Teilhard de Chardin on Insects in "The Phenomenon of Man"

The year 2009 saw the publication of a curious work bearing the title The Secret Life of Insects: An Entomological Alphabet (New Brunswick and London: Transaction Publishers). The author, Peter Milward (b. 1925), excels in having combined together humour and profundity. The title is indeed curious and attention-catching, although it can also be misleading, for in fact the book contains a wide series of philosophical and theological reflections. Milward himself confesses in the book’s prologue: “I make no claim to entomological expertise. That is to say, I confess my ignorance of insects … I know nothing about insects, except what everybody knows.”As Milward proceeds to explain, his original and insightful reflections about insects “go on to discourse about the philosophy and the theology of the universe, ending (of course) with God”.peer-reviewe

SPARQL Query Recommendations by Example

In this demo paper, a SPARQL Query Recommendation Tool (called SQUIRE) based on query reformulation is presented. Based on three steps, Generalization, Specialization and Evaluation, SQUIRE implements the logic of reformulating a SPARQL query that is satisfiable w.r.t a source RDF dataset, into others that are satisfiable w.r.t a target RDF dataset. In contrast with existing approaches, SQUIRE aims at rec- ommending queries whose reformulations: i) reflect as much as possible the same intended meaning, structure, type of results and result size as the original query and ii) do not require to have a mapping between the two datasets. Based on a set of criteria to measure the similarity between the initial query and the recommended ones, SQUIRE demonstrates the feasibility of the underlying query reformulation process, ranks appropriately the recommended queries, and offers a valuable support for query recommendations over an unknown and unmapped target RDF dataset, not only assisting the user in learning the data model and content of an RDF dataset, but also supporting its use without requiring the user to have intrinsic knowledge of the data

THE FAIR VALUE – REPRESENTATION OF THE MARKET VALUE IN ACCOUNTING. TRENDS AND PERSPECTIVES IN ROMANIAN ACCOUNTING PRACTICE

The market value, as a method of measuring the right value, also provides the highest objectivity due to the fact that it is based on information exterior to the entity, impossible to influence in any way. For the fair value of a product to be equivalent to the market value, a prerequisite needs to be followed: the market must be perfect, namely organized and active. In this case, the evaluation’s type is market to market. In certain fields, the active’s market existence is clearly difficult (for instance for the derived products or specialized, unique assets etc). In such situations – imperfect market – we will valorize that specific good by calculating its fair value by using an evaluation technique, an alternative technique in the absence of a price set by the market. There are two possible approaches: the first one belongs to the analogy method; the second approach belongs to valuing an asset using the modeling technique also known as market to model. The method of determining the value of an asset by analogy or similarity is theoretically valid, but in practice this is difficult, since the notion of similar characteristics is often difficult to establish and prove. This article proposes a valuation of the market value concept based on Romanian realities - legal, accounting practices in that area, and taking into account the existing fiscal limitations.market value, fair value, comparison approach, the analogy method, identical or similar assets sales, the modeling technique Romania

A-Lister: a tool for analysis of differentially expressed omics entities across multiple pairwise comparisons.

BackgroundResearchers commonly analyze lists of differentially expressed entities (DEEs), such as differentially expressed genes (DEGs), differentially expressed proteins (DEPs), and differentially methylated positions/regions (DMPs/DMRs), across multiple pairwise comparisons. Large biological studies can involve multiple conditions, tissues, and timepoints that result in dozens of pairwise comparisons. Manually filtering and comparing lists of DEEs across multiple pairwise comparisons, typically done by writing custom code, is a cumbersome task that can be streamlined and standardized.ResultsA-Lister is a lightweight command line and graphical user interface tool written in Python. It can be executed in a differential expression mode or generic name list mode. In differential expression mode, A-Lister accepts as input delimited text files that are output by differential expression tools such as DESeq2, edgeR, Cuffdiff, and limma. To allow for the most flexibility in input ID types, to avoid database installation requirements, and to allow for secure offline use, A-Lister does not validate or impose restrictions on entity ID names. Users can specify thresholds to filter the input file(s) by column(s) such as p-value, q-value, and fold change. Additionally, users can filter the pairwise comparisons within the input files by fold change direction (sign). Queries composed of intersection, fuzzy intersection, difference, and union set operations can also be performed on any number of pairwise comparisons. Thus, the user can filter and compare any number of pairwise comparisons within a single A-Lister differential expression command. In generic name list mode, A-Lister accepts delimited text files containing lists of names as input. Queries composed of intersection, fuzzy intersection, difference, and union set operations can then be performed across these lists of names.ConclusionsA-Lister is a flexible tool that enables the user to rapidly narrow down large lists of DEEs to a small number of most significant entities. These entities can then be further analyzed using visualization, pathway analysis, and other bioinformatics tools