Drivers of Change or Cut-Throat Competitors? Challenging Cultures of Innovation of Chinese and Nigerian Migrant Entrepreneurs in West Africa

L'afflux remarquable des entrepreneurs migrants chinois dans différents pays d'Afrique occidentale au cours des dernières années a été heurtée à une résistance de plus en plus farouche par des entrepreneurs locaux établis. Que le premiers ont un avantage concurrentiel sur ce dernier en raison de traits socio-culturels distinctifs, ou si l'efficacité supposée chinoise est juste une caractéristique de toutes les diasporas mercantiles, est ouvert à la question. Cette étude exploratoire des migrants entrepreneuriales chinois et nigérians au Ghana et au Bénin tente de répondre à cette question. Apparemment, les forces culturels des agents du changement migrants ne sont pas limités à des systèmes de valeurs héritées ou religions, comme une éthique protestante ou le confucianisme, mais ils sont adaptés en permanence et ont inventé de nouveau par des réseaux transnationaux de la migration dans un monde globalisé. Il n'y a aucune preuve d'une prétendue supériorité de la culture d’innovation chinois par rapport aux cultures d’innovation africains des migrants entrepreneuriales. Plutôt, il existe une capacité accrue d'innovation d'une diaspora mercantile en général vis à vis des entrepreneurs locaux, indépendamment de l'origine de la culture nationale dans lequel il est intégré. En outre, la rivalité des entrepreneurs migrants chinois et nigérians dans les marchés africains ne conduit pas nécessairement à la concurrence coupe-gorge souvent suspectée sous l'impact de la mondialisation. Souvent, les deux groupes agissent plutôt complémentaires. Cela contribue, sous certaines conditions, même à la réduction de la pauvreté dans le pays d'accueil

The Resource Curse and Rentier States in the Caspian Region : A Need for Context Analysis

Although much attention is paid to the Caspian region with regard to energy issues, the domestic consequences of the region’s resource production have so far constituted a neglected field of research. A systematic survey of the latest research trends in the economic and political causalities of the resource curse and of rentier states reveals that there is a need for context analysis. In reference to this, the paper traces any shortcomings and promising approaches in the existent body of literature on the Caspian region. Following on from this, the paper then proposes a new approach; specifically, one in which any differences and similarities in the context conditions are captured. This enables a more precise exploration of the exact ways in which they form contemporary post-Soviet Caspian rentier states.Obwohl der Region am Kaspischen Meer im Zuge von Energiediskursen große Aufmerksamkeit zuteil wird, stellen die innerstaatlichen Folgen der Ressourcenproduktion in der Region ein bislang vernachlässigtes Forschungsfeld dar. Ein systematischer Überblick über die jüngsten Forschungstrends zu wirtschaftlichen und politischen Kausalzusammenhängen des Ressourcenfluchs und zu Rentierstaaten offenbart die Notwendigkeit von Kontextanalysen. Hierauf Bezug nehmend, analysiert der Aufsatz sowohl die Mängel als auch viel versprechende Ansätze in der betreffenden Literatur zur Region am Kaspischen Meer. Der Aufsatz stellt letztendlich einen neuen Ansatz vor, der Unterschiede und Gemeinsamkeiten in den Kontextbedingungen erfasst, um zu erforschen, wie diese die gegenwärtigen post-sowjetischen Rentierstaaten in der Region am Kaspischen Meer tatsächlich prägen

Robust estimation of bacterial cell count from optical density

Optical density (OD) is widely used to estimate the density of cells in liquid culture, but cannot be compared between instruments without a standardized calibration protocol and is challenging to relate to actual cell count. We address this with an interlaboratory study comparing three simple, low-cost, and highly accessible OD calibration protocols across 244 laboratories, applied to eight strains of constitutive GFP-expressing E. coli. Based on our results, we recommend calibrating OD to estimated cell count using serial dilution of silica microspheres, which produces highly precise calibration (95.5% of residuals <1.2-fold), is easily assessed for quality control, also assesses instrument effective linear range, and can be combined with fluorescence calibration to obtain units of Molecules of Equivalent Fluorescein (MEFL) per cell, allowing direct comparison and data fusion with flow cytometry measurements: in our study, fluorescence per cell measurements showed only a 1.07-fold mean difference between plate reader and flow cytometry data

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe

Finishing the euchromatic sequence of the human genome

The sequence of the human genome encodes the genetic instructions for human physiology, as well as rich information about human evolution. In 2001, the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium reported a draft sequence of the euchromatic portion of the human genome. Since then, the international collaboration has worked to convert this draft into a genome sequence with high accuracy and nearly complete coverage. Here, we report the result of this finishing process. The current genome sequence (Build 35) contains 2.85 billion nucleotides interrupted by only 341 gaps. It covers ∼99% of the euchromatic genome and is accurate to an error rate of ∼1 event per 100,000 bases. Many of the remaining euchromatic gaps are associated with segmental duplications and will require focused work with new methods. The near-complete sequence, the first for a vertebrate, greatly improves the precision of biological analyses of the human genome including studies of gene number, birth and death. Notably, the human enome seems to encode only 20,000-25,000 protein-coding genes. The genome sequence reported here should serve as a firm foundation for biomedical research in the decades ahead