass-through. They define pass-through within a correlated vector autoregression (VAR) framework as the response of domestic inflation to an impulse in import price inflation. This approach allows them to examine changes in both the amount and the duration of pass-through.Econometric and statistical methods