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Beta distribution has been widely used in many scientific areas. It is applied very often and is known as a probability distribution with wide application in the management of various kinds of problems, such as in survival analysis. In recent years, development has focused on new probabilistic techniques for building new distributions, (e.g., Jones’ Generalized Beta Distribution, 2004). This study will investigate the statistical properties of the proposed distribution using six parameters; this is called the Beta Gompertz Generalized Makeham distribution. It includes verifying the probability density function, the cumulative density function, and the hazard function. © 2020, Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

The trade in counterfeit goods is growing. Recent EU studies on Fast Moving Consumer Goods indicate that 6.5% of all sports(wear) goods, 7.8% of cosmetics and 12.7% of luggage/handbags sold in the EU are in some way counterfeit. The WTO has an oft-repeated estimate of 7% of all global commerce as counterfeit. The World Economic Forum goes further, suggesting that counterfeiting and piracy cost the global economy an estimated $1.77 trillion in 2015, which is nearly 10% of the global trade in merchandise. Much work and popular scrutiny has examined flows of counterfeit goods. However, there remains a general lack of information on the financing of the counterfeit trade. Drawing upon cross-disciplinary research, the book offers a unique account into the financing of the trade in counterfeit goods. Focusing on tangible goods, it addresses the ways in which capital is secured to allow counterfeiting businesses to be initiated and sustained, how entrepreneurs and customers settle payments, the costs of conducting business in the counterfeiting trade, and how profits from the business are spent and invested. The book covers the UK context, whilst also considering the distinctly transnational nature of the trade.

Ultra low frequency-ULF (1 Hz or lower), kHz and MHz electromagnetic (EM) anomalies were recorded prior to the L'Aquila catastrophic earthquake (EQ) that occurred on 6 April 2009. The detected anomalies followed this temporal scheme. (i) The MHz EM anomalies were detected on 26 March 2009 and 2 April 2009. The kHz EM anomalies were emerged on 4 April 2009. The ULF EM anomaly was appeared from 29 March 2009 up to 3 April 2009. The question effortlessly arises as to whether the observed anomalies before the L'Aquila EQ were seismogenic or not. The main goal of this work is to provide some insight into this issue. More precisely, the main aims of this contribution are threefold: How can we recognize an EM observation as pre-seismic one? We aim, through a multidisciplinary analysis to provide some elements of a definition. How can we link an individual EM anomaly with a distinctive stage of the EQ preparation process? The present analysis is consistent with the hypothesis that the kHz EM anomalies were associated with the fracture of asperities that were distributed along the L'Aquila fault sustaining the system, while the MHz EM anomalies could be triggered by fractures in the highly disordered system that surrounded the backbone of asperities of the activated fault. How can we identify precursory symptoms in an individual EM precursor that indicate that the occurrence of the EQ is unavoidable? We clearly state that the detection of a MHz EM precursor does not mean that the occurrence of EQ is unavoidable; the abrupt emergence of kHz EM emissions indicate the fracture of asperities. The observed ULF EM anomaly supports the hypothesis of a relationship between processes produced by increasing tectonic stresses in the Earth's crust and attendant EM interactions between the crust and ionosphere. We emphasize that we attempt to specify not only whether or not a single EM anomaly is pre-seismic in itself, but mainly whether a combination of emergent ULF, MHz and kHz EM anomalies could be characterized as pre-earthquake.

We started this paper with questioning the living conditions and considerations of undocumented unaccompanied minor asylum seekers living in the Netherlands. These undocumented youngsters are excluded from formal employment as well as from the provisions of the welfare state. By far the largest group of the undocumented (former) unaccompanied minors has never been involved in criminal activities and only one third of our respondents work in the informal economy. The sectors in which these youngsters perform informal work vary from cleaning and construction to catering and personal services. The work is characterised by uncertain working hours. There are few hours available and the work provided is often last minute. The pay is meagre and few respondents can survive exclusively on their earnings. The undocumented (former) unaccompanied minors are mainly supported by friends and private organisations for their living and housing. It is because of this support that the youngsters are not sleeping in the streets and are able to continue their illegal stay in the Netherlands. The strong focus of the youngsters on a future lawful residence in the Netherlands causes them to fear the risk of getting arrested while working, so they settle for the limited support of private organisations and friends. The support of private organisations and the focus of the youngsters on obtaining legal residence status thus constitute a buffer against exploitation. One could argue that all too often ‘ordinary crime’ is confused with ‘organised crime’. Authorities often assume too quickly that they are dealing with organised crime which obviously should be dealt with in policies accordingly and leads to disproportionally measures. The image of ‘disappeared’ former UMAs living illegally in the Netherlands as victims of brutal and internationally organised human traffickers fits remarkably well with this fallacy. In the evaluation of the pilot scheme titled ‘protected reception for UMAs at risk’, mentioned in the introduction of this chapter, the authors concluded not only that there is no legal basis for the placement of youngsters at risk in ‘protected reception’ but also that the number of UMAs who have actually been found in a situation of exploitation and even more so, exploitaiton by ‘organised criminals’, has been limited. Our research shows, there is very little empirical evidence to substantiate the concerns of Dutch politicians and policy makers with respect to the connection between UMAs and human traffickers and exploitation in the sex industry. The image of the (former) UMAs and the international organized human traffickers poorly matches reality. For the major part, these (former) UMAs 'just' went underground and stayed illegally in the Netherlands in the hope for a legal status.

The financial crisis has shone a light on many hitherto disregarded market practices and has put pressure on regulators to show that they are policing the markets in order to contain unacceptable practices. In 2010 a prominent example arose in the area of financial market regulation, as the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the US financial market regulator, laid civil charges against Goldman Sachs, a premier investment bank. A settlement was reached involving payment of 550 million dollars – a record for the SEC but representing only a few days’ profits for the firm. The settlement is explored here from three perspectives, (i) weaknesses in the regulatory and legal systems, (ii) negotiated justice and re-integrative shaming (Braithwaite et al), (iii) elite theory (Wright Mills and contemporary re-workings). It is concluded that each explanation adds value: the settlement reflects legal weaknesses, a tendency for justice to be negotiated, and elites that were badly rattled by the crises and desired to return to ‘normal’. [This abstract does not appear in the book.]

Ultra low frequency-ULF (1 Hz or lower), kHz and MHz electromagnetic (EM) anomalies were recorded prior to the L'Aquila catastrophic earthquake (EQ) that occurred on 6 April 2009. The detected anomalies followed this temporal scheme. (i) The MHz EM anomalies were detected on 26 March 2009 and 2 April 2009. The kHz EM anomalies were emerged on 4 April 2009. The ULF EM anomaly was appeared from 29 March 2009 up to 3 April 2009. The question effortlessly arises as to whether the observed anomalies before the L'Aquila EQ were seismogenic or not. The main goal of this work is to provide some insight into this issue. More precisely, the main aims of this contribution are threefold: How can we recognize an EM observation as pre-seismic one? We aim, through a multidisciplinary analysis to provide some elements of a definition. How can we link an individual EM anomaly with a distinctive stage of the EQ preparation process? The present analysis is consistent with the hypothesis that the kHz EM anomalies were associated with the fracture of asperities that were distributed along the L'Aquila fault sustaining the system, while the MHz EM anomalies could be triggered by fractures in the highly disordered system that surrounded the backbone of asperities of the activated fault. How can we identify precursory symptoms in an individual EM precursor that indicate that the occurrence of the EQ is unavoidable? We clearly state that the detection of a MHz EM precursor does not mean that the occurrence of EQ is unavoidable; the abrupt emergence of kHz EM emissions indicate the fracture of asperities. The observed ULF EM anomaly supports the hypothesis of a relationship between processes produced by increasing tectonic stresses in the Earth's crust and attendant EM interactions between the crust and ionosphere. We emphasize that we attempt to specify not only whether or not a single EM anomaly is pre-seismic in itself, but mainly whether a combination of emergent ULF, MHz and kHz EM anomalies could be characterized as pre-earthquake.

Earthquakes (EQs) are large-scale fracture phenomena in the Earth's heterogeneous crust. Fracture-induced physical fields allow a real-time monitoring of damage evolution in materials during mechanical loading. Electromagnetic (EM) emissions in a wide frequency spectrum ranging from kHz to MHz are produced by opening cracks, this can be considered as the so-called precursors of general fracture. We emphasize that the MHz radiation appears earlier than the kHz on both laboratory and geophysical scales. An important challenge in this field of research is to distinguish characteristic epochs in the evolution of precursory EM activity and identify them with the equivalent last stages in the EQ preparation process. Recently, we proposed the following two-stage model. (i) The first epoch, which includes the initial emergent MHz EM emission, is thought to be due to the fracture of a highly heterogeneous system that surrounds a family of large high-strength asperities distributed along the activated fault sustaining the system. (ii) The second epoch, which includes the emergent strong impulsive kHz EM radiation, is due to the fracture of the asperities themselves. A catastrophic EQ of magnitude Mw=6.3 occurred on 6 April, 2009 (06/04/09) in central Italy. The majority of the damage occurred in the city of L'Aquila. Clear kHz-MHz EM anomalies had been detected prior to the L'Aquila EQ. Here, we investigate the seismogenic origin of the MHz part of the anomalies. The analysis, which is in terms of intermittent dynamics of critical fluctuations, reveals that the candidate EM precursor (i) can be described as analogous to a thermal continuous phase transition and (ii) has anti-persistent behavior. These features suggest that this candidate precursor was triggered by microfractures in the highly disordered system that surrounded the backbone of asperities of the activated fault. A criterion for underlying strong critical behavior is introduced. In this field of research, reproducibility of results is desirable; and is best done by analyzing a number of precursory MHz EM emissions. We refer to previous studies of precursory MHz EM activities associated with nine significant EQs that have occurred in Greece in recent years. We conclude that all the MHz EM precursors studied, including the present one, can be described as analogous to a continuous second-order phase transition having strong criticality and anti-persistent behavior. © 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

112 σ.

Ultra low frequency, kHz and MHz electromagnetic (EM) anomalies were recorded prior to the L'Aquila catastrophic earthquake that occurred on 6 April 2009. The main aims of this paper are threefold: (i) suggest a procedure for the designation of detected EM anomalies as seismogenic ones. We do not expect to be able to provide a succinct and solid definition of a pre-seismic EM emission. Instead, we aim, through a multidisciplinary analysis, to provide the elements of a definition. (ii) Link the detected MHz and kHz EM anomalies with equivalent last stages of the earthquake preparation process. (iii) Put forward physically meaningful arguments for quantifying the time to global failure and the identification of distinguishing features beyond which the evolution towards global failure becomes irreversible. We emphasize that we try to specify not only whether a single EM anomaly is pre-seismic in itself, but also whether a combination of kHz, MHz, and ULF EM anomalies can be characterized as pre-seismic. The entire procedure unfolds in two consecutive parts. Here in Part 1 we focus on the detected kHz EM anomaly, which play a crucial role in our approach to these challenges. We try to discriminate clearly this anomaly from background noise. For this purpose, we analyze the data successively in terms of various concepts of entropy and information theory including, Shannon /-block entropy, conditional entropy, entropy of the source, Kolmogorov-Sinai entropy,T-entropy, approximate entropy, fractal spectral analysis, R/S analysis and detrended fluctuation analysis. We argue that this analysis reliably distinguishes the candidate kHz EM precursor from the noise: the launch of anomalies from the normal state is combined by a simultaneous appearance of a significantly higher level of organization, and persistency. This finding indicates that the process in which the anomalies are rooted is governed by a positive feedback mechanism. This mechanism induces a non-equilibrium process, i.e., a catastrophic event. This conclusion is supported by the fact that the two crucial signatures included in the kHz EM precursor are also hidden in other quite different, complex catastrophic events as predicted by the theory of complex systems. However, our view is that such an analysis by itself cannot establish a kHz EM anomaly as a precursor. It likely offers necessary but not sufficient criteria in order to recognize an anomaly as pre-seismic. In Part 2 we aim to provide sufficient criteria: the fracture process is characterized by fundamental universally valid scaling relationships which should be reflected in a real fracto-electromagnetic activity. Moreover, we aim to answer the following two key questions: (i) How can we link an individual EM precursor with a distinctive stage of the EQ preparation process; and (ii) How can we identify precursory symptoms in EM observations that indicate that the occurrence of the EQ is unavoidable.

Many aspects of earthquake generation still escape our full understanding. Observations of electromagnetic emissions preceding significant earthquakes provide one of the few cases of premonitory events that are possibly related to a subsequent earthquake. Understanding the factors that control electromagnetic precursors generation seems to be important for determining how significant earthquakes nucleate. Here we report the results of a comprehensive study of the appearance of individual patterns in candidate electromagnetic precursors possibly indicating the breaking of backbone of large and strong asperities that sustain the activated fault. The search of precursory patterns is mainly based on well documented scaling properties of fault surface topology. More precisely, we argue that the candidate electromagnetic precursors might be originated during the slipping of two rough and rigid fractional-Brownian-motion-type profiles one over the other, with a roughness which is consistent with field and laboratory studies. The results also imply that the activation of a single earthquake (fault) is a reduced self-affine image of the whole regional seismicity and a magnified self-affine image of the laboratory seismicity.

An important question in geophysics is whether earthquakes (EQs) can be anticipated prior to their occurrence. Pre-seismic electromagnetic (EM) emissions provide a promising window through which the dynamics of EQ preparation can be investigated. However, the existence of precursory features in pre-seismic EM emissions is still debatable: in principle, it is difficult to prove associations between events separated in time, such as EQs and their EM precursors. The scope of this paper is the investigation of the pre-seismic EM activity in terms of complexity. A basic reason for our interest in complexity is the striking similarity in behavior close to irreversible phase transitions among systems that are otherwise quite different in nature. Interestingly, theoretical studies (Hopfield, 1994; Herz and Hopfield 1995; Rundle et al., 1995; Corral et al., 1997) suggest that the EQ dynamics at the final stage and neural seizure dynamics should have many similar features and can be analyzed within similar mathematical frameworks. Motivated by this hypothesis, we evaluate the capability of linear and non-linear techniques to extract common features from brain electrical activities and pre-seismic EM emissions predictive of epileptic seizures and EQs respectively. The results suggest that a unified theory may exist for the ways in which firing neurons and opening cracks organize themselves to produce a large crisis, while the preparation of an epileptic shock or a large EQ can be studied in terms of "Intermittent Criticality".

Clear VLF electromagnetic (EM) anomalies were detected prior to the Athens earthquake (EQ). We attempt to establish the hypothesis that these emissions were launched from the pre-focal area during micro-fracturing process. The spectral analysis in terms of fractal dynamics reveals that distinquished alterations in the associated scaling parameters emerge as the EQ is approached. These alterations suggests that the evolution of the Earth's crust towards the ‘ critical point‘ takes place not only in the seismological sense but also in the pre-fracture EM sense. VAN-signals and space-time TIR-signals were also detected prior to the Athens EQ. These anomalies, as well as the fault modeling of the Athens EQ obtained by interferometric combinations of ERS2 SAR images bring further support for the confidence in the reliability of our conclusions. © 2005, The Seismological Society of Japan, Society of Geomagnetism and Earth, Planetary and Space Sciences, The Volcanological Society of Japan, The Geodetic Society of Japan, The Japanese Society for Planetary Sciences. All rights reserved.

Electromagnetic anomalies (EMA) covering a wide range of frequencies from ULF, VLF up to VHF have been observed before recent destructive earthquakes in continental Greece. We show that the features of these signals are possibly correlated with the fault model characteristics of the associated earthquake and with the degree of geotectonic heterogeneity within the focal zone. The time evolution of these electromagnetic sequences reveals striking similarities to that observed in laboratory acoustic and electromagnetic emissions during different stages of failure preparation process in rocks. If we consider that the same dynamics governs the large-scale earthquakes and the microscopic scale sample rheological structure, the results of this analysis suggest that the recorded EMA might reflect the nucleation phase of the associated impending earthquake. We focus on the rise of the statistical view of earthquakes. We find electromagnetic fingerprints of an underlying critical mechanism. Finally, we conclude that it is useful to combine ULF and VLF-VHF field measurements in an attempt to enhance the understanding of the physics behind these observations and thus to improve the quality of earthquake prediction. Further, the identification of an EMA as a seismogenic one supports the characterization of a sequence of shocks as foreshocks at the time they occur, further helping the earthquake prediction effort. © European Geosciences Union 2003.

Strong electromagnetic (EM) anomalies have been detected, from MHz to kHz, prior to the three destructive earthquakes occurred during 1995-1999 in Greece. The observed sequence of EM anomalies before the Kozani-Grevena earthquake (K-G) of Ms = 6.6 on May 13, 1995 showed some important characteristics: (i) an increasing electromagnetic emission rate; (ii) an emergence of lower kHz frequencies with large amplitudes at the tail of the MHz electromagnetic anomaly; (iii) an electromagnetic quiescence approximately a few hours before the earthquake and (iv) a total absence of EM anomalies during the aftershock period. All these features are compatible with those reported by other authors. This sequence of the field observed EM signals revealed, in terms of emission pattern, similarities to the laboratory acoustic (AE) emissions during different stages of failure preparation process in rocks. Copyright 2002 by the American Geophysical Union.

Two electromagnetic (EM) anomalies have been detected in the VLF frequency band before the Athens earthquake (EQ) (Mw = 5.9, Sept. 7, 1999) with the following characteristics: (i) The first and second anomaly lasted for 12 and 17 hours respectively with a cessation of 12 hours; (ii) The second anomaly ceased at about 9 hours before the EQ; (iii) The larger anomaly, the second one, contains approximately 80% of the total EM energy received; (iv) No EM disturbance has been recorded in the VHF frequency band unlike with other cases, e.g., the Kozani Grevena and Egion-Eratini earthquakes. The fault modeling of the Athens EQ, based on information obtained by radar interferometry, predicts two faults. The main fault segment is responsible for 80% of the total energy released, while the secondary fault segment for the remaining 20%. Moreover, a recent seismic data analysis supports the hypothesis that a two-event solution for the Athens EQ, is more likely than a single event solution. In addition, the absence of surface rupture explains the absence of EM detection in the VHF frequency band. The present analysis reveals that the properties of the preseismic electromagnetic anomalies might be considered as signatures of a pending earthquake.

Electromagnetic (EM) anomalies were detected in a nide frequency band prior to the two strongest earthquakes that occurred in Greece during 1995, i.e., at Kozani-Grevena and Egio-Eratini areas. The analysis of these se EM anomalies indicates that these EM anomalies should be pre-seismic ones. Two basic characteristics emerged: (i) The lead time of each disturbance was systematically smaller in the case of Kozani-Grevena earthquake than that of that Egio-Eratini earthquake. (ii) An almost simultaneous cessation of the EM anomalies, although they had different onset times and were detected in a wide frequency range. As for the seismic activity that occurred in Greece during the last year, pre-seismic EM anomalies were detected before (i) the September 7, 1999, Athens eearthquake and (ii) other smaller EQs. The possibility to predict, the parameters of an impending EQ from the EM anomalies is also investigated.