Trade Liberalization versus Protectionism in Developing Countries: The case of the 100% Tariff in Kosovo

The principal aim of this Honors project is to analyze the effects of the protective trade measures, by the example of the 100% tariff in Kosovo. The analysis is carried out mainly with respect to three dimensions: price of goods and consumption, volume of trade, and new trade patterns; with the purpose of deriving lessons for the development of future trade policies in Kosovo. The research methodology for this study includes a combination of primary and secondary data. In line with the goal of providing an in-depth analysis on the impact of the 100% tariff on trade and Kosovo’s economic performance, the secondary data attained through literature review was coupled with primary data, namely semi-structured interviews. Consequently, the evidence collected displays a lack of positive ‘protectionist’ measure by the tariff, and a myriad of new-arising problems due to the tariff

Internet connectivity for mobile Ad Hoc networks

Ad hoc networking allows portable devices to establish communication independent of a central infrastructure. However, the fact that there is no central infrastructure and that the devices can move randomly gives rise to various kind of problems, such as routing and security. In this thesis the problem of routing is considered. There are several ad hoc routing protocols, such as AODV, DSR, OLSR and ZRP, that propose solutions for routing within a mobile ad hoc network. However, since there is an interest in communication between not only mobile devices in an ad hoc network, but also between a mobile device in an ad hoc network and a fixed device in a fixed network (e.g. the Internet), the ad hoc routing protocols need to be modified. In this thesis the ad hoc routing protocol AODV is used and modified to examine the interconnection between a mobile adhoc network and the Internet. For this purpose Network Simulator 2, ns2, has been used. Moreover, three proposed approaches for gateway discovery are implemented and investigated. The goal of the thesis project is twofold: • To modify the source code of AODV in accordance with the Internet draft\Global connectivity for IPv6 Mobile Ad Hoc Networks " which presents a solution where AODV is used to provide Internet access to mobile nodes. • To implement and compare di®erent approaches for gateway discovery. In this thesis, three di®erent type of gateway discovery have been taken: • The proactive gateway discovery is initiated by the gateway itself. The gateway periodically broadcasts a gateway advertisement message which is transmitted after expiration of the gateways timer. The time between two consecutive advertisements must be chosen with care so that the network is not °ooded unnecessarily. All mobile devices residing in the gateways transmission range receive the advertisement and update information about gateway. After receiving advertisement, a mobile device just forward it broadcast it again. This process goes on within entire MANET. • In reactive gateway discovery a mobile device of MANET connects by gateway only when it is needed. For that the mobile device broadcasts request message to the ALL MANET GW MULTICAST address (the IP address for the group of all gateways in a mobile ad hoc network). Thus, only the gateways are addressed by this message and only they process it. Intermediate mobile nodes that receive the message just forward it by broadcasting it again up to gateway. • To minimize the disadvantages of proactive and reactive gateway discovery, the two approaches can be combined. This results is a hybrid gateway discovery. For mobile devices in a certain range around a gateway, proactive gateway discovery is used. Mobile devices residing outside this range use reactive gateway discovery to obtain information about the gateway. In comparing theses di®erent gateway discovery, three matrices are used. These are packet delivery ratio,average end-to-end delay and overhead. In case of proactive gateway discovery and hybrid gateway discovery, value of packet delivery ratio is larger than reactive gateway discovery. In case of proactive gateway discovery and hybrid gateway discovery, value of end to end delay is less than reactive gateway discovery. The overhead of proactive gateway discovery is greater than other two gateway discovery As for the average end-to-end delay, the proactive and hybrid methods perform slightly better than the reactive method. Concerning the routing overhead, when the advertisement interval is short the reactive method generates much less overhead than the proactive method, which in turn generates much less overhead than the hybrid method

Robust Techniques for Feature-based Image Mosaicing

Since the last few decades, image mosaicing in real time applications has been a challenging field for image processing experts. It has wide applications in the field of video conferencing, 3D image reconstruction, satellite imaging and several medical as well as computer vision fields. It can also be used for mosaic-based localization, motion detection & tracking, augmented reality, resolution enhancement, generating large FOV etc. In this research work, feature based image mosaicing technique using image fusion have been proposed. The image mosaicing algorithms can be categorized into two broad horizons. The first is the direct method and the second one is based on image features. The direct methods need an ambient initialization whereas, Feature based methods does not require initialization during registration. The feature-based techniques are primarily followed by the four steps: feature detection, feature matching, transformation model estimation, image resampling and transformation. SIFT and SURF are such algorithms which are based on the feature detection for the accomplishment of image mosaicing, but both the algorithms has their own limitations as well as advantages according to the applications concerned. The proposed method employs this two feature based image mosaicing techniques to generate an output image that works out the limitations of the both in terms of image quality The developed robust algorithm takes care of the combined effect of rotation, illumination, noise variation and other minor variation. Initially, the input images are stitched together using the popular stitching algorithms i.e. Scale Invariant Feature Transform (SIFT) and Speeded-Up Robust Features (SURF). To extract the best features from the stitching results, the blending process is done by means of Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) using the maximum selection rule for both approximate as well as detail-components

To Bind or not to Bind: Understanding how CooA Activates

CooA, a gas-sensing heme protein found in several organisms, binds to DNA in the presence of carbon monoxide (CO) to regulate important metabolic functions. CO binding to a heme, an iron-containing entity of the protein, initiates a series of structural changes of CooA that enables it to bind a specific DNA target. The broader goal of this research is to understand the key steps that take place as CooA is activated for DNA binding. Previously and surprisingly, data suggested CooA appeared to bind DNA under non-native conditions: without CO and at low pH values. This observation was potentially important because it suggested the breaking of a CooA salt-bridge (a pair of oppositely-charged amino acids that are attracted to one another) may be a key step that allows the protein to change shape into its “active” form. Current research definitely refuted one key aspect of this hypothesis as experiments revealed this apparent low pH DNA binding is not an attribute unique to CooA; specifically results of fluorescence anisotropy assays showed that several proteins without hemes and having a range of properties also showed apparent binding activity at low pH to a DNA target specifically tailored for CooA. Although low pH binding is not supported by these experiments, this does not rule out the importance of the breaking of the salt bridge as a critical part of CooA activation. To further investigate this idea, variants of CooA with mutated salt-bridge amino acids were made and purified. Analysis of these CooA variant proteins are underway and experimental results will be presented in light of the proposed CooA activation mechanism

How proteins bind macrocycles

The potential utility of synthetic macrocycles (MCs) as drugs, particularly against low-druggability targets such as protein-protein interactions, has been widely discussed. There is little information, however, to guide the design of MCs for good target protein-binding activity or bioavailability. To address this knowledge gap, we analyze the binding modes of a representative set of MC-protein complexes. The results, combined with consideration of the physicochemical properties of approved macrocyclic drugs, allow us to propose specific guidelines for the design of synthetic MC libraries with structural and physicochemical features likely to favor strong binding to protein targets as well as good bioavailability. We additionally provide evidence that large, natural product-derived MCs can bind targets that are not druggable by conventional, drug-like compounds, supporting the notion that natural product-inspired synthetic MCs can expand the number of proteins that are druggable by synthetic small molecules.R01 GM094551 - NIGMS NIH HHS; GM064700 - NIGMS NIH HHS; GM094551 - NIGMS NIH HHS; R01 GM064700 - NIGMS NIH HHS; GM094551-01S1 - NIGMS NIH HH

Causation, Probability, and the Continuity Bind

Analyses of singular (token-level) causation often make use of the idea that a cause increases the probability of its effect. Of particular salience in such accounts are the values of the probability function of the effect, conditional on the presence and absence of the putative cause, analysed around the times of the events in question: causes are characterized by the effect’s probability function being greater when conditionalized upon them. Put this way, it becomes clearer that the ‘behaviour’ (continuity) of probability functions in small intervals about the times in question ought to be of concern. In this article, I make an extended case that causal theorists employing the ‘probability raising’ idea should pay attention to the continuity question. Specifically, if the probability functions are ‘jumping about’ in ways typical of discontinuous functions, then the stability of the relevant probability increase is called into question. The rub, however, is that sweeping requirements for either continuity or discontinuity are problematic and, as I argue, this constitutes a ‘continuity bind’. Hence more subtle considerations and constraints are needed, two of which I consider: (1) utilizing discontinuous first derivatives of continuous probability functions, and (2) abandoning point probability for imprecise (interval) probability