Where is the Border Between an Information System and a Knowledge Management System?

Both information systems and knowledge management systems are important in an organisation and often fulfil the same task. The aim of this paper is to identify the border between these two systems. The approach of the research is to analyse both systems in order to identify their role in an organisation, determine the problems, advantages, and opportunities, and discover common and uncommon features between them to find out when an information system becomes a knowledge management system and when it is useful to implement the latter.information system, knowledge management system, information, knowledge and knowledge management

The Development of Privatization in Latvian Agriculture

The two most important laws regulating land reform and land privatization in rural areas provide the legal basis for changes in land ownership and management. These laws were the starting point for reestablishing private farming. At the same time, the previous highly centralized management of agricultural production assets required that action be taken to decentralize these assets through privatization. The primary guidelines for privatizing these assets were provided in the Law on Land Privatization in Rural Areas. The law provided for a large degree of flexibility in the design and implementation of privatization at the enterprise level. There need be certain structural adjustments in upstream industries supplying agriculture with main inputs and downstream industries processing and marketing agricultural products. Recently the Latvian Parliament passed the Law on Privatization of Food Processing and Agro-service Enterprises. Asset privatization began in 1993 and is moving rapidly. It will undoubtedly show shortcomings and advantages of various approaches used by different industries. The purpose of this paper is to explain the legal framework for agricultural and food industry privatization, as well as to present two examples of privatization

Computational studies of genome evolution and regulation

This thesis takes on the challenge of extracting information from large volumes of biological data produced with newly established experimental techniques. The different types of information present in a particular dataset have been carefully identified to maximise the information gained from the data. This also precludes the attempts to infer the types of information that are not present in the data. In the first part of the thesis I examined the evolutionary origins of de novo taxonomically restricted genes (TRGs) in Drosophila subgenus. De novo TRGs are genes that have originated after the speciation of a particular clade from previously non-coding regions - functional ncRNA, within introns or alternative frames of older protein-coding genes, or from intergenic sequences. TRGs are clade-specific tool-kits that are likely to contain proteins with yet undocumented functions and new protein folds that are yet to be discovered. One of the main challenges in studying de novo TRGs is the trade-off between false positives (non-functional open reading frames) and false negatives (true TRGs that have properties distinct from well established genes). Here I identified two de novo TRG families in Drosophila subgenus that have not been previously reported as de novo originated genes, and to our knowledge they are the best candidates identified so far for experimental studies aimed at elucidating the properties of de novo genes. In the second part of the thesis I examined the information contained in single cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) data and propose a method for extracting biological knowledge from this data using generative neural networks. The main challenge is the noisiness of scRNA-seq data - the number of transcripts sequenced is not proportional to the number of mRNAs present in the cell. I used an autoencoder to reduce the dimensionality of the data without making untestable assumptions about the data. This embedding into lower dimensional space alongside the features learned by an autoencoder contains information about the cell populations, differentiation trajectories and the regulatory relationships between the genes. Unlike most methods currently used, an autoencoder does not assume that these regulatory relationships are the same in all cells in the data set. The main advantages of our approach is that it makes minimal assumptions about the data, it is robust to noise and it is possible to assess its performance. In the final part of the thesis I summarise lessons learnt from analysing various types of biological data and make suggestions for the future direction of similar computational studies

Changing Ownership in Latvia through Agrarian Reform

The economic life of Latvia entered a new phase after the disintegration of the USSR and restoration of independence on August 1991. This period is characterized by a decrease in gross national product, by deterioration of living standards, by essential structural changes, by hyperinflation caused by monetary emission by an alien country, among other factors. The economic reforms should be based in acquisition of strategic targets, although this would prolong the crisis for a certain period of time. The economic reforms in Latvia are more closely linked with legal, political and demographic problems as they are in any other postsocialist country in Eastern and Central Europe. In accordance with the Hague convention and other international agreements, the rebirth of the Latvian Republic as an independent state claims to observe the principle of inviolability of property rights during the Soviet occupation. It means that in Latvia one should respect the property rights of Latvian citizens and others whose property was nationalized or illegally expropriated after June 17, 1940

Programs and Problems of City Planning in the Soviet Union

This Article traces the forty-five year history of city planning in the Soviet Union. It describes and interprets the landmark events and the periods of progress which have alternated with periods of stagnation and retreat. The focus is on the principal normative acts and the agencies charged with their execution