Reputation and Ownership of Public Goods

This paper analyzes the effect of reputation on ownership of public goods in the Besley and Ghatak (2001) model. We show that in the dynamic setup the optimal ownership depends not only on the relative valuations for the public good but also on technology (elasticity of investment). We also show that joint ownership of public good can be optimal in both the static and repeated game but it emerges for a different parameter range. Our results are applied to the case of return of cultural goods to their country of origin.public goods, property rights, reputation, joint ownership, cultural goods

Ενεργειακός και περιβαλλοντικός σχεδιασμός για την αξιοβίωτη ανάπτυξη της Νισύρου

Εθνικό Μετσόβιο Πολυτεχνείο--Μεταπτυχιακή Εργασία. Διεπιστημονικό-Διατμηματικό Πρόγραμμα Μεταπτυχιακών Σπουδών (Δ.Π.Μ.Σ.) “Περιβάλλον και Ανάπτυξη

Web-based Named Entity Recognition and Data Integration to Accelerate Molecular Biology Research

Finding information about a biological entity is a step tightly bound to molecular biology research. Despite ongoing efforts, this task is both tedious and time consuming, and tends to become Sisyphean as the number of entities increases. Our aim is to assist researchers by providing them with summary information about biological entities while they are browsing the web, as well as with simplified programmatic access to biological data. To materialise this aim we employ emerging web technologies offering novel web-browsing experiences and new ways of software communication Reflect is a tool that couples biological named entity recognition with informative summaries, and can be applied to any web page, during web browsing. Invoked either via its browser extensions or via its web page, Reflect highlights gene, protein and chemical molecule names in a web page, and, dynamically, attaches to them summary information. The latter provides an overview of what is known about the entity, such as a description, the domain composition, the 3D structure and links to more detailed resources. The annotation process occurs via easy-to-use interfaces. The fast performance allows for Reflect to be an interactive companion for scientific readers/researchers, while they are surfing the internet. OnTheFly is a web-based application that not only extends Reflect functionality to Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, PDF and plain text format files, but also supports the extraction of networks of known and predicted interactions about the entities recognised in a document. A combination of Reflect and OnTheFly offers a data annotation solution for documents used by life science researchers throughout their work. EasySRS is a set of remote methods that expose the functionality of the Sequence Retrieval System (SRS), a data integration platform used in providing access to life science information including genetic, protein, expression and pathway data. EasySRS supports simultaneous queries to all of the integrated resources. Accessed from a single point, via the web, and based on a simple, common query format, EasySRS facilitates the task of biological data collection and annotation. EasySRS has been employed to enrich the entries of a Plant Defence Mechanism database. UniprotProfiler is a prototype application that employs EasySRS to generate graphs of knowledge based on database record cross-references. These graphs are converted into 3D diagrams of interconnected data. The 3D diagram generation occurs via Systems Biology visualisation tools that employ intuitive graphs to replace long result lists and facilitate hypothesis generation and knowledge discovery

Index-driven XML data integration to support functional genomics

We identify a new type of data integration problem that arises in functional genomics research in the context of large-scale experiments involving arrays, 2-dimensional protein gels and mass-spectrometry. We explore the current practice of data analysis that involves repeated web queries iterating over long lists of gene or protein names. We postulate a new approach to solve this problem, applicable to data sets stored in XML format. We propose to discover data redundancies using an XML index we construct and to remove them from the results returned by the query. We combine XML indexing with queries carried out on top of relational tables. We believe our approach could support semi-automated data integration such as that required in the interpretation of large-scale biological experiments

Evolution of antipredator behavior in an island lizard species, Podarcis erhardii (Reptilia: Lacertidae): The sum of all fears?

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/110598/1/evo12555.pd

Environmental variability and heavy metal concentrations from five lagoons in the Ionian Sea (Amvrakikos Gulf, W Greece)

Background: Coastal lagoons are ecosystems of major importance as they host a number of species tolerant to disturbances and they are highly productive. Therefore, these ecosystems should be protected to ensure stability and resilience. The lagoons of Amvrakikos Gulf form one of the most important lagoonal complexes in Greece. The optimal ecological status of these lagoons is crucial for the well-being of the biodiversity and the economic prosperity of the local communities. Thus, monitoring of the area is necessary to detect possible sources of disturbance and restore stability. New information: The environmental variables and heavy metals concentrations, from five lagoons of Amvrakikos Gulf were measured from seasonal samplings and compared to the findings of previous studies in the area, in order to check for possible sources of disturbance. The analysis, showed that i) the values of the abiotic parameters vary with time (season), space (lagoon) and with space over time; ii) the variability of the environmental factors and enrichment in certain elements is naturally induced and no source of contamination is detected in the lagoons

Polytraits : a database on biological traits of marine polychaetes

The study of ecosystem functioning – the role which organisms play in an ecosystem – is becoming increasingly important in marine ecological research. The functional structure of a community can be represented by a set of functional traits assigned to behavioural, reproductive and morphological characteristics. The collection of these traits from the literature is however a laborious and time-consuming process, and gaps of knowledge and restricted availability of literature are a common problem. Trait data are not yet readily being shared by research communities, and even if they are, a lack of trait data repositories and standards for data formats leads to the publication of trait information in forms which cannot be processed by computers. This paper describes Polytraits (http://polytraits.lifewatchgreece.eu), a database on biological traits of marine polychaetes (bristle worms, Polychaeta: Annelida). At present, the database contains almost 20,000 records on morphological, behavioural and reproductive characteristics of more than 1,000 marine polychaete species, all referenced by literature sources. All data can be freely accessed through the project website in different ways and formats, both human-readable and machine-readable, and have been submitted to the Encyclopedia of Life for archival and integration with trait information from other sources