Factors affecting the selling prices of small firms

Thesis (M. Eng.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2008.Includes bibliographical references (p. 36-37).58 percent of the jobs in the United Stated are created by firms with fewer than 500 employees (Davis, et al. [1998]). Yet, there is only limited research done on the industry trends and conditions affecting small company sale transactions. The small business industry has very different dynamics compared to the large public companies. Based on my findings, small businesses have significantly lower price-to-earning ratios compared to large companies. In this paper, I study the economic conditions affecting small firms and variables that affect the selling prices of these companies. I show that there exists a strong informational asymmetry between the buyers and sellers of small companies that lower the transaction prices. I also show that market illiquidity and contingent contracts can impact the selling prices of small companies.by Timo J. Somervuo.M.Eng

Helsingin yliopiston sisäisten urheiluseurojen ja yliopistoliikunnan välinen kumppanuusstrategia

Helsingin yliopistolla toimii paljon yliopiston sisällä perustettuja urheiluseuroja. Yliopistoliikunnassa oli jo pitkään ollut tarve kehittää sekä jäntevöittää yliopistolla olevaa seuratoimintaa, koska toiminta oli vaikeasti hahmotettavaa. Urheiluseuratoiminnan kehittämisen tavoitteena oli saada Helsingin yliopistolla olevasta urheiluseuratoiminnasta selkeä ja ymmärrettävä osa yliopistoliikunnan palvelutarjontaa. Tavoitteena on käytännössä selkeyttää yhteistyötä Helsingin yliopiston omien urheiluseurojen ja yliopistoliikunnan välillä. Jotta tähän tavoitteeseen päästään on tavoitteena saada aikaan yliopistolla toimivien urheiluseurojen ja yliopistoliikunnan välille toimiva kumppanuusstrategia. Seuratoiminnan tila yliopistolla oli syytä selvittää käyttäen tutkimuksellisia menetelmiä ja hyödyntää tuloksia kehittämistyössä sekä peilata niitä seuratoiminnan laajaan viitekehykseen. Menetelmänä käytettiin kyselyä ja seurojen kanssa käytyjä keskusteluja eli seuratapaamisia. Kehittämistyön perusajatuksena oli edetä yhteissuunnittelun ja avoimen keskustelun kautta. Kysely ja tapaamiset toteutettiin vuoden 2009 aikana. Tulokset muodostivat kokonaiskuvan siitä, mitä seurat tekevät tällä hetkellä ja mihin yhteistyön muotoihin seuroilla on mahdollisuuksia lähteä mukaan. Tulosten perusteella voitiin päätellä, että osalla seuroista on hyvät edellytykset kumppanuuteen. Pääasiassa yhteistyö yliopistoliikunnan ja seurojen välillä on kuitenkin niin toimivaa jo nyt, että kumppanuuteen päästään viimeistään vuoden 2010 syksyllä. Oleellista oli, että toiminnalle löytyi rakenne, työnjako seurojen ja yliopistoliikunnan välille, viestinnän ja markkinoinnin keinot sekä yhteiset tavoitteet.There are several sports clubs founded within the university of Helsinki. University Sports had for a long time felt it necessary to develop and clarify the club activities at the university because they didn’t function very systematically and were rather difficult to delineate. The objective in developing the sports activities was to convert the sports activities at the university into a clear and comprehensible part of the university sports services. The aim is to clarify in practice the cooperation between the sports clubs of the University of Helsinki and University Sports. In order to reach this objective the intention is to create a functioning partnership strategy between the sports clubs of the university and University Sports. It was essential to clarify the actual state of the club activities by using research methods and make use of the results in the development process and compare the results with the club activities on the whole. The methods used were questionnaire and dialogues or meetings with the clubs. The basic idea of the development process was to proceed by planning together and openness. The questionnaire and the meetings were carried out during the year 2009. The results gave a good overall picture of what the clubs are now doing and what their possi-bilities are to join in and participate. On the basis of the results it was possible to conclude that some of the clubs are quite ready for partnership, some not just yet. The cooperation between University Sports and the clubs already functions mainly quite well so that partnership will be reached at the latest by Autumn 2010. The essential point is that a structure for the activities, a division of labour between the clubs and University Sports were found as well as methods for marketing and communication and mutual objectives

Transcriptomic and Phenotypic Analyses of the Sigma B-Dependent Characteristics and the Synergism between Sigma B and Sigma L in Listeria monocytogenes EGD-e

Numerous gene expression and stress adaptation responses in L. monocytogenes are regulated through alternative sigma factors σB and σL. Stress response phenotypes and transcriptomes were compared between L. monocytogenes EGD-e and its ΔsigB and ΔsigBL mutants. Targeted growth phenotypic analysis revealed that the ΔsigB and ΔsigBL mutants are impaired during growth under cold and organic-acid stress conditions. Phenotypic microarrays revealed increased sensitivity in both mutants to various antimicrobial compounds. Genes de-regulated in these two mutants were identified by genome-wide transcriptome analysis during exponential growth in BHI. The ΔsigB and ΔsigBL strains repressed 198 and 254 genes, respectively, compared to the parent EGD-e strain at 3 °C, whereas 86 and 139 genes, respectively, were repressed in these mutants during growth at 37 °C. Genes repressed in these mutants are involved in various cellular functions including transcription regulation, energy metabolism and nutrient transport functions, and viral-associated processes. Exposure to cold stress induced a significant increase in σB and σL co-dependent genes of L. monocytogenes EGD-e since most (62%) of the down-regulated genes uncovered at 3 °C were detected in the ΔsigBL double-deletion mutant but not in ΔsigB or ΔsigL single-deletion mutants. Overall, the current study provides an expanded insight into σB and σL phenotypic roles and functional interactions in L. monocytogenes. Besides previously known σB- and σL-dependent genes, the transcriptomes defined in ΔsigB and ΔsigBL mutants reveal several new genes that are positively regulated by σB alone, as well as those co-regulated through σB- and σL-dependent mechanisms during L. monocytogenes growth under optimal and cold-stress temperature conditions

Unbiased probabilistic taxonomic classification for DNA barcoding

Motivation: When targeted to a barcoding region, high-throughput sequencing can be used to identify species or operational taxonomical units from environmental samples, and thus to study the diversity and structure of species communities. Although there are many methods which provide confidence scores for assigning taxonomic affiliations, it is not straightforward to translate these values to unbiased probabilities. We present a probabilistic method for taxonomical classification (PROTAX) of DNA sequences. Given a pre-defined taxonomical tree structure that is partially populated by reference sequences, PROTAX decomposes the probability of one to the set of all possible outcomes. PROTAX accounts for species that are present in the taxonomy but that do not have reference sequences, the possibility of unknown taxonomical units, as well as mislabeled reference sequences. PROTAX is based on a statistical multinomial regression model, and it can utilize any kind of sequence similarity measures or the outputs of other classifiers as predictors. Results: We demonstrate the performance of PROTAX by using as predictors the output from BLAST, the phylogenetic classification software TIPP, and the RDP classifier. We show that PROTAX improves the predictions of the baseline implementations of TIPP and RDP classifiers, and that it is able to combine complementary information provided by BLAST and TIPP, resulting in accurate and unbiased classifications even with very challenging cases such as 50% mislabeling of reference sequences.Peer reviewe

Alternative developmental and transcriptomic responses to host plant water limitation in a butterfly metapopulation

Predicting how climate change affects biotic interactions poses a challenge. Plant-insect herbivore interactions are particularly sensitive to climate change, as climate-induced changes in plant quality cascade into the performance of insect herbivores. Whereas the immediate survival of herbivore individuals depends on plastic responses to climate change-induced nutritional stress, long-term population persistence via evolutionary adaptation requires genetic variation for these responses. To assess the prospects for population persistence under climate change, it is therefore crucial to characterize response mechanisms to climate change-induced stressors, and quantify their variability in natural populations. Here, we test developmental and transcriptomic responses to water limitation-induced host plant quality change in a Glanville fritillary butterfly (Melitaea cinxia) metapopulation. We combine nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy on the plant metabolome, larval developmental assays and an RNA sequencing analysis of the larval transcriptome. We observed that responses to feeding on water-limited plants, in which amino acids and aromatic compounds are enriched, showed marked variation within the metapopulation, with individuals of some families performing better on control and others on water-limited plants. The transcriptomic responses were concordant with the developmental responses: families exhibiting opposite developmental responses also produced opposite transcriptomic responses (e.g. in growth-associated transcripts). The divergent responses in both larval development and transcriptome are associated with differences between families in amino acid catabolism and storage protein production. The results reveal intrapopulation variability in plasticity, suggesting that the Finnish M. cinxia metapopulation harbours potential for buffering against drought-induced changes in host plant quality.Peer reviewe

Heat shock and prolonged heat stress attenuate neurotoxin and sporulation gene expression in group I Clostridium botulinum strain ATCC 3502

Foodborne pathogenic bacteria are exposed to a number of environmental stresses during food processing, storage, and preparation, and in the human body. In order to improve the safety of food, the understanding of molecular stress response mechanisms foodborne pathogens employ is essential. Many response mechanisms that are activated during heat shock may cross-protect bacteria against other environmental stresses. To better understand the molecular mechanisms Clostridium botulinum, the causative agent of botulism, utilizes during acute heat stress and during adaptation to stressfully high temperature, the C. botulinum Group I strain ATCC 3502 was grown in continuous culture at 39 degrees C and exposed to heat shock at 45 degrees C, followed by prolonged heat stress at 45 degrees C to allow adaptation of the culture to the high temperature. Growth in continuous culture was performed to exclude secondary growth phase effects or other environmental impacts on bacterial gene transcription. Changes in global gene expression profiles were studied using DNA microarray hybridization. During acute heat stress, Class I and III heat shock genes as well as members of the SOS regulon were activated. The neurotoxin gene botA and genes encoding the neurotoxin-associated proteins were suppressed throughout the study. Prolonged heat stress led to suppression of the sporulation machinery whereas genes related to chemotaxis and motility were activated. Induced expression of a large proportion of prophage genes was detected, suggesting an important role of acquired genes in the stress resistance of C. botulinum. Finally, changes in the expression of a large number of genes related to carbohydrate and amino acid metabolism indicated remodeling of the cellular metabolism.Peer reviewe

SANSparallel : interactive homology search against Uniprot

Proteins evolve by mutations and natural selection. The network of sequence similarities is a rich source for mining homologous relationships that inform on protein structure and function. There are many servers available to browse the network of homology relationships but one has to wait up to a minute for results. The SANSparallel webserver provides protein sequence database searches with immediate response and professional alignment visualization by third-party software. The output is a list, pairwise alignment or stacked alignment of sequence-similar proteins from Uniprot, UniRef90/50, Swissprot or Protein Data Bank. The stacked alignments are viewed in Jalview or as sequence logos. The database search uses the suffix array neighborhood search (SANS) method, which has been re-implemented as a client-server, improved and parallelized. The method is extremely fast and as sensitive as BLAST above 50% sequence identity. Benchmarks show that the method is highly competitive compared to previously published fast database search programs: UBLAST, DIAMOND, LAST, LAMBDA, RAPSEARCH2 and BLAT. The web server can be accessed interactively or programmatically at http://ekhidna2.biocenter.helsinki.fi/cgi-bin/sans/sans.cgi. It can be used to make protein functional annotation pipelines more efficient, and it is useful in interactive exploration of the detailed evidence supporting the annotation of particular proteins of interest.Peer reviewe

BARCOSEL: a tool for selecting an optimal barcode set for high-throughput sequencing

Abstract Background Current high-throughput sequencing platforms provide capacity to sequence multiple samples in parallel. Different samples are labeled by attaching a short sample specific nucleotide sequence, barcode, to each DNA molecule prior pooling them into a mix containing a number of libraries to be sequenced simultaneously. After sequencing, the samples are binned by identifying the barcode sequence within each sequence read. In order to tolerate sequencing errors, barcodes should be sufficiently apart from each other in sequence space. An additional constraint due to both nucleotide usage and basecalling accuracy is that the proportion of different nucleotides should be in balance in each barcode position. The number of samples to be mixed in each sequencing run may vary and this introduces a problem how to select the best subset of available barcodes at sequencing core facility for each sequencing run. There are plenty of tools available for de novo barcode design, but they are not suitable for subset selection. Results We have developed a tool which can be used for three different tasks: 1) selecting an optimal barcode set from a larger set of candidates, 2) checking the compatibility of user-defined set of barcodes, e.g. whether two or more libraries with existing barcodes can be combined in a single sequencing pool, and 3) augmenting an existing set of barcodes. In our approach the selection process is formulated as a minimization problem. We define the cost function and a set of constraints and use integer programming to solve the resulting combinatorial problem. Based on the desired number of barcodes to be selected and the set of candidate sequences given by user, the necessary constraints are automatically generated and the optimal solution can be found. The method is implemented in C programming language and web interface is available at http://ekhidna2.biocenter.helsinki.fi/barcosel . Conclusions Increasing capacity of sequencing platforms raises the challenge of mixing barcodes. Our method allows the user to select a given number of barcodes among the larger existing barcode set so that both sequencing errors are tolerated and the nucleotide balance is optimized. The tool is easy to access via web browser

BARCOSEL : a tool for selecting an optimal barcode set for high-throughput sequencing

Background: Current high-throughput sequencing platforms provide capacity to sequence multiple samples in parallel. Different samples are labeled by attaching a short sample specific nucleotide sequence, barcode, to each DNA molecule prior pooling them into a mix containing a number of libraries to be sequenced simultaneously. After sequencing, the samples are binned by identifying the barcode sequence within each sequence read. In order to tolerate sequencing errors, barcodes should be sufficiently apart from each other in sequence space. An additional constraint due to both nucleotide usage and basecalling accuracy is that the proportion of different nucleotides should be in balance in each barcode position. The number of samples to be mixed in each sequencing run may vary and this introduces a problem how to select the best subset of available barcodes at sequencing core facility for each sequencing run. There are plenty of tools available for de novo barcode design, but they are not suitable for subset selection. Results: We have developed a tool which can be used for three different tasks: 1) selecting an optimal barcode set from a larger set of candidates, 2) checking the compatibility of user-defined set of barcodes, e.g. whether two or more libraries with existing barcodes can be combined in a single sequencing pool, and 3) augmenting an existing set of barcodes. In our approach the selection process is formulated as a minimization problem. We define the cost function and a set of constraints and use integer programming to solve the resulting combinatorial problem. Based on the desired number of barcodes to be selected and the set of candidate sequences given by user, the necessary constraints are automatically generated and the optimal solution can be found. The method is implemented in C programming language and web interface is available at http://ekhidna2.biocenter.helsinki.fi/barcosel. Conclusions: Increasing capacity of sequencing platforms raises the challenge of mixing barcodes. Our method allows the user to select a given number of barcodes among the larger existing barcode set so that both sequencing errors are tolerated and the nucleotide balance is optimized. The tool is easy to access via web browser.Peer reviewe

A Comparison Study to Identify Birds Species Based on Bird Song Signals

this paper presents a comparison study in automatically identifying bird species based on bird acoustic signals, using audio files from XENO-CANTO online database. The features including Mel-Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (MFCC), geo-related meta-features, and the integration are compared. The learning classifiers Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA), Support Vector Machine (SVM), k-Nearest Neighbor (kNN), and Ensemble Learning are examined. Our experimental results show that in the comparison study, ensemble learning using discriminant learner with the integration of MFCC features and geo meta-features obtains the best detection performance