The SIB Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics' resources: focus on curated databases

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

Global, regional, and national age-sex-specific mortality for 282 causes of death in 195 countries and territories, 1980-2017: a systematic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2017.

BACKGROUND: Global development goals increasingly rely on country-specific estimates for benchmarking a nation's progress. To meet this need, the Global Burden of Diseases, Injuries, and Risk Factors Study (GBD) 2016 estimated global, regional, national, and, for selected locations, subnational cause-specific mortality beginning in the year 1980. Here we report an update to that study, making use of newly available data and improved methods. GBD 2017 provides a comprehensive assessment of cause-specific mortality for 282 causes in 195 countries and territories from 1980 to 2017. METHODS: The causes of death database is composed of vital registration (VR), verbal autopsy (VA), registry, survey, police, and surveillance data. GBD 2017 added ten VA studies, 127 country-years of VR data, 502 cancer-registry country-years, and an additional surveillance country-year. Expansions of the GBD cause of death hierarchy resulted in 18 additional causes estimated for GBD 2017. Newly available data led to subnational estimates for five additional countries-Ethiopia, Iran, New Zealand, Norway, and Russia. Deaths assigned International Classification of Diseases (ICD) codes for non-specific, implausible, or intermediate causes of death were reassigned to underlying causes by redistribution algorithms that were incorporated into uncertainty estimation. We used statistical modelling tools developed for GBD, including the Cause of Death Ensemble model (CODEm), to generate cause fractions and cause-specific death rates for each location, year, age, and sex. Instead of using UN estimates as in previous versions, GBD 2017 independently estimated population size and fertility rate for all locations. Years of life lost (YLLs) were then calculated as the sum of each death multiplied by the standard life expectancy at each age. All rates reported here are age-standardised

Essays on Finance, the Environment, and Philanthropy

This dissertation examines environmental impacts on economic activity andfinance issues for private philanthropic foundations that might want to fund environmental efforts. The first chapter examines the effects of weather on retail activity using the lasso machine learning method to develop a flexible weather index. The second chapter presents a theoretical model showing that large investments in objectionable firms can be optimal for foundations when they yield opportunities to hedge missions. The third chapter examines tax return data for private foundations to explore intertemporal spending strategies and the tax on net investment income

Le livre et ses espaces

LA CONNAISSANCE DU LIVRE se rattache ici à la mise en jeu dialectique de termes apparemment éloignés : « livre » et « espace ». Le livre ne se réduit donc pas à son support matériel. Notre intention n’est pas non plus de délimiter tous les espaces possibles du livre qu’ils soient physique, esthétique, littéraire, métaphysique ou anthropologique. Il s’agit plutôt de proposer au lecteur un voyage à travers l’espace dans le livre - la page, le texte…, l’espace pour le livre - la bibliothèque, la collection…, l’espace hors du livre - l’œuvre d’art, l’hypertexte… Le livre utopique de Lévinas, Blanchot ou Deleuze, la poésie plastique de Mallarmé, Apollinaire ou Claudel, le récit littéraire de Kundera, Le Clézio, ou Perec, l’espace pictural de Matisse, Kandinsky ou Gris, seront autant de jalons pour mieux mesurer l’étendue de ces espaces infinis que le livre invente