BACKGROUND Chinese herbal medicine (CHM) is of noteworthy international interest due to its potential impact on healthcare and manifests numerous opportunities for new drug development. However, solid scientific evidence is still lacking regarding the safety, efficacy, and quality of CHM-derived medicines. Success in the modernization and globalization of CHM is heavily dependent on the achieve...

EPC Class-1 Generation-2 UHF tags, one of Radio frequency identification or RFID tag types, is expected that most companies are planning to use it in the supply chain in the short term and in consumer packaging in the long term due to its inexpensive cost. Because of the very cost, however, its resources are extremely scarce and it is hard to have any valuable security algorithms in it. It caus...

Although not uncommon in mental hospital patients, a trichobezoar in a child is not often seen. Besides being rare, the condition is of considerable historical interest. The word 'bezoar,' derived from Arabic ' badzehr' or from Persian 'pad zahr,' signifying counter-poison or antidote, is the term applied to masses found in the intestine and stomach of both men and animals. Bezoars have been kn...

In this paper, we describe new and improved attacks on the authentication scheme previously proposed by Yeung and Mintzer [1]. Previous attacks assumed that the binary watermark logo inserted in an image for the purposes of authentication was known. Here we remove that assumption and show how the scheme is still vulnerable, even if the binary logo is not known but the attacker has access to mul...

Poor consumers in the developing world use a variety of status signalling devices that rely on deception of the observer. A frequently used deceptive strategy is the consumption of counterfeit instead of original status-intensive goods, mainly cheap copies of expensive brand-name goods from developed countries. The choice for such deceptive modes of conspicuous consumption is analysed within a ...

It is well known that the world of art (paintings, sculptures, graphics etc) is plagued by the virus of counterfeits and this issue is particularly sensible in a country like Italy where art has flourished for centuries and where in the XX century too many pieces of art of great painters were copied and/or counterfeited and sold for authentic. Counterfeiting is a crime which involve great amoun...

In some low- and middle-income countries, the national stores and public-sector health facilities contain large stocks of pharmaceuticals that are past their expiry dates. In low-income countries like Uganda, many such stockpiles are the result of donations. If not adequately monitored or regulated, expired pharmaceuticals may be repackaged and sold as counterfeits or be dumped without any thou...

Firms and organizations often need to collect and analyze sensitive consumer data. A common problem encountered in such evidence-based research is that they cannot collect all essential information from one sample, and may need to link non-overlapping data items across independent samples. We propose an automated nonparametric data fusion solution to this problem. The proposed methods are not r...