The SIB Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics (www. isb-sib.ch) provides world-class bioinformatics databases, software tools, services and training to the international life science community in academia and industry. These solutions allow life scientists to turn the exponentially growing amount of data into knowledge. Here, we provide an overview of SIB’s resources and competence areas, with a strong focus on curated databases and SIB’s most popular and widely used resources. In particular, SIB’s Bioinformatics resource portal ExPASy features over 150 resources, including UniProtKB/Swiss-Prot, ENZYME, PROSITE, neXtProt, STRING, UniCarbKB, SugarBindDB, SwissRegulon, EPD, arrayMap, Bgee, SWISS-MODEL Repository, OMA, OrthoDB and other databases, which are briefly described in this article.
This paper analyzes the drivers of carbon taxes acceptability with survey data and a randomized labeling treatment. Based on a sample of more than 300 individuals, it assesses the effect on acceptability of specific policy designs and individuals’ perceptions of carbon taxes advantages and disadvantages. We find that the lack of perception of primary and ancillary benefits is one of the main barriers to the acceptability of carbon taxes. In addition, policy design matters for acceptability and in particular earmarking fiscal revenues for environmental purposes can lead to larger support. We also find an effect of labeling, comparing the wording ‘‘climate contribution’’ with ‘‘carbon tax’’. We argue that proper policy design coupled with effective communication on the effects of carbon taxes may lead to a substantial improvement in acceptability
Publicly provided long-term care (LTC) insurance with means-tested benefits is suspected to crowd out either private LTC insurance (Brown and Finkelstein 2008. The Interaction of Public and Private Insurance: Medicaid and the Long-Term Care Insurance Market. American Economic Review 98(3):1083–102), private saving (Gruber and Yelowitz 1999. Public Health Insurance and Private Saving. Journal of Political Economy 107(6):1249–74; Sloan and Norton 1997. Adverse Selection, Bequests, Crowding Out, and Private Demand for Insurance: Evidence from the Long-term Care Insurance Market. Journal of Risk and Uncertainty 15:201–19), or informal care (Pauly 1990. The Rational Non-purchase of Long-term Care Insurance. Journal of Political Economy 95:153–68; Zweifel and Strüwe 1998. Long-term Care Insurance in a Two-generation Model. Journal of Risk and Insurance 65(1):13–32). This contribution predicts crowding-out effects for both private LTC insurance and informal care on the one hand and private saving and informal care on the other. These effects result from the interaction of a parent who decides about private LTC insurance before retirement and the amount of saving in retirement and a caregiver who decides about effort devoted to informal care. Some of the predictions are tested using a recent survey from China.
Dans cet article, nous nous intéressons à l’assimilation des filles et garçons de nationalité étrangère dans le système scolaire suisse, en nous concentrant sur la transition en fin de scolarité obligatoire. Nous examinons empiriquement les effets de la vague migratoire, de l’âge d’arrivée et de la cohorte sur les différences de genre, en exploitant une base de données administrative du canton de Genève couvrant quinze cohortes d’élèves (1993-2007). Nos résultats montrent des écarts importants entre les différents sous-groupes de la population scolaire, indépendamment du statut socioéconomique des parents. En particulier, plus les enfants migrants arrivent tôt au sein du système scolaire, plus leur comportement de genre au moment de la transition dépend de leur appartenance ethnique ; un résultat compatible avec l’idée d’une assimilation caractérisée par une acculturation sélective.
Biomedical professionals have access to a huge amount of literature, but when they use a search engine, they often have to deal with too many documents to efficiently find the appropriate information in a reasonable time. In this perspective, question-answering (QA) engines are designed to display answers, which were automatically extracted from the retrieved documents. Standard QA engines in literature process a user question, then retrieve relevant documents and finally extract some possible answers out of these documents using various named-entity recognition processes. In our study, we try to answer complex genomics questions, which can be adequately answered only using Gene Ontology (GO) concepts. Such complex answers cannot be found using state-of-the-art dictionary- and redundancy-based QA engines. We compare the effectiveness of two dictionary-based classifiers for extracting correct GO answers from a large set of 100 retrieved abstracts per question. In the same way, we also investigate the power of GOCat, a GO supervised classifier. GOCat exploits the GOA database to propose GO concepts that were annotated by curators for similar abstracts. This approach is called deep QA, as it adds an original classification step, and exploits curated biological data to infer answers, which are not explicitly mentioned in the retrieved documents. We show that for complex answers such as protein functional descriptions, the redundancy phenomenon has a limited effect. Similarly usual dictionary-based approaches are relatively ineffective. In contrast, we demonstrate how existing curated data, beyond information extraction, can be exploited by a supervised classifier, such as GOCat, to massively improve both the quantity and the quality of the answers with a +100% improvement for both recall and precision.
The Data Mining OPtimization Ontology (DMOP) has been developed to support informed decision-making at various choice points of the data mining process. The ontology can be used by data miners and deployed in ontology-driven information systems. The primary purpose for which DMOP has been developed is the automation of algorithm and model selection through semantic meta-mining that makes use of an ontology-based meta-analysis of complete data mining processes in view of extracting patterns associated with mining performance. To this end, DMOP contains detailed descriptions of data mining tasks (e.g., learning, feature selection), data, algorithms, hypotheses such as mined models or patterns, and workflows. A development methodology was used for DMOP, including items such as competency questions and foundational ontology reuse. Several non-trivial modeling problems were encountered and due to the complexity of the data mining details, the ontology requires the use of the OWL 2 DL profile. DMOP was successfully evaluated for semantic meta-mining and used in constructing the Intelligent Discovery Assistant, deployed at the popular data mining environment RapidMiner
Librarians are expected to be expert searchers, and developing information literacy skills to navigate the vast world of information is a focus of most library and information science (LIS) programs. It is important to understand the information literacy and behaviors of LIS students to see if they are employing the skills they will need to assist and educate their future patrons, yet there is relatively little research into the information literacy and behaviors of librarians and library students. Using a survey on information behaviors, this study addresses this gap in the literature by examining how LIS students in 18 countries search for, evaluate, and use information in various contexts, and on whom they rely for help. The results of this study demonstrate library science students' information literacy skills within an international context. Faculty in LIS programs will be interested to see how their students approach information problems, and might use this understanding to develop or strengthen courses and inform curricular decisions
Purpose. This paper aims to investigate management auditing, a thorough examination of an organization and the management in place, through an empirical research to gather data about how management audits are perceived and implemented among Geneva’s (Switzerland) business community. The board of directors is in charge of a corporation’s overall supervision. The internal auditing function works under the aegis of the board to ensure that the directors will properly execute their responsibilities as defined by corporate governance rules. Management auditing could thus be used to improve corporation performance. However, management audits are not commonly used or referred to as a tool to address corporate governance. Findings enable the authors to both explain why management audits are not commonly used or referred to as a tool to address corporate governance and generate related research hypotheses. Design/methodology/approach. In this paper, the authors rely on an ethnographic study aimed at exploring perceptions of management audits in service companies from the Geneva region. This study is based on transcripts from 85 semi-directed interviews, conducted over a three-year period, of professionals with managerial and auditing backgrounds. The economic context during these three years was consistently characterized by the Swiss and international financial crises, ensuring that the findings remain comparable over this time period. Findings This paper identified three main factors that influence the integration of management audits into corporate practices: the degree of acceptance of the tools and requirements of management audits, the national culture and values embodied in the practice and the degree of corporate governance maturity. This paper presents the findings in the form of hypotheses that can be tested on any adoption of good corporate governance practices – not on management audits alone. Research limitations/implications. Notwithstanding the limitations due to its nature and extent, this study’s main limitation is its lack of validation of the hypotheses. In further research, the authors intend to use a quantitative survey to validate the research hypotheses and make statistical inferences. Originality/value This paper contributes to the literature because it is, to the authors’ knowledge, the first study to empirically examine the significant link between management audits and corporate governance. The findings could be interesting for an international audience because they indicate possible action points that boards of directors can leverage to carry out management audits. The findings also bridge a gap between the literature on management audits and the expanding role of the internal audit function. This study also examines the way companies – in the Swiss context – understand, perceive and may be ready to apply management audits as a good corporate governance practice.
Cet article analyse les perceptions, comportements et rapports à la forêt de la population du canton de Genève (Suisse), révélés par un sondage effectué en hiver 2014. On constate que les Genevois utilisent la forêt de façon moins intensive que la population des autres cantons suisses et valorisent moins l’aspect économique de la forêt. La majorité des répondants privilégient la conservation et la biodiversité plutôt que la construction de logements ou une augmentation de la production de bois. L’évaluation monétaire du service récréatif de la forêt grâce à la méthode du coût du trajet indique que la valeur d’usage de la forêt genevoise se monte à CHF 656.– en moyenne par personne et an (médiane à CHF 175.–), respectivement à CHF 313.– par personne et an en moyenne (médiane à CHF 60.–) sans inclure le coût d’opportunité du temps passé sur place. La disponibilité à payer pour le programme de la Politique forestière 2020 impliquant une augmentation de la surface des réserves forestières à 10% est évaluée à CHF 283.– par an grâce à la méthode d’évaluation contingente.
The article reports on a study of the views and actions of nearly a hundred scholars – mostly academic researchers from four European countries and four disciplines – in regard to scholarly reputation in the Science 2.0 age. It specifically looks at the role that 'emerging' reputational mechanisms and platforms are playing in building, maintaining, and showcasing scholarly reputation in the digital age. Popular examples of such platforms are ResearchGate and Academia. edu. Data were obtained through one-to-one interviews and focus groups, supported by desk research. The main findings were: (a) it is early days and uptake is light and patchy with platforms largely used for non-reputational purposes, such as sharing documents; (b) most users were passive and did not fully engage with the social aspects of the platforms; (c) the reputational focus was very much on just one scholarly activity (research), on just two outputs of that activity (publications and conferences) and one measurement of that activity (citations), but there are the stirrings of change; (d) young researchers are set to profit most from the emerging platforms.
