Isolation of a novel Orientia species (O. chuto sp. nov.) from a patient infected in Dubai

In July 2006, an Australian tourist returning from Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), developed acute scrub typhus. Her signs and symptoms included fever, myalgia, headache, rash, and eschar. Orientia tsutsugamushi serology demonstrated a 4-fold rise in antibody titers in paired serum collections (1:512 to 1:8,192), with the sera reacting strongest against the Gilliam strain antigen. An Orientia species was isolated by the in vitro culture of the patient's acute blood taken prior to antibiotic treatment. The gene sequencing of the 16S rRNA gene (rrs), partial 56-kDa gene, and the full open reading frame 47-kDa gene was performed, and comparisons of this new Orientia sp. isolate to previously characterized strains demonstrated significant sequence diversity. The closest homology to the rrs sequence of the new Orientia sp. isolate was with three strains of O. tsutsugamushi (Ikeda, Kato, and Karp), with a nucleotide sequence similarity of 98.5%. The closest homology to the 47-kDa gene sequence was with O. tsutsugamushi strain Gilliam, with a nucleotide similarity of 82.3%, while the closest homology to the 56-kDa gene sequence was with O. tsutsugamushi strain TA686, with a nucleotide similarity of 53.1%. The molecular divergence and geographically unique origin lead us to believe that this organism should be considered a novel species. Therefore, we have proposed the name “Orientia chuto,” and the prototype strain of this species is strain Dubai, named after the location in which the patient was infected.

Relationship of osmosis : rise of Emirates, the airline and Dubai, the city

A relationship of economic osmosis is noticed between an airline and the country whose flag it flies. Economic impact studies prepared by government organisations and airline managements usually point out the economic benefits of setting up a new airline or flying a new route. These benefits arise for the airline’s home base by way of greater connectivity with the world and include a number of tangibles such as growth in tourism, increase in retail revenue from transit passengers, access to cargo transport for importers and exporters, employment opportunities and a host of indirect benefits that the local populace can gain from exposure to other countries and cultures. One also notices two very important intangibles associated with an airline and the nation of origin- national pride and national security. This paper analyses the remarkable success story of mutual growth shared by Emirates, the airline and Dubai, the city, over the past twenty-five years and the opportunities that the success of this duo signifies for others in the region.

Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus antibody reactors among camels in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, in 2005

We tested, using a low starting dilution, sequential serum samples from dromedary camels, sheep and horses collected in Dubai from February/April to October of 2005 and from dromedary camels for export/import testing between Canada and USA in 2000-2001. Using a standard Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus (MERS-CoV) neutralization test, serial sera from three sheep and three horses were all negative while sera from 9 of 11 dromedary camels from Dubai were positive for antibodies supported by similar results in a MERS-CoV recombinant partial spike protein antibody ELISA. The two negative Dubai camels were both dromedary calves and remained negative over the 5 months studied. The six dromedary samples from USA and Canada were negative in both tests. These results support the recent findings that infection with MERS-CoV or a closely related virus is not a new occurrence in camels in the Middle East. Therefore, interactions of MERS-CoV at the human-animal interface may have been ongoing for several, perhaps many, years and by inference, a widespread pandemic may be less likely unless significant evolution of the virus allow accelerated infection and spread potential in the human population.

Faculty collaboration in teaching global business, MBA teaching process

This presentation stems from global business teaching and ongoing research of an interactive group of professors working together in the service delivery of online MBA education at University of Maryland University College . A model for collaborative teaching by delocated professors who literally span the globe – from Australia to Canada, including the United Kingdom, both coasts of the USA, China and Dubai - is offered, underscoring the enormous mobility of knowledge and knowledge workers. Working together as a collaborating team, it was found that the "whole is greater than the sum of the parts". The teachers became more than a teaching team, they became a collaborating operation as they worked together in the sharing and development of materials, insights and knowledge. The model demonstrates how the teaching of global business in an MBA environment is really an exercise in the management of global service operations.

Ethical, economic and efficient sector : is it a gamble? The case of New Zealand Health

The New Zealand public sector has gone through major reform as a result of fiscal deficit in 1984 (KettI, 1997; Schwartz, 1997), resulting in shift of emphasis from quality service provision to establishing financial supremacy (Kettl, 1997). This raises concern as to how public sector employees are attaining balance between their service objectives with financial ones and how is the ethics negotiated in this process. Following this concern, this paper focuses on determining the organisational variables consisting of organisational policies in the District Health Boards (DHBs) and hospitals of New Zealand on ethical behaviours of managers and the ethical climate of these departments. The aim of this study is to increase our understanding of the ethical climate of the public health. Our findings suggest that little emphasis has been provided to the aspect of ethics in New Zealand health sector. There is no reward for employees who exhibit exemplary ethical behaviour, no hot line to consult/report about ethics, any detailed guidelines and policies, and not enough ethics-related training provided to staff.

Virtual property theft detection framework

 The issue of virtual property theft in virtual worlds is a serious problem which has ramifications in both the real and virtual world. Virtual world users invest a considerable amount of time, effort and often money to collect virtual property items, only to have them stolen by thieves. Many virtual property thefts go undetected, with thieves often stealing virtual property items without resistance, leaving victims to discover the theft only after it has occurred. This paper presents the design of a detection framework that uses an algorithm for identifying virtual property theft at two key stages: account intrusion and unauthorized virtual property trades. Initial tests of this framework on a synthetic data set show an 80% detection rate with no false positives. This framework can allow virtual world developers to tailor and extend it to suit their specific virtual world software and provide an effective way of detecting virtual property theft while being a low maintenance, user friendly and cost effective.

Classification of correlated internet traffic flows

A critical problem for Internet traffic classification is how to obtain a high-performance statistical feature based classifier using a small set of training data. The solutions to this problem are essential to deal with the encrypted applications and the new emerging applications. In this paper, we propose a new Naive Bayes (NB) based classification scheme to tackle this problem, which utilizes two recent research findings, feature discretization and flow correlation. A new bag-of-flow (BoF) model is firstly introduced to describe the correlated flows and it leads to a new BoF-based traffic classification problem. We cast the BoF-based traffic classification as a specific classifier combination problem and theoretically analyze the classification benefit from flow aggregation. A number of combination methods are also formulated and used to aggregate the NB predictions of the correlated flows. Finally, we carry out a number of experiments on a large scale real-world network dataset. The experimental results show that the proposed scheme can achieve significantly higher classification accuracy and much faster classification speed with comparison to the state-of-the-art traffic classification methods.

Effects of social characters in viral propagation seeding strategies in online social networks

Online social networks have not only become a point of aggregation and exchange of information, they have so radically rooted into our everyday behaviors that they have become the target of important network attacks. We have seen an increasing trend in Sybil based activity, such as in personification, fake profiling and attempts to maliciously subvert the community stability in order to illegally create benefits for some individuals, such as online voting, and also from more classic informatics assaults using specifically mutated worms. Not only these attacks, in the latest months, we have seen an increase in spam activities on social networks such as Facebook and RenRen, and most importantly, the first attempts at propagating worms within these communities. What differentiates these attacks from normal network attacks, is that compared to anonymous and stealthy activities, or by commonly untrusted emails, social networks regain the ability to propagate within consentient users, who willingly accept to partake. In this paper, we will demonstrate the effects of influential nodes against non-influential nodes through in simulated scenarios and provide an overview and analysis of the outcomes.

Wire - a formal intermediate language for binary analysis

Wire is a intermediate language to enable static program analysis on low level objects such as native executables. It has practical benefit in analysing the structure and semantics of malware, or for identifying software defects in closed source software. In this paper we describe how an executable program is disassembled and translated to the Wire intermediate language. We define the formal syntax and operational semantics of Wire and discuss our justifications for its language features. We use Wire in our previous work Malwise, a malware variant detection system. We also examine applications for when a formally defined intermediate language is given. Our results include showing the semantic equivalence between obfuscated and non obfuscated code samples. These examples stem from the obfuscations commonly used by malware.

Keynote : Detection of and defense against distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks

Distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks typically exhaust bandwidth, processing capacity, or memory of a targeted machine, service or network. Despite enormous efforts in combating DDoS attacks in the past decade, DDoS attacks are still a serious threat to the security of cyberspace. In this talk I shall outline the recent efforts of my research group in detection of and defence against DDoS attacks. In particular, this talk will concentrate on the following three critical issues related to DDoS attacks: (1) Traceback of DDoS attacks; (2) Detection of low-rate DDoS attacks; and (3) Discriminating DDoS attacks from flash crowds.

AMDD : Exploring entropy based anonymous multi-dimensional data detection for network optimization in human associated DTNs

Human associated delay-tolerant networks (HDTNs) are new networks where mobile devices are associated with humans and demonstrate social-related communication characteristics. Most of recent works use real social trace file to analyse its social characteristics, however social-related data is sensitive and has concern of privacy issues. In this paper, we propose an anonymous method that anonymize the original data by coding to preserve individual's privacy. The Shannon entropy is applied to the anonymous data to keep rich useful social characteristics for network optimization, e.g. routing optimization. We use an existing MIT reality dataset and Infocom 06 dataset, which are human associated mobile network trace files, to simulate our method. The results of our simulations show that this method can make data anonymously while achieving network optimization.

An analytical model on the propagation of modern email worms

Email worms propagate across networks by taking advantage of email relationships. Modeling the propagation of email worms can help predict their potential damages and develop countermeasures. We propose a novel analytical model on the propagation process of modern reinfection email worms. It relies on probabilistic analysis, and thus can provide a steady and reliable assessment on the propagation dynamics. Additionally, by introducing virtual users to represent the repetitious spreading process, the proposed model overcomes the computational challenge caused by reinfection processes. To demonstrate the benefits of our model, we conduct a series of experimental evaluation. The results show that our novel approach achieves a greater accuracy and is more suitable for modeling modern email worms than previous models.

Is Roger Federer more loss averse than Serena Williams?

Using data from the high-stakes 2013 Dubai professional tennis tournament, we find that, compared with a tied score, (i) male players have a higher serve speed and thus exhibit more effort when behind in score, and their serve speeds get less sensitive to losses or gains when score difference gets too large, and (ii) female players do not change their serve speed when behind, while serving slower when ahead. Thus, male players comply more with Prospect Theory exhibiting more loss aversion and reflection effect. Our results are robust to controlling for player fixed effects and characteristics with player random effects.