Selected papers from the 16th Annual Bio-Ontologies Special Interest Group Meeting

Copyright @ 2014 Soldatova et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.Over the 16 years, the Bio-Ontologies SIG at ISMB has provided a forum for vibrant discussions of the latest and most innovative advances in the research area of bio-ontologies, its applications to biomedicine and more generally in the organisation, sharing and re-use of knowledge in biomedicine and the life sciences. The six papers selected for this supplement span a wide range of topics including: ontology-based data integration, ontology-based annotation of scientific literature, ontology and data model development, representation of scientific results and gene candidate prediction

Investment analysts' forecasts of earnings

The literature on investment analysts' forecasts of firms' earnings and their forecast errors is enormous. This paper summarizes the evidence on the distribution of analysts' forecasts and forecast errors using data for all U.S. firms from 1990 to 2004. The evidence indicates substantial asymmetry of earnings, earning forecasts, and forecast errors. There is strong support for average and median earning forecasts being higher than actual earnings a year before the earnings announcement. Such differences between earnings and forecasts also exist across time periods and industries. A month before the earnings announcement, the mean and median differences are small.Investments ; Forecasting

Fractional Calculus as a Macroscopic Manifestation of Randomness

We generalize the method of Van Hove so as to deal with the case of non-ordinary statistical mechanics, that being phenomena with no time-scale separation. We show that in the case of ordinary statistical mechanics, even if the adoption of the Van Hove method imposes randomness upon Hamiltonian dynamics, the resulting statistical process is described using normal calculus techniques. On the other hand, in the case where there is no time-scale separation, this generalized version of Van Hove's method not only imposes randomness upon the microscopic dynamics, but it also transmits randomness to the macroscopic level. As a result, the correct description of macroscopic dynamics has to be expressed in terms of the fractional calculus.Comment: 20 pages, 1 figur

Response to. comment on optic nerve sheath diameter ultrasound evaluation in intensive care unit: possible role and clinical aspects in neurological critical patients' daily monitoring

Comment on "Optic Nerve Sheath Diameter Ultrasound Evaluation in Intensive Care Unit: Possible Role and Clinical Aspects in Neurological Critical Patients' Daily Monitoring"

Policy implementation under stress: How the Affordable Care Act’s frontline workers cope with the challenges of public service delivery

Public service delivery in the contemporary American state is becoming increasingly challenging. As the implementation of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) shows, new social policies combine high technological and cognitive demands on citizens and government with budget austerity, decentralization and political polarization. Yet, as we argue in this paper, the ACA also shows how frontline workers cope with these challenges by focusing on improving client experiences and policy outcomes. In particular, we consider how non-governmental social-service professionals, critical to contemporary service delivery, cope with high caseloads, legal rigidity, and a lack of policy knowledge on the part of citizens. Variation in coping techniques is consequential; rationing care to deal with large numbers of high-demand clients may lead to poorer service and citizen dissatisfaction. By contrast, techniques like learning and rule bending may actually improve citizens’ experience of policy. To examine patterns of coping in ACA implementation, we present the results of 21 in-depth interviews with navigators, assisters, and Certified Application Counselors in Wisconsin and Minnesota. Across both states, our respondents coped by engaging in instrumental action (learning & collaboration) and rule bending, rather than rationing care, routinizing their work, or rigidly adhering to rules. While these pro-client techniques are both fiscally and organizationally constrained, our interviews reveal that social-service professionals use them even in especially adverse circumstances

Robust Gravitational Wave Burst Detection and Source Localization in a Network of Interferometers Using Cross Wigner Spectra

We discuss a fast cross-Wigner transform based technique for detecting gravitational wave bursts, and estimating the direction of arrival, using a network of (three) non co-located interferometric detectors. The performances of the detector as a function of signal strength and source location, and the accuracy of the direction of arrival estimation are investigated by numerical simulations.Comment: accepted in Class. Quantum Gravit

Mars rover sample return: An exobiology science scenario

A mission designed to collect and return samples from Mars will provide information regarding its composition, history, and evolution. At the same time, a sample return mission generates a technical challenge. Sophisticated, semi-autonomous, robotic spacecraft systems must be developed in order to carry out complex operations at the surface of a very distant planet. An interdisciplinary effort was conducted to consider how much a Mars mission can be realistically structured to maximize the planetary science return. The focus was to concentrate on a particular set of scientific objectives (exobiology), to determine the instrumentation and analyses required to search for biological signatures, and to evaluate what analyses and decision making can be effectively performed by the rover in order to minimize the overhead of constant communication between Mars and the Earth. Investigations were also begun in the area of machine vision to determine whether layered sedimentary structures can be recognized autonomously, and preliminary results are encouraging