Biological invasion is one of the most threatening factors for biodiversity conservation. Lacking information on alien species in certain regions of the world hampers a balanced understanding of invasion processes and efficient data exchange among stakeholders. Current knowledge gaps are in need of urgent concern. We therefore conducted a review on alien animals in Xinjiang, an unknown region o...

One of humanity's major challenges of the 21st century will be meeting future food demands on an increasingly resource constrained-planet. Global food production will have to rise by 70 percent between 2000 and 2050 to meet effective demand which poses major challenges to food production systems. Doing so without compromising environmental integrity is an even greater challenge. This study look...

Self-employment and Intergenerational Transfers: Liquidity Constraints or Family Environment? Anne Laferrère and Peter McEntee We examine the determinants of entrepreneurship using data on intergenerational transfers of wealth, education and what we call informal human capital. We are interested in the respective importance of the level of assets which relax liquidity constraints and of an entr...

This study examined the impact of Human Resource (HR) practices (selection, training, compensation, and appraisal) and participation on the financial performance of U.S. petrochemical refineries. Survey results from HR and Operations respondents indicated that appraisal and training were significantly related to workforce skills and that training and compensation were marginally related to work...

Regulatory agencies and citizens have placed great emphasis on sustainability of natural resources. Individuals involved in animal husbandry should understand the basic components associated with air and water quality issues. An increase in regulations governing land, air, and water resources increases the need for educators, researchers, and producers to realize impacts of current and potentia...

We propose a range of deep lexical acquisition methods which make use of morphological, syntactic and ontological language resources to model word similarity and bootstrap from a seed lexicon. The different methods are deployed in learning lexical items for a precision grammar, and shown to each have strengths and weaknesses over different word classes. A particular focus of this paper is the r...

The manual curation of the information in biomedical resources is an expensive task. This article argues the value of this approach in comparison with other apparently less costly options, such as automated annotation or text-mining, then discusses ways in which databases can make cost savings by sharing infrastructure and tool development. Sharing curation effort is a model already being adopt...

The rapidly increasing amount of information on three-dimensional (3D) structures of biological macro-molecules has still an insufficient impact on genome analysis, functional genomics and proteomics as well as on many other fields in biomedicine including disease-related research. There are, however, attempts to make structural data more easily accessible to the bench biologist. As members of ...