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Credit card fraud increases as ecommerce becomes more prevalent. Current fraud detection techniques, however, are far from accurate, and can result in significant financial losses to merchants and card issuers. Furthermore, the associated high false positive declines can cause inconvenience and dissatisfaction for consumers. We introduce a consumer incentive strategy for merchants to adopt more accurate fraud detection (prevention) techniques, such as secondary verification. We further optimize the strategy by applying secondary verification only to transactions with values higher than certain thresholds. We identify the conditions under which the strategy is attractive to merchants, and show that it may lead to a ‘win-win-win’ for consumers, merchants, and the card issuer, when the consumer’s tolerance of false declines is low or/and the incentive amount is within a certain range. In addition, we show that coordinated decisions by the merchant and the card issuer may generate further benefits. Finally, the effectiveness of various proposed strategies is demonstrated using actual credit card transaction data.

Duodenal cancer presents an elusive therapeutic challenge for clinicians to treat because of its highly malignant behavior and anatomical complexity. Endoscopic excision has been administered to treat early-stage cancers of upper gastrointestinal tract, especially esophagus and stomach cancer. There is currently a scarcity of data regarding the application and efficacy of endoscopic resection for early duodenal cancer due to its rarity. This study aimed at exploring the prevalence and efficacy of endoscopic excision in treatment for early duodenal cancer in comparison with major surgery.This cohort study retrospectively collected patients with primary Tis/T1-N0-M0 duodenal cancer in the Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results database from 2004 to 2017. Prevalence of endoscopic excision in duodenal cancer treatment, overall survival (OS) and disease-specific survival (DSS) of patients who received different tumor-resection procedures were estimated.A total of 1354 patients with Tis/T1-stage duodenal cancer were identified. Most patients (69.4%) underwent tumor resection as initial treatments. Among them, 65.7% underwent endoscopic excision, while 34.3% underwent major surgery. The multivariable Cox analyses revealed that endoscopic excision was associated with a significantly favorable OS (HR: 0.70; 95% CI: 0.52-0.95, p = 0.02) and DSS (HR: 0.32; 95% CI: 0.17-0.60, p 0.001), compared to major surgery, for Tis/T1-stage cancer patients. In addition to cancer-related deaths (p 0.001), endoscopic resection manifested significantly lower cumulative mortality rate of post-operative infectious diseases (p = 0.03).Endoscopic resection currently accounted for approximately two-thirds of all procedures to resect Tis/T1-stage duodenal tumor. Endoscopic resection represents a viable therapeutic option in the management of Tis/T1-stage duodenal cancer for its oncological superiorities to major surgery and its capacity to reduce operative traumas and morbidities.

We propose a new herd mechanism and embed it into an open financial market system, which allows traders to get in and out of the system based on some transition rates. Moreover, the novel mechanism can avoid the volatility disappearance when the population scale increases. There are three kinds of heterogeneous agents in the system: optimistic, pessimistic and fundamental. Interactions especially occur among three different groups of agents instead of two, which makes the artificial financial market more close to the real one. By the simulation results of this complex system, we can explain stylized facts like volatility clustering and find the key parameters of market bubbles and market collapses.

Aggregation-driven seeded growth of uniform platinum nanoparticles and exclusive silica-coating of the as-grown platinum nanoparticles have been achieved successfully. Fluorescent Pt@SiO2 nanoparticles have also been reproducibly prepared via effective co-condensation of silanized dye molecules with tetraethylorthosilicate. The dye-loaded Pt@SiO2 nanoparticles have been exploited as model carriers for thermal-responsive controlled release of guest molecules via slow hydrolysis/dissolution of silica shells; importantly, the encapsulated platinum cores have also been used as nanoprobes to simultaneously investigate their controlled release process. Meanwhile, unique size-sensitive absorbance resonance in the dye-loaded Pt@SiO2 nanoparticles has been demonstrated for the first time, and it is expected to find novel application.

In this article, we have demonstrated one-step solid-phase transformation from high-quality cadmium carbonate microcrystals into highly nanoporous cadmium oxide. The high crystal quality of cadmium carbonate is critical for the successful fabrication of porous nanoarchitectures with predetermined morphology and well-controlled internal structure. This novel strategy has a good potential to prepare nanoporous materials at a large scale by using perfect monolithic carbonate crystals, and it is also useful to synthesize different nanoporous materials on metal-oxide-coated substrates. Meanwhile, this simple thermal transformation of cadmium carbonate into porous structures has further been extended to convert calcium carbonate into such porous structures.

This study compares the performance of various data mining classifiers in order to find out which classifiers should be used for predicting whether a loan application will be approved or rejected. The study also tries to find the data mining classifiers which have the best performance in predicting whether an approved loan applicant will eventually default on his/her loan or not. The study was performed using a sample of 971 loan applicants. The results indicated that the best data mining classifier for predicting whether a loan applicant will be approved or rejected is LAD Tree, followed by Rotation Forest, Logit Boost, Random Forest, and AD Tree. It was also found that the best classifier for predicting whether an approved applicant will default on his/her loan is Bagging, followed by Simple Cart, J 48, J 48 graft, END, Class Balance ND, Data Near Balance ND, ND, and Ordinal Class Classifier.

Oxidation-induced constituent separation of ternary Fe/CoO nanocrystals has been investigated to evidence their exchange bias mechanism, which is important for conceptually new design, synthesis and utilization of magnetic nanostructures.

A second-order accurate numerical scheme is proposed for a thermo-elastic system which models a bar made of two distinct materials. The physical parameters involved may be discontinuous across the joint of the two materials, where there might be also singular heat and/or force sources. The solution components, the temperature and the displacement, may change rapidly across the joint. By transforming the system into a different one, time-marching schemes can be used for the new system which is well posed. The immersed interface method is employed to deal with the discontinuities of the coefficients and the singular sources. The proposed numerical method can fit both explicit and implicit formulation. For the implicit version, a stable and fast prediction-correction scheme is also developed. Convergence analysis shows that our method is second-order accurate at all grid points in spite of the discontinuities across the interface. Numerical experiments are performed to support the theoretical analysis in this paper.