An empirical analysis of regional disparity of influence factors on financial exclusion based on types and levels of financial institution in China

We make an empirical analysis of regional characteristics of influence factors on financial exclusion by using the data of types and levels of financial institutions in the nation from 1998 to 2012. The study shows the number of financial institution nodes continues to increase, but with uneven distributions; the density of financial institutions increases steadily and the gap between the eastern and the Midwest is huge; the commercial banks of the eastern region account for the highest but the rate of the commercial bank basic outlets is low and the rate of the rural institution bank basic outlets is relatively higher, in addition the proportion of the Midwest rural banks is high. Even though the financial exclusion eases, large differences still exist in different areas and the situation is rather critical in rural areas, especially the financial exclusion in western rural areas is the wors

Side-channel Attacks with Multi-thread Mixed Leakage

Side-channel attacks are one of the greatest practical threats to security-related applications, because they are capable of breaking ciphers that are assumed to be mathematically secure. Lots of studies have been devoted to power or electro-magnetic (EM) analysis against desktop CPUs, mobile CPUs (including ARM, MSP, AVR, etc) and FPGAs, but rarely targeted modern GPUs. Modern GPUs feature their special and specific single instruction multiple threads (SIMT) execution fashion, which makes their power/EM leakage more sophisticated in practical scenarios. In this paper, we study side-channel attacks with leakage from SIMT systems, and propose leakage models suited to any SIMT systems and specifically to CUDA-enabled GPUs. Afterwards, we instantiate the models with a GPU AES implementation, which is also used for performance evaluations. In addition to the models, we provide optimizations on the attacks that are based on the models. To evaluate the models and optimizations, we run the GPU AES implementation on a CUDA-enabled GPU and, at the same time, collect its EM leakage. The experimental results show that the proposed models are more efficient and the optimizations are effective as well. Our study suggests that GPU-based cryptographic implementations may be much vulnerable to microarchitecture-based side-channel attacks. Therefore, GPU-specific countermeasures should be considered for GPU-based cryptographic implementations in practical applications

Variations in Soil Bacterial Community Diversity and Structures Among Different Revegetation Types in the Baishilazi Nature Reserve

We compared patterns of soil bacterial community diversity and structure in six secondary forests (JM, Juglans mandshurica; QM, Quercus mongolica; MB, mixed Broadleaf forest; BE, Betula ermanii; CB, conifer-broadleaf forest; PT, Pinus tabuliformis) and two plantation forests (LG, Larix gmelinii; PK, Pinus koraiensis) of the Baishilazi Nature Reserve, China, based on the 16S rRNA high-throughput Illumina sequencing data. The correlations between the bacterial community and soil environmental factors were also examined. The results showed that the broadleaf forests (JM, QM, MB) had higher levels of total C (TC), total N (TN), available N (AN), and available K (AK) compared to the coniferous forests (PT, LG, PK) and conifer-broadleaf forest (CB). Different revegetation pathways had different effects on the soil bacterial community diversity and structure. For the α-diversity, the highest Shannon index and Simpson index were found in JM. The Simpson index was significantly positively correlated with the available P (AP) (P < 0.05), and the Shannon index was significantly positively correlated with AK (P < 0.05). Compared with others, the increased ACE index and Chao1 index were observed in the CB and MB, and both of these α-diversity were significantly negative with AK (P < 0.05). The relative abundances of bacterial phyla and genera differed among different revegetation types. At the phylum level, the dominant phylum groups in all soils were Proteobacteria, Acidobacteria, Actinobacteria, Verrucomicrobia, Chloroflexi, Bacteroidetes, Gemmatimonadetes, and Planctomycetes. Significant differences in relative abundance of bacteria phyla were found for Acidobacteria, Actinobacteria, Chloroflexi, Gemmatimonadetes, and Proteobacteria. Correlation analysis showed that Soil pH, TC, TN, AP, and AK were the main abiotic factors structuring the bacterial communities. As revealed by the clear differentiation of bacterial communities and the clustering in the heatmap and in the PCA plots, broadleaf forests and coniferous forests harbored distinct bacterial communities, indicating a significant impact of the respective reforestation pathway on soil bacterial communities in the Baishilazi Nature Reserve

Bond Yield Characteristics of Undisturbed Completely Decomposed Granite

To investigate the bond yield characteristics of undisturbed completely decomposed granite (CDG) which is widely distributed in Southern China, a series of conventional drained tests were conducted. From the test data, some insights are obtained as follows: for undisturbed CDG soils, the bond yield point during shearing could be identified on the curve of the normalized tangential stiffness Etan/p′ versus axial strain on log-log scale. The consolidation pressure P0′ has a significant influence on the bond yield characteristics of undisturbed CDG during shearing, the bonds inside undisturbed CDG tend to be damaged relatively more seriously as P0′ is higher, accordingly the initial normalized stiffness Eitan/p′ will be smaller at the beginning of the shearing process, and the axial strain at the bond yield point will also be smaller. Once consolidation pressure P0′ excesses a critical value such as 475 kPa for this studied CDG, the bonds inside soil will be damaged totally at the consolidation compression stage. In this case, there will be no bond yield occurring during shearing and the Etan/p′-εa curves will coincide with the ones of reconstituted CDG soil. For reconstituted soils, no bond yielding was observed during shearing; the Etan/p′-εa curves are tightly consistent with no dependence of the value of P0′

How Does Strict Parallelism Affect Security? A Case Study on the Side-Channel Attacks against GPU-based Bitsliced AES Implementation

Parallel cryptographic implementations are generally considered to be more advantageous than their non-parallel counterparts in mitigating side-channel attacks because of their higher noise-level. So far as we know, the side-channel security of GPU-based cryptographic implementations have been studied in recent years, and those implementations then turn out to be susceptible to some side-channel attacks. Unfortunately, the target parallel implementations in their work do not achieve strict parallelism because of the occurrence of cached memory accesses or the use of conditional branches, so how strict parallelism affects the side-channel security of cryptographic implementations is still an open problem. In this work, we make a case study of the side-channel security of a GPU-based bitsliced AES implementation in terms of bit-level parallelism and thread-level parallelism in order to show the way that works to reduce the side-channel security of strict parallel implementations. We present GPU-based bitsliced AES implementation as the study case because (1) it achieves strict parallelism so as to be resistant to cache-based attacks and timing attacks; and (2) it achieves both bit-level parallelism and thread-level parallelism (a.k.a. task-level parallelism), which enables us to research from multiple perspectives. More specifically, we first set up our testbed and collect electro-magnetic (EM) traces with some special techniques. Then, the measured traces are analyzed in two granularity. In bit-level parallelism, we give a non-profiled leakage detection test before mounting attacks with our proposed bit-level fusion techniques like multi-bits feature-level fusion attacks (MBFFA) and multi-bits decision-level fusion attacks (MBDFA). In thread-level parallelism, a profiled leakage detection test is employed to extract some special information from multi-threads leakages, and with the help of those information our proposed multi-threads hybrid fusion attack (MTHFA) method takes effect. Last, we propose a simple metric to quantify the side-channel security of parallel cryptographic implementations. Our research shows that the secret key of our target implementation can be recovered with less cost than expected, which suggests that the side-channel security of parallel cryptographic implementations should be reevaluated before application

Genus Two Quasi-Siegel Modular Forms and Gromov-Witten Theory of Toric Calabi-Yau Threefolds

We first develop theories of differential rings of quasi-Siegel modular and quasi-Siegel Jacobi forms for genus two. Then we apply them to the Eynard-Orantin topological recursion of certain local Calabi-Yau threefolds equipped with branes, whose mirror curves are genus two hyperelliptic curves. By the proof of the Remodeling Conjecture, we prove that the corresponding open- and closed- Gromov-Witten potentials are essentially quasi-Siegel Jacobi and quasi-Siegel modular forms for genus two, respectively

Geographical distribution and prevalence of mental disorders among healthcare workers in China:A cross-sectional country-wide survey A cross-sectional study to assess mental disorders of healthcare workers in China

Background Reliable and detailed nationwide data on the prevalence and distribution of mental disorders among healthcare workers in China during the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) outbreak are scarce. Methods We did a cross-sectional online survey from March 2 to 2 April 2020 and a total of 19,379 healthcare workers from 25 provinces participated. Depression, anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) were assessed by the Patient Health Questionnaire (PHQ-9), Generalized Anxiety Disorder Scale (GAD-7) and PTSD Checklist for DSM-5 (PCL-5), respectively. Results The age-standardized prevalence of depression, anxiety and PTSD was 15.5%, 12.7% and 5.2%, respectively. Frontline workers had higher prevalence estimates than non-frontline workers (depression: 18.2% vs. 13.9%; anxiety: 14.7% vs. 11.6%; PTSD: 6.1% vs. 4.6%). Subgroups who were nurses, were married or had dependent children reported higher prevalence of depression, anxiety and PTSD. Despite of the large variations, the prevalence of mental disorders was lowest in East China, followed by Middle China, and highest in West China. Conclusion Healthcare workers faced enormous stress not only from the direct risk presented by the COVID-19 outbreak, but also from the profound changes in their professional practice. Prevalence of adverse psychological outcomes has a significant association with geographically distribution of health resources and regional economic level. Sufficient medical resource may be a protective factor to mental health condition of healthcare personnel when such a public health emergency happened