Interrater Reliability Estimation via Maximum Likelihood for Gwet’s Chance Agreement Model

Interrater reliability (IRR) statistics, like Cohen’s kappa, measure agreement between raters beyond what is expected by chance when classifying items into categories. While Cohen’s kappa has been widely used, it has several limitations, prompting development of Gwet’s agreement statistic, an alternative “kappa”statistic which models chance agreement via an “occasional guessing” model. However, we show that Gwet’s formula for estimating the proportion of agreement due to chance is itself biased for intermediate levels of agreement, despite overcoming limitations of Cohen’s kappa at high and low agreement levels. We derive a maximum likelihood estimator for the occasional guessing model that yields an unbiased estimator of the IRR, which we call the maximum likelihood kappa (κML). The key result is that the chance agreement probability under the occasional guessing model is simply equal to the observed rate of disagreement between raters. The κMLstatistic provides a theoretically principled approach to quantifying IRR that addresses limitations of previous κcoefficients. Given the widespread use of IRR measures, having an unbiased estimator is important for reliable inference across domains where rater judgments are analyzed.

Chaotic Map-Based Authentication and Key Agreement Protocol with Low-Latency for Metasystem

With the rapid advancement in exploring perceptual interactions and digital twins,metaverse technology has emerged to transcend the constraints of space-time and reality,facilitating remote AI-based collaboration.In this dynamic metasystem environment,frequent information exchanges necessitate robust security measures,with Authentication and Key Agreement(AKA)serving as the primary line of defense to ensure communication security.However,traditional AKA protocols fall short in meeting the low-latency requirements essential for synchronous interactions within the metaverse.To address this challenge and enable nearly latency-free interactions,a novel low-latency AKA protocol based on chaotic maps is proposed.This protocol not only ensures mutual authentication of entities within the metasystem but also generates secure session keys.The security of these session keys is rigorously validated through formal proofs,formal verification,and informal proofs.When confronted with the Dolev-Yao(DY)threat model,the session keys are formally demonstrated to be secure under the Real-or-Random(ROR)model.The proposed protocol is further validated through simulations conducted using VMware workstation compiled in HLPSL language and C language.The simulation results affirm the protocol’s effectiveness in resisting well-known attacks while achieving the desired low latency for optimal metaverse interactions.

Cautionary Remarks When Testing Agreement between Two Raters for Continuous Scale Measurements: A Tutorial in Clinical Epidemiology with Implementation Using R

Background: When continuous scale measurements are available, agreements between two measuring devices are assessed both graphically and analytically. In clinical investigations, Bland and Altman proposed plotting subject-wise differences between raters against subject-wise averages. In order to scientifically assess agreement, Bartko recommended combining the graphical approach with the statistical analytic procedure suggested by Bradley and Blackwood. The advantage of using this approach is that it enables significance testing and sample size estimation. We noted that the direct use of the results of the regression is misleading and we provide a correction in this regard. Methods: Graphical and linear models are used to assess agreements for continuous scale measurements. We demonstrate that software linear regression results should not be readily used and we provided correct analytic procedures. The degrees of freedom of the F-statistics are incorrectly reported, and we propose methods to overcome this problem by introducing the correct analytic form of the F statistic. Methods for sample size estimation using R-functions are also given. Results: We believe that the tutorial and the R-codes are useful tools for testing and estimating agreement between two rating protocols for continuous scale measurements. The interested reader may use the codes and apply them to their available data when the issue of agreement between two raters is the subject of interest.

The Faithful Representation of Electrical Energy Sale and Purchase Agreements Under International Accounting Standards/International Financial Reporting Standards （IAS/IFRS）

This article aims at giving a contribution to the issue of accounting electrical energy sale and purchase agreements in accordance with the faithful representation principle. To this end, it must be ascertained whether electrical energy is bought/sold for an industrial use exclusively, so that the relevant transaction will be accounted as a normal purchase/sale, or through the lease of the relevant production plant, which would require the supply contract to be accounted in compliance with International Accounting Standards （IAS） 17 ＂Leasing＂. Alternatively, it must also be ascertained whether the relevant party is implementing financial trading strategies, as in such hypothesis, the supply contract is to be accounted as a financial instrument according to International Financial Reporting Standards （IFRS） 9/IAS 39 ＂Financial Instruments＂. Finally, the modalities used by a number of companies listed on European regulated markets to account such kind of contracts will be analyzed.

Encryption Algorithm for Securing Non-Disclosure Agreements in Outsourcing Offshore Software Maintenance

Properly created and securely communicated,non-disclosure agreement(NDA)can resolve most of the common disputes related to outsourcing of offshore software maintenance(OSMO).Occasionally,these NDAs are in the form of images.Since the work is done offshore,these agreements or images must be shared through the Internet or stored over the cloud.The breach of privacy,on the other hand,is a potential threat for the image owners as both the Internet and cloud servers are not void of danger.This article proposes a novel algorithm for securing the NDAs in the form of images.As an agreement is signed between the two parties,it will be encrypted before sending to the cloud server or travelling through the public network,the Internet.As the image is input to the algorithm,its pixels would be scrambled through the set of randomly generated rectangles for an arbitrary amount of time.The confusion effects have been realized through an XOR operation between the confused image,and chaotic data.Besides,5D multi-wing hyperchaotic system has been employed to spawn the chaotic vectors due to good properties of chaoticity it has.The machine experimentation and the security analysis through a comprehensive set of validation metric vividly demonstrate the robustness,defiance to the multifarious threats and the prospects for some real-world application of the proposed encryption algorithm for the NDA images.

EU＇s Association Agreements ＆ Central America： No Milk Until the Cows Come Home

Why did the European Union （EU） conclude an Association Agreement （A.A）, rather than a free-trade agreement with Central American （CA） countries in 2010？ A CA-EU AA content analysis within the broader EU policy approach towards Latin America suggests it to be （1） the only feasible option for each side at a time of increasing commercial flux; （2） mutually attractive against globalizing threats, thus converting an institutional innovation into a double-edged instrument; and （3） illustrative of the subtle but significant shift of farm-protection demands from endogenous dynamics to exogenous. They carry important implications： （1） empirically： weak CA-EU linkages further dilute West Europe＇s broader Latin ambitions; （2） theoretically： AA analyses better reflect trading realities than pure regional economic integration theories, suggesting the corrosive impact of globalizing forces on regional pursuits; and （3） historically： the continued role of the farm jinx in trade.

Macroeconomic and Social Impacts of Economic Partnership Agreements on Ivorian Economy： A New Assessment

This study reassesses the macroeconomic and social impacts of Economic Partnership Agreements （EPAs） on Ivorian economy using Computable General Equilibrium （CGE） model with positive externalities of public investment in education, health, and economic infrastructure. Previous studies highlight negative effect of these agreements stressing particularly on losses in government revenues due to the removal of all tariffs on imports. This analysis aims to provide some insight into this question by refreshing the debate to show how this situation could be transformed into opportunities for Ivory Coast in order to promote growth and reduce poverty. To do so, this study postulates that government spending （investment） in economic infrastructure （roads, bridges, communication network, etc.）, in education and health sectors produces positive externalities in each industry. This assumption has not been set anymore in previous studies. Simulation results reveal that, despite this decline in government revenues, if it invests in economic infrastructure, health and education sector, EPAs will generate more revenue for government due to the rise in income tax on firms and households, and tax on overall production. Furthermore, household income will increase which will in turn stimulate （final） consumption. There won＇t also be a decline in economic growth.

An Automated Semantic Negotiation for Cloud Service Level Agreements

Mostly, cloud agreements are signed between the consumer and the provider using online click-through agreements. Several issues and conflicts exist in the negotiation of cloud agreement terms due to the legal and ambiguous terms in Service Level Agreements (SLA). Semantic knowledge applied during the formation and negotiation of SLA can overcome these issues. Cloud SLA negotiation consists of numerous activities such as formation of SLA templates, publishing it in registry, verification and validation of SLA, monitoring for violation, logging and reporting and termination. Though these activities are interleaved with each other, semantic synchronization is still lacking. To overcome this, a novel SLA life cycle using semantic knowledge to automate the cloud negotiation has been formulated. Semantic web platform using ontologies is designed, developed and evaluated. The resultant platform increases the task efficiency of the consumer and the provider during negotiation. Precision and recall scores for Software as a Service (SaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) SLAs were calculated. And it reveals that applying semantic knowledge helps the extraction of meaningful answers from the cloud actors.

China, Philippines signed two power plants agreements

China and Philippines signed agreements on the construction of two power plants in the Philippines on Nov. 27, 1996. China Shanghai Electric Corp signed an export credit supply contract with Philippines Magellan Utilities Development Corp for the huilding of a 300 MW

Research on the Risk Management Issues of VAM Agreements in Private Equity Financing

At present,the biggest obstacle that growing enterprises may encounter in their development process is insufficient funds.Private equity financing does not only solve the capital problem of enterprises,but also provide enterprises with professional management concepts and even help growing enterprises to go public in advance.However,high returns must be accompanied by high risks.For example,private equity financing has information asymmetry risks,principal-agent risks,etc.,and these risks make it impossible to maximize the advantages of private equity financing.Therefore,in order to reduce the risks brought by financing,investment and financing parties should choose to sign gambling contracts to reduce the risk.In recent years,the use of VAM agreements has become more in China.However,according to incomplete statistics,less than 30%of VAM agreements are successful,and this result is mainly due to the insufficient depth and breadth of research on VAM agreements.Therefore,this article will comprehensively analyze the problems that need to be paid attention to when signing a gambling agreement by introducing the case of Anda Technology,and the issue of targeted risk prevention will also be discussed in this paper.

A Comparative Analysis of Owner-Contractor Agreements in the Turkish and US Construction Industry

Successful and cost-effective construction relies upon appropriate communication of the participants of the construction project. Hence, it is important to define the rights and responsibilities of the parties, and relationships among them. In this context, well-designed and complete agreement is essential and necessary for the successfully completion of a construction project within the desired time, quality and budget. In this paper, it is aimed to analyze and compare the owner-contractor agreements in the Turkish and the US construction industry. First, the importance of construction contracts and contractual elements of an agreement is determined, and then, the standard owner-contractor agreement which is used in the Turkish construction industry is analyzed and compared with the US standard owner-contractor agreement. Finally, the differences between these agreements are put forward, the lack and deficiencies of Turkish standard agreement form are determined, and appropriate suggestions are improved.

ZTE Inks Strategic Agreements with Two Leading European Telecom System Integrators

ZTE Corporation has signed strategic telecommunications software agreement with two leading providers in Europe and Latin America to optimize its offerings for target customers in

Improved quantum key agreement protocol with authentication

In order to make the quantum key agreement process immune to participant attacks, it is necessary to introduce the authentication in the communication process. A quantum key agreement protocol with identity authentication that exploits the measurement correlation of six-particle entangled states is proposed. In contrast to some recently proposed quantum key agreement protocols with authentication, this protocol requires neither a semi-trusted third party nor additional private keys in the authentication process. The entire process of authentication and key agreement can be achieved using only n six-particle entangled states, which saves communication costs and reduces the complexity of the authentication process.Finally, security analysis shows that this scheme is resistant to some important attacks.

Efficient Certificateless Authenticated Key Agreement for Blockchain-Enabled Internet of Medical Things

Internet of Medical Things(IoMT)plays an essential role in collecting and managing personal medical data.In recent years,blockchain technology has put power in traditional IoMT systems for data sharing between different medical institutions and improved the utilization of medical data.However,some problems in the information transfer process between wireless medical devices and mobile medical apps,such as information leakage and privacy disclosure.This paper first designs a cross-device key agreement model for blockchain-enabled IoMT.This model can establish a key agreement mechanism for secure medical data sharing.Meanwhile,a certificateless authenticated key agreement(KA)protocol has been proposed to strengthen the information transfer security in the cross-device key agreement model.The proposed KA protocol only requires one exchange of messages between the two parties,which can improve the protocol execution efficiency.Then,any unauthorized tampering of the transmitted signed message sent by the sender can be detected by the receiver,so this can guarantee the success of the establishment of a session key between the strange entities.The blockchain ledger can ensure that the medical data cannot be tampered with,and the certificateless mechanism can weaken the key escrow problem.Moreover,the security proof and performance analysis are given,which show that the proposed model and KA protocol are more secure and efficient than other schemes in similar literature.

A Provably Secure and PUF-Based Authentication Key Agreement Scheme for Cloud-Edge IoT

With the exponential growth of intelligent Internet of Things(IoT)applications,Cloud-Edge(CE)paradigm is emerging as a solution that facilitates resource-efficient and timely services.However,it remains an underlying issue that frequent end-edgecloud communication is over a public or adversarycontrolled channel.Additionally,with the presence of resource-constrained devices,it’s imperative to conduct the secure communication mechanism,while still guaranteeing efficiency.Physical unclonable functions(PUF)emerge as promising lightweight security primitives.Thus,we first construct a PUF-based security mechanism for vulnerable IoT devices.Further,a provably secure and PUF-based authentication key agreement scheme is proposed for establishing the secure channel in end-edge-cloud empowered IoT,without requiring pre-loaded master keys.The security of our scheme is rigorously proven through formal security analysis under the random oracle model,and security verification using AVISPA tool.The comprehensive security features are also elaborated.Moreover,the numerical results demonstrate that the proposed scheme outperforms existing related schemes in terms of computational and communication efficiency.

Analysis of Factors Affecting Loyalty of Employees of Private Higher Education Institutions in Herat,Afghanistan

This study examined factors affecting employee loyalty of Higher Education Private Institutes in Herat,Afghanistan.Present research is exploratory as well as descriptive in nature.To gain the objectives of this study,self-structure questionnaire was made and distributed to 132 employees of private higher education institutions to collect primary data.In this research,for data analysis in descriptive statistics,SPSS24 separation software and for data analysis in inferential statistics,which includes fitting of measurement model,fitting of structural model and testing of research hypotheses from Smart software PLS3.0 was used.Results show that factors affecting employee loyalty are:Compensation,Work environment,Person-job fit,Empowerment,and Leadership.

药品数据专有权国际立法溯源与中国制度安排

药品上市审批对于药品安全有效性数据的专门审查要求,造就了涉及药品数据的独特知识产权保护机制。基于药品数据获取的高昂投入及其对于药品仿制与后续创新的重要价值,美欧发达国家在世界范围内率先建立了药品数据保护机制,其逐渐成为一项国际性的法律规则。无论是美欧发达国家的立法,还是相关国际法律规则,对于药品数据的知识产权保护都呈现从商业秘密模式向专有权机制转变的立法格局。产业利益驱动无疑是其中的一个重要诱因,但归根结底是源自药品数据专有权有效兼顾原研发药企经济利益与社会公众健康权益的制度优势。鉴于此,在药品数据专有权保护的国际趋势下,我国应从本土药品产业激励创新与规范仿制的基本诉求出发,以必要的内部限制与外部监管明确药品数据专有权的法律边界,并通过药品数据动态化公示平台的设置与药品数据付费使用模式的创设,建构起与药品专利制度有机衔接的数据专有权保护机制。

培育国家忠诚与构建人类情怀:新时代爱国主义教育的双重使命

在民族国家发展与世界历史进程深度融合的时代背景下,爱国主义教育面临着回应国家发展和应对全球挑战的双重使命,彰显了本土化与全球化、国家视野与人类情怀的融合与张力。经由国家公民身份认同的教育、国家利益关切的教育,最终走向国家忠诚、民族情感的教育,是新时代爱国主义教育的根本要求;同时,促进世界视野和人类共同价值的培育,推动全球危机应对、人类共同繁荣视域下的人类情怀的发展,也是新时代爱国主义教育的重要主题。基于此,新时代爱国主义教育应坚持培育国家忠诚与构建人类情怀的目标导向,开展以社会主义核心价值观和人类共同价值为核心的价值内容创新,推进情智交融的爱国主义教学,探索知行合一的爱国主义实践,从而更好地培养兼具国家忠诚与人类情怀的时代新人。

公司法上信义义务的体系构成——兼评新《公司法》相关规定

信义义务起源于信托法上的受托人义务,在普通法系衡平法传统影响下,其在英美等国的适用早就超越了信托法范畴,成为公司法领域通用的原则。无论是从“委托—代理”视角,还是信托关系视角来看,公司法制度引入信义义务理论都有必要。董、监、高之所以对公司负有信义义务,是因为他们在公司担任特定职务,与公司存在特定的法律关系,“公司利益至上”是其信义义务的内核。新《公司法》构建了较为完整的信义义务规则体系。在控股股东与实际控制人实际履行董、监、高职能的情况下,他们的行为后果对于公司利益的影响与董、监、高并无差异,理应对公司负信义义务;同时完善信义义务的例外和救济条款,增加了对全资子公司的“双重股东代表诉讼”制度。

5G车联网中安全高效的组播服务认证与密钥协商方案

5G车联网(5G-V2X)中,内容提供者通过以点对多的传输方式向属于特定区域的一组车辆提供服务消息。针对于车辆获取组播服务遭受的安全威胁与隐私泄露问题,该文提出一种认证和密钥协商方案用于内容提供者与车辆之间的组播服务消息传输。首先,采用无证书聚合签名技术批量验证群组内所有车辆,提高了认证请求的效率。其次,基于多项式密钥管理技术实现安全的密钥协商,使得非法用户或核心网络无法获取共享会话密钥。最后,实现了群组内车辆的动态密钥更新机制,当车辆加入或离开群组时,内容提供者只需要发送1条密钥更新消息即可更新会话密钥。基于形式化验证工具和进一步安全性分析表明,所提方案可以保证匿名性、不可链接性、前向和后向安全性以及抗共谋攻击等安全需求。与现有方案相比,计算效率提高了约34.2%。