Common Threats Research Articles

«Ծայրամասային դոկտրինն» ու Մերձավոր Արևելքի «Հատվածայնացման տեսությունը» Իսրայելի ռազմավարական ընկալումների համատեքստում / The “Periphery Doctrine” and “Theory of Fragmentation” of the Middle East within the context of Israel’s strategic perceptions

October 7, 2023, saw the Israeli-Palestinian conflict step up on a new stage of combat operations. Consequently, with local, regional and global actors elucidating or clarifying their position on current military actions that hold the potential to escalate into a regional and large-scale war, importance is attached to the consideration of doctrines, concepts and theories that have become ideologies in the aspect of ensuring Israel’s own security, and its perceptions of regional security as a whole. In this sense, the article discusses the “Periphery Doctrine” (“Strategy of periphery countries”), and the essence of the “Theory of Fragmenta­tion”, stages of their transformation and Israel’s security perceptions stipulating those transformations. The aforementioned doctrine and the theory are considered within the context of Israel’s strategic security principles and its perceptions of the Near and Middle East as somewhat a heterogeneous cultural domain. Тhe axis drawn due to the Israeli-developed “New Doctrine of Periphery”, sometimes called the “Reverse periphery doctrine”, is also comprehensively analyzed, representing Israel’s desire to impose a blockade on the real periphery countries – Iran and Turkey – or to contain them. The article attaches particular interest to the consideration and comparative analysis of the differences between the classical Periphery Doctrine and the “New” one (not only in the sense of the number and motives of actors, the goals facing the new alliance or cooperation, methods of achieving them, but also within the framework of the fact of attaching special importance to their economic component along with common threats uniting all parties). The analysis allows us to sum up that Israel’s first, or “classical” doctrine “on concluding an alliance with periphery countries”, and the theory of fragmentation as a whole, were successful. Besides, owing to this strategy, the thesis on reconciliation with Israel and establishment of diplomatic relations with it was put on the agenda of the Arab States. In its turn, Israel’s “New Periphery Doctrine” is still at the formation stage. However, to some extent it comes from Israeli perceptions of not only military threats, but also economic and energy security.

Hospital Experiences of Dignity in People Who Inject Drugs.

Dignity is a complex concept necessary for the adequate treatment of patients in the healthcare setting. Autonomy, self-sufficiency, respect, and equality are concepts used to define dignity. Dignity has not been studied in people who inject drugs (PWID). This study aimed to determine how PWID maintain or have their dignity threatened during hospitalization in an acute care unit. The qualitative descriptive study was a deductive thematic analysis of secondary data on PWID experiences with received nursing care. In-depth, semistructured interviews were conducted and transcribed verbatim with a constant comparison method for thematic analysis using NVivo. A priori codes of dignity concepts from the literature and dignity scales were used as a guide to examine the nine qualitative transcripts. The three most common threats to dignity during hospitalization were lack of equality compared with other patients, not feeling valued as an individual, and not feeling respected by the healthcare workers providing care. The three most common protectors of dignity were feeling respected by healthcare workers, having autonomy in treatment choices, and feeling valued as an individual. Protecting dignity significantly affects whether PWID are willing to seek healthcare in the hospital setting. Preserving dignity in PWID during their hospitalizations can encourage this population to seek care earlier. Nurses must be experienced in caring for PWID and provide nonjudgmental care for this population.

Social Engineering Attack Classifications on Social Media Using Deep燣earning

In defense-in-depth, humans have always been the weakest link in cybersecurity. However, unlike common threats, social engineering poses vulnerabilities not directly quantifiable in penetration testing. Most skilled social engineers trick users into giving up information voluntarily through attacks like phishing and adware. Social Engineering (SE) in social media is structurally similar to regular posts but contains malicious intrinsic meaning within the sentence semantic. In this paper, a novel SE model is trained using a Recurrent Neural Network Long Short Term Memory (RNN-LSTM) to identify well-disguised SE threats in social media posts. We use a custom dataset crawled from hundreds of corporate and personal Facebook posts. First, the social engineering attack detection pipeline (SEAD) is designed to filter out social posts with malicious intents using domain heuristics. Next, each social media post is tokenized into sentences and then analyzed with a sentiment analyzer before being labelled as an anomaly or normal training data. Then, we train an RNN-LSTM model to detect five types of social engineering attacks that potentially contain signs of information gathering. The experimental result showed that the Social Engineering Attack (SEA) model achieves 0.84 in classification precision and 0.81 in recall compared to the ground truth labeled by network experts. The experimental results showed that the semantics and linguistics similarities are an effective indicator for early detection of SEA.

Leaf Diseases Detection System Using Machine Learning

Abstract: Agriculture supports living beings and nature in many ways, such as food and habitat. All humans as well as animals depend on the agriculture sector for their basic needs of food and nutrients. Thus, the importance of agriculture and the ways it can be improved further should be taken into account. While discussing agriculture, the topic of related diseases is not far behind. Crop disease is the most common threat that falls upon agricultural harvest. To address the issue at hand, firstly, farmers must figure out the situation on time. Then only the chance of saving the crops exists. We are aware of how the various types of diseases affect the yield badly and in turn affect the quantity. In this paper, we will detect such diseases and identify them. We will use image processing, Machine Learning Algorithms, and sample datasets to get the resulting detection.

Decentralized Children's Immunization Record Management System for Private Healthcare in Malaysia Using IPFS and Blockchain

In Malaysia, private healthcare providers keep computerized records of vaccination data, including personal information, diagnostic results, and vaccine prescriptions. However, such sensitive information is commonly stored using a centralized storage paradigm which subsequently brings about the issue of maintaining user privacy. Concerning this, unauthorized access to crucial information such as identity details and ailments that a patient is suffering from, as well as the misuse of patients' data and medical reports, are common threats to user's (patient) privacy. To overcome this problem, the researchers suggest leveraging IPFS (Interplanetary File System) and blockchain technology to create a decentralized children's immunization record management system. While respecting patient privacy, the proposed system also allows authorized entities, such as healthcare professionals, and provides easy access to medical data (e.g., doctors and nurses). The proposed decentralized system integrates IPFS, blockchain, and AES cryptography to ensure consistency, integrity, and accessibility. A permission Ethereum blockchain allows hospitals and patients within private healthcare providers to connect. We utilized a combination of symmetric and asymmetric key encryption to provide secure storage and selective records access. The proposed system was analyzed using Wireshark to evaluate the overall system's performance in terms of integrity and accessibility while sharing patient records. This project aims to provide automated system keeper using autonomous agents collaboratively with the role of blockchain for further enhancement.

Rational or emotional? A study on Chinese tourism boycotts on social media during international crisis situations

In the era of social media, tourism boycotts are regarded as an effective way for individuals to convey their dissatisfaction and emotions toward destinations, decreasing destinations' visits and reputations. Thus, tourism boycotts become a common threat for both domestic and international tourism destinations, especially during international crisis situations. Drawing on Situational Crisis Communication Theory and consumer boycott research, this study is the first to explore the influential mechanisms of potential Chinese tourists' tourism boycotts in international crises. The results reveal that potential Chinese tourists' tourism boycott behaviors in international crisis situations incorporate cognitive (rational) as well as emotional, political, and non-political factors. The study also detected group differences in terms of age, income level, and tourism experiences, which affect tourism boycotts. This study advances the theoretical development of tourism boycotts and provides practical implications for international destinations in terms of effective crisis communication and marketing in a post-pandemic world.

Detection and Prevention of Medication Errors by the Network of Sentinel Pharmacies in a Southern European Region

A medication error (ME) is a drug-related problem that has been recognized as a common and serious threat to patient safety. The aim of this study was to detect and analyze ME reports occurring throughout the therapeutic process through the community's pharmacies in order to improve the efficacy and safety of medications and contribute to the prevention of future MEs. This was a three-year descriptive, observational, and prospective study to detect and analyze the different MEs reported by the Catalan sentinel pharmacies network (Catalan SePhaNet). In total, 1394 notifications of MEs were reported (an incidence rate of 737.34 cases/100,000 inhabitants). MEs were detected more frequently in primary care centers. Most of the MEs reported were caused by an incorrect, incomplete, illegible, or verbal medical prescription (41.3%). Of the global notifications detected, 71.9% did not reach the patient (categories A and B). The drugs most frequently implicated in the reported ME cases were beta-lactam antibiotics. In 6.0% of the cases, the ME caused injury to the patient (categories E and F). In 72.0% of the global notifications, a pharmacist's intervention avoided the ME. The importance of a community pharmacy and the role of a pharmacist were demonstrated in aspects related to patient and drug safety.

Two Multiplex PCR Methods for Detecting Several Pathogens Associated with Feline Respiratory and Intestinal Tracts

Respiratory tract and intestinal diseases are common threats to feline health. Coinfection with multiple pathogens is not rare among clinical infectious cases. Rapid diagnosis of these coinfections is of great significance for timely and effective clinical treatment. In this study, two novel multiplex polymerase chain reactions (mPCRs) were established for simultaneous detection of four pathogens associated with the feline intestinal tract (feline coronavirus (FCoV), feline astrovirus (FeAstV), feline panleukopenia virus (FPV) and feline kobuvirus (FeKoV)) and five pathogens associated with the respiratory tract (feline calicivirus (FCV), feline herpesvirus 1 (FHV-1), feline leukemia virus (FeLV), Chlamydia felis (C. felis) and influenza A virus (IAV)). The results of sensitivity analysis revealed that the detection limits for FeKoV, FPV, FeAstV, FCoV, IAV, C. felis, FeLV, FHV-1 and FCV were 103, 104, 103, 103, 103, 104, 104, 105 and 105 copies/µL, respectively. Moreover, the specificity of the two mPCRs was high. When the two mPCRs were applied to clinical samples, the assay worked well. In conclusion, we established two mPCR methods that provide an excellent tool for the diagnosis and monitoring of pathogens associated with the feline respiratory and intestinal tracts.

Cellular features of localized microenvironments in human meniscal degeneration: a single-cell transcriptomic study.

Musculoskeletal tissue degeneration impairs the life quality and function of many people. Meniscus degeneration is a major origin of knee osteoarthritis and a common threat to athletic ability, but its cellular mechanism remains elusive. We built a cell atlas of 12 healthy or degenerated human meniscus samples from the inner and outer meniscal zones of 8 patients using scRNA-seq to investigate meniscal microenvironment homeostasis and its changes in the degeneration process and verified findings with immunofluorescent imaging. We identified and localized cell types in inner and outer meniscus and found new chondrocyte subtypes associated with degeneration. The observations suggested understandings on how cellular compositions, functions, and interactions participated in degeneration, and on the possible loop-like interactions among extracellular matrix disassembly, angiogenesis, and inflammation in driving the degeneration. The study provided a rich resource reflecting variations in the meniscal microenvironment during degeneration and suggested new cell subtypes as potential therapeutic targets. The hypothesized mechanism could also be a general model for other joint degenerations. The National Natural Science Foundation of China (81972123, 82172508, 62050178, 61721003), the National Key Research and Development Program of China (2021YFF1200901), Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (2015SCU04A40); The Innovative Spark Project of Sichuan University (2018SCUH0034); Sichuan Science and Technology Program (2020YFH0075); Chengdu Science and Technology Bureau Project (2019-YF05-00090-SN); 1.3.5 Project for Disciplines of Excellence of West China Hospital Sichuan University (ZYJC21030, ZY2017301); 1.3.5 Project for Disciplines of Excellence - Clinical Research Incubation Project, West China Hospital, Sichuan University (2019HXFH039).

Smart Approach for Botnet Detection Based on Network Traffic Analysis

Today, botnets are the most common threat on the Internet and are used as the main attack vector against individuals and businesses. Cybercriminals have exploited botnets for many illegal activities, including click fraud, DDOS attacks, and spam production. In this article, we suggest a method for identifying the behavior of data traffic using machine learning classifiers including genetic algorithm to detect botnet activities. By categorizing behavior based on time slots, we investigate the viability of detecting botnet behavior without seeing a whole network data flow. We also evaluate the efficacy of two well-known classification methods with reference to this data. We demonstrate experimentally, using existing datasets, that it is possible to detect botnet activities with high precision.

633. Eravacycline Use in Immunocompromised Patients: Multicenter Evaluation of Clinical and Safety Endpoints

Abstract Background Infections caused by multidrug-resistant (MDR) bacteria are an increasingly common public health threat associated with worse outcomes in immunocompromised patients. Eravacycline (ERV) has potent in-vitro activity against MDR Gram-negative and Gram-positive bacteria and has demonstrated non-inferiority to meropenem in the phase III IGNITE4 trial; however, the trial excluded immunocompromised patients. We aimed to evaluate clinical and safety endpoints of immunocompromised patients receiving ERV as definitive therapy. Methods Multicenter, retrospective, observational study conducted from October 2018 to April 2022. Adult hospitalized immunocompromised patients treated with ERV for ≥72 hours were included. Immunocompromised patients were defined as having any of the following: chemo or radiation therapy < 30 days of hospital admission, HIV/AIDS with CD4 < 200, chronic steroids ( >40 mg prednisone or equivalent. The primary outcome was 30-day survival. Secondary outcomes were lack of 30-day infection recurrence and drug-related safety events. Results Overall, 75 immunocompromised patients treated with ERV were included from 17 United States medical centers. Median (IQR) age was 62 (53-70) and 61.6% were male. Hospital length of stay was 28 (13-42) days and 67% were admitted to the intensive care unit. SOFA and APACHE II scores were 3.5 (1-7) and 16 (11-20), respectively. Common infection sources were intra-abdominal (26%) and lower respiratory tract (18%); 24% were bacteremic. Most patients had cultured Enterobacterales (58.7%) and Enterococci (37%) spp. infections. Of those, 21.3% were CRE and 19% were VRE. Infectious diseases consult was obtained in 91.8% of cases. Time elapsed from index culture collection to ERV initiation was 4 (2-8) days and duration of ERV therapy was 7 (4-12) days. In total, 81.3% of immunocompromised patients achieved 30-day survival and 90.7% did not have 30-day infection recurrence. Probable drug-related adverse events occurred in 5.3% of patients (GI 4%, rash 1%). Conclusion A majority of immunocompromised patients receiving ERV as definitive therapy achieved 30-day survival and did not experience infection recurrence. ERV use in immunocompromised subpopulations will benefit from studies tailored to their specific characteristics. Disclosures Kimberly C. Claeys, PharmD, BioFire Diagnostics: Honoraria Bruce M. Jones, Pharm.D., FIDSA, BCPS, AbbVie: Advisor/Consultant|AbbVie: Honoraria|La Jolla: Honoraria|Melinta: Advisor/Consultant|Paratek: Honoraria|Regeneron: Honoraria.

“This Virus is a Common Threat to All Humans”: Discourse Representation of COVID-19 in Selected Newspaper Editorials

Existing studies on viruses with bias for COVID-19 have mainly been carried out from non-linguistic fields. Linguistics-related studies have not examined the media representation of COVID-19 since it is a recent development. This study, therefore, identifies the representational strategies, discourse structures and discourse strategies deployed by selected newspapers in representing COVID-19 and associated participants. Data were retrieved from selected COVID-19-related editorials from four purposively selected countries and continents across the world: New York Times (USA, North America), The Guardian (UK, Europe), China Daily (China, Asia) and The Punch (Nigeria, Africa), published in the early periods of the pandemic, and precisely from January 1 – March 31, 2020. Guided by aspects of van Dijk’s socio-cognitive model of critical discourse analysis on ideological discourse structures, data were quantitatively and qualitatively analysed. The newspaper editorials unusually converged to negatively represent an issue – COVID-19 – because it is largely negatively viewed by all. Ten representational strategies (like economic cankerworm, threat to humans, common enemy), six discourse strategies (like demonising, criminalising, condemnation) and twelve ideological discourse structures (like Actor Description, Authority, Burden) and different participant representations and roles (like solver, potential super spreader) were identified in the study. The newspapers largely set the agenda on the negative representation of the virus and its potential havoc on all facets of human endeavours, thereby giving emotional and informational appeal to all to join hands in earnestly silencing the epidemic. Keywords: COVID-19, media representation, newspaper editorials, discourse strategies, discourse structures

Screening, Diagnosis, and Treatment of Pediatric Ocular Diseases.

Vision is an important aspect of a child's quality of life and intellectual, social, and emotional development. Disruptions to vision during infancy and early childhood can cause lifelong vision impairment or blindness. However, early identification and treatment of eye disease can prevent loss of sight and its consequent long-term effects. Therefore, screening guidelines exist to guide physicians in detecting the most common threats to sight in the different stages of infancy and childhood. This review describes common causes of pediatric vision impairment, the recommended screening guidelines for diagnosing them, and current treatment modalities.

The impact of recreational activities on species at risk in Canada

Recreational activities are among the most common threats to species at risk. The use of standardized threat assessment tables in assessment reports for 300 Canadian species at risk since 2012 enabled a systematic comparison of threat categories considering both frequency and intensity of threats. Our analysis of these reports reveals that recreational activities are the most common threat to species at risk in Canada, affecting more species than any other threat category. However, the intensity of a threat should be considered. When accounting for the intensity of threats, recreational activities are the third-greatest threat to species at risk in Canada following “Invasive Non-native/Alien Species” and “Roads and Railroads”. Recreational activities were among the top five threats to molluscs, vascular plants, mosses, arthropods, marine and terrestrial mammals, and reptiles considering both frequency and intensity of threat to the assessed species in each taxonomic group. Among species at risk for which recreational activities posed at least a low-level threat, off-road vehicle use was the most commonly mentioned recreational threat. The second-most common recreational threat was hiking. Boating, mountain biking, camping, beach use, horseback riding, off-leash pets, and rock climbing were considered at least a low-level threat to five or more species. Common mechanisms of threat arising from recreational activities include direct mortality and damage from trampling species and/or their habitat, siltation and changes to water chemistry, disruption due to human presence, and noise disturbance. Recreation activities affected more species at risk than any other category of threat. The intensity of threat from recreational activities was negligible or low for most at-risk species affected. However, increases in recreational use and cumulative effects could result in more severe threats in the future. Both mechanized and non-mechanized recreational activities cause direct mortality, disturbance, and/or degradation of habitat for species at risk in Canada including many under-studied taxa. Thus, recreational activities that are typically unauthorised and those that are commonly permitted in protected areas warrant management attention to avoid impacts on species at risk, especially less conspicuous taxa.

Modern features of checking the integrity of a business partner

In this article, the author raises the problem of checking the counterparty for reliability. The author emphasizes that at present it is impossible to imagine economic relations without partnerships. Taking into account the fact that in modern realities there is a fairly high level of fraud, the issue of conducting a counterparty verification becomes more relevant. In the article, the author cites a study conducted by Detoil and aimed at analyzing existing business practices. According to the results, it was revealed that most organizations faced negative consequences from cooperation with unfavorable partners. Also in the article, other conclusions formulated on the basis of this study are presented in sufficient detail. The author emphasizes that today the information and explanatory work of the Federal Tax Service has begun to play a very significant role in the verification of counterparties. Regarding this fact, a study by IPT Group was also conducted, the results of which are presented in the article. The author notes that the main purpose of conducting due diligence of a counterparty is to ensure the security of an economic entity, and lists a number of tasks performed to achieve this goal. In addition, the author lists the most common threats that arise when interacting with unscrupulous contractors. Within the framework of this article, the author also refers to the regulatory framework in force in Russia, on the basis of which the process of checking the reliability of a partner is regulated. Further, the author considers this problem in the field of food retail. He notes the characteristic features and main trends of the partner verification process in this area. In the final part of the article, the author comes to the conclusion that the issue of counterparty due diligence should be given more attention, since many companies still face the problem of overcoming the negative consequences of interacting with unfavorable partners.

Brief Synopses of New Arabic-Language Publications

Brief Synopses of New Arabic-Language Publications

Ethical transformation and legal boundaries of economic intelligence

Within the framework of this article, the authors considered the issue of economic intelligence in modern conditions. Against the backdrop of the economic confrontation between Western countries and Russia, it becomes obvious that the concept of economic intelligence is changing, manifesting itself in several planes at the same time, and corporate confrontation is moving to the level of protecting national interests. According to the authors, the factors affecting the perception of the methods of corporate confrontation are subject to change. Based on the assumption that the methods and tactics of economic intelligence are not static, the authors in this study set himself the task of determining the factors that influence their ethical perception. The study provides an opinion that the transformation of approaches to understanding ethical behavior and the very definition of ethical behavior in economic intelligence is directly related to the technological aspect, the transition of many business processes to the digital plane. The authors focus on the fact that in the conditions of cyberspace the psychological perception of illegal actions changes significantly. Commitment to ethical behavior may naturally decrease due to the lack of personal contact between the agent of influence and the source. At the same time, in practice, the boundary separating ethical and unethical methods of conducting competitive intelligence remains very unclear, which creates additional difficulties in countering such methods. In the final part of the article, the authors formulate a conclusion regarding the most common threats to which corporate data is exposed, as well as the role of economic intelligence in ensuring the security of an organization.

Anaerobic conditions are a major influence on Candida albicans chlamydospore formation.

Candidiasis now represents the fourth most frequent nosocomial infection both in the USA and worldwide. Candida albicans is an increasingly common threat to human health as a consequence of AIDS, steroid therapy, organ and tissue transplantation, cancer therapy, broad-spectrum antibiotics, and other immune defects. Unfortunately, these infections carry unacceptably high morbidity, mortality rates and important economic repercussions (estimated total direct cost of approximately 2 billion dollars in 1998 in US hospitals alone). This pathogen can grow both in yeast and filamentous forms and the pathogenic potential of C. albicans is intimately related to certain key processes including filamentation. Chlamydospores are considered to be a dormant form of C. albicans that remain understudied. Chlamydospores have been widely used as a diagnostic tool to separate C. albicans and C. dubliniensis from other Candida species. More recently, media have been developed that use chlamydopsore formation to separate C. albicans and C. dubliniensis from each other. Chlamydospore formation can be stimulated by hypoxic conditions but only on limited specific media types. Here, we show that anaerobic conditions are enough to drive chlamydospore formation in C. albicans on the surface of nutrient-rich agar.

An Improved Transformer Framework for Well-Overflow Early Detection via Self-Supervised Learning

Oil drilling has always been considered a vital part of resource exploitation, and during which overflow is the most common and tricky threat that may cause blowout, a catastrophic accident. Therefore, to prevent further damage, it is necessary to detect overflow as early as possible. However, due to the unbalanced distribution and the lack of labeled data, it is difficult to design a suitable solution. To address this issue, an improved Transformer Framework based on self-supervised learning is proposed in this paper, which can accurately detect overflow 20 min in advance when the labeled data are limited and severely imbalanced. The framework includes a self-supervised pre-training scheme, which focuses on long-term time dependence that offers performance benefits over fully supervised learning on downstream tasks and makes unlabeled data useful in the training process. Next, to better extract temporal features and adapt to multi-task training process, a Transformer-based auto-encoder with temporal convolution layer is proposed. In the experiment, we used 20 min data to detect overflow in the next 20 min. The results show that the proposed framework can reach 98.23% accuracy and 0.84 F1 score, which is much better than other methods. We also compare several modifications of our framework and different pre-training tasks in the ablation experiment to prove the advantage of our methods. Finally, we also discuss the influence of important hyperparameters on efficiency and accuracy in the experiment.

Lithium ion battery energy storage systems (BESS) hazards

There has been an increase in the development and deployment of battery energy storage systems (BESS) in recent years. In particular, BESS using lithium-ion batteries have been prevalent, which is mainly due to their power density, performance, and economical aspects. BESS have been increasingly used in residential, commercial, industrial, and utility applications for peak shaving or grid support. As the number of installed systems is increasing, the industry has also been observing more field failures that resulted in fires and explosions. Lithium-ion batteries contain flammable electrolytes, which can create unique hazards when the battery cell becomes compromised and enters thermal runaway. The initiating event is frequently a short circuit which may be a result of overcharging, overheating, or mechanical abuse. During the exothermic reaction process (i.e., thermal runaway), large amounts of flammable and potentially toxic battery gas will be generated. The released gas largely contains hydrogen, which is highly flammable under a wide range of conditions. This may create an explosive atmosphere in the battery room or storage container. As a result, a number of the recent incidents resulted in significant consequences highlighting the difficulties on how to safely deal with the hazard. This paper identifies fire and explosion hazards that exist in commercial/industrial BESS applications and presents mitigation measures. Common threats, barriers, and consequences are conceptually shown and how they would be identified in a hazard mitigation analysis (HMA). Mitigation measures that can be implemented to reduce the risk of a fire or an explosion are discussed. The presented information is intended to provide practical information to professionals and authorities in this fairly new industry to assure that prevention and mitigation strategies can be effectively implemented and that the regulatory requirement of the HMA can be met.