The European influence on workers' compensation reform in the United States

Workers' compensation law in the United States is derived from European models of social insurance introduced in Germany and in England. These two concepts of workers' compensation are found today in the federal and state workers' compensation programs in the United States. All reform proposals in the United States are influenced by the European experience with workers' compensation. In 2006, a reform proposal termed the Public Health Model was made that would abolish the workers' compensation system, and in its place adopt a national disability insurance system for all injuries and illnesses. In the public health model, health and safety professionals would work primarily in public health agencies. The public health model eliminates the physician from any role other than that of privately consulting with the patient and offering advice solely to the patient. The Public Health Model is strongly influenced by the European success with physician consultation with industry and labor

Gene Ontology Consortium: going forward

The Gene Ontology (GO; http://www.geneontology.org) is a community-based bioinformatics resource that supplies information about gene product function using ontologies to represent biological knowledge. Here we describe improvements and expansions to several branches of the ontology, as well as updates that have allowed us to more efficiently disseminate the GO and capture feedback from the research community. The Gene Ontology Consortium (GOC) has expanded areas of the ontology such as cilia-related terms, cell-cycle terms and multicellular organism processes. We have also implemented new tools for generating ontology terms based on a set of logical rules making use of templates, and we have made efforts to increase our use of logical definitions. The GOC has a new and improved web site summarizing new developments and documentation, serving as a portal to GO data. Users can perform GO enrichment analysis, and search the GO for terms, annotations to gene products, and associated metadata across multiple species using the all-new AmiGO 2 browser. We encourage and welcome the input of the research community in all biological areas in our continued effort to improve the Gene Ontology