We apply a physical based model to describe the clothes fashion market. Every time a new outlet appears on the market, it can invade the market under certain specific conditions. Hence, the “old” outlet can be completely dominated and disappears. Each creator competes for a finite population of agents. Fashion phenomena are shown to result from a collective phenomenon produced by local individu...

Cordyceps, a well-known traditional Chinese medicine, is an endoparasitic and/or symbiotic macrofungus in the body of insect and other arthropod, and has received increasing attention worldwide due to its rarity and outstanding curative effects for different diseases. Recent years, however, the counterfeits and mimics of Cordyceps are frequently found in markets because of its scarce in nature ...

We designed and evaluated a kind of Agkistrodon DNA detection kit. Bioinformatics was used to investigate the characteristics of cytochrome b (cyt b ) gene in Agkistrodon. A series of primers were designed, and sequencing and blasting in conjunction with PCR technology were applied. Its’ indexes including specificity, sensitivity and repeatability were evaluated according to the method recorded...

Counterfeit medicines are a global public health risk. We assess counterfeit reports involving the legitimate supply chain using 2009-2011 data from the Pharmaceutical Security Institute Counterfeit Incident System (PSI CIS) database that uses both open and nonpublic data sources. Of the 1,510 identified CIS reports involving counterfeits, 27.6% reported China as the source country of the incid...

The rapid globalisation of the pharmaceutical market that characterised the two last decades has led to a situation of multiple standards (Caudron et al. 2008): the quality of medicines is not uniform worldwide, but largely depends on the level of income (Newton 2010) and regulation (Editorial, 1852; World Health Organization, 2010; Nishtar 2012) in the country of destination. Poor-quality medi...

Direct infusion electrospray ionization mass spectrometry (ESI-MS) is shown to provide an efficient technique for the investigation of polar composition of forensic tablets for male erectile dysfunction. ESI-MS fingerprinting of 41 commercial sildenafil samples (Viagra, Cialis, Lazar, Libiden, Maxfil, Plenovit, Potent 75, Rigix, V-50, Vimax, Pramil 75 and Pramil) and 56 counterfeit samples (Via...

Relatively cheap and high quality consumer scanners and printers have enabled the rise of the casual money counterfeiter. One who passes along home-made fake bills of low denomination in busy environments where the receiver is not likely to authenticate a bill. While this may be negligible on macro-economic scale, it does hurt consumers. In this paper we investigate several methods to identify ...

This paper develops a new tractable strategic theory of counterfeiting as a competition between good and bad guys. There is free entry of bad guys, who choose whether and what note to counterfeit, and what quality to produce. Good guys select a costly verification effort. Along with the quality, this effort fixes the chance of finding counterfeits, and induces a collateral “hot potato” passing ...