Chops and Trademarks: Asian Trading Ports and Textile Branding, 1840-1920

This article is a contribution to the prehistory of modern branding, presenting a case study of the textile trade in colonial Southeast Asia. The visual appearance of brands as well as their social meaning were altered in the cultural encounter of colonial trade. Through these encounters, trademarks were modernized: the reputation of a producer became less important than the distinctiveness of the produc

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

The Swiss in Singapore

Since the founding of colonial Singapore, the Swiss have been active on the island, whether as traders, naturalists, or tourists fascinated by the exoticism of the East. Discover the stories of Swiss-made sarongs, of Swiss Nobel laureate Hermann Hesse’s time in Singapore and of the evolution of the longstanding Swiss Club from its early days as the Swiss Rifle Shooting Club. Historian Andreas Zangger also provides the background to the close economic and diplomatic relationship between the two countries today. This fascinating history is accompanied by an assortment of contemporary and archival images, photographs and documents. The Swiss in Singapore is the perfect guide to the past, present and potential of the small but important Swiss community in the country that is often described as the 'Switzerland of the East'