An entrepreneurial model of economic and environmental co-evolution

A basic tenet of ecological economics is that economic growth and development are ultimately constrained by environmental carrying capacities. It is from this basis that notions of a sustainable economy and of sustainable economic development emerge to undergird the “standard model” of ecological economics. However, the belief in “hard” environmental constraints may be obscuring the important role of the entrepreneur in the co-evolution of economic and environmental relations, and hence limiting or distorting the analytic focus of ecological economics and the range of policy options that are considered for sustainable economic development. This paper outlines a co-evolutionary model of the dynamics of economic and ecological systems as connected by entrepreneurial behaviour. We then discuss some of the key analytic and policy implications.

A Personalized Ontology Model for Web Information Gathering

As a model for knowledge description and formalization, ontologies are widely used to represent user profiles in personalized web information gathering. However, when representing user profiles, many models have utilized only knowledge from either a global knowledge base or a user local information. In this paper, a personalized ontology model is proposed for knowledge representation and reasoning over user profiles. This model learns ontological user profiles from both a world knowledge base and user local instance repositories. The ontology model is evaluated by comparing it against benchmark models in web information gathering. The results show that this ontology model is successful.

Whole-proteome phylogeny of large dsDNA viruses and parvoviruses through a composition vector method related to dynamical language model

Background The vast sequence divergence among different virus groups has presented a great challenge to alignment-based analysis of virus phylogeny. Due to the problems caused by the uncertainty in alignment, existing tools for phylogenetic analysis based on multiple alignment could not be directly applied to the whole-genome comparison and phylogenomic studies of viruses. There has been a growing interest in alignment-free methods for phylogenetic analysis using complete genome data. Among the alignment-free methods, a dynamical language (DL) method proposed by our group has successfully been applied to the phylogenetic analysis of bacteria and chloroplast genomes. Results In this paper, the DL method is used to analyze the whole-proteome phylogeny of 124 large dsDNA viruses and 30 parvoviruses, two data sets with large difference in genome size. The trees from our analyses are in good agreement to the latest classification of large dsDNA viruses and parvoviruses by the International Committee on Taxonomy of Viruses (ICTV). Conclusions The present method provides a new way for recovering the phylogeny of large dsDNA viruses and parvoviruses, and also some insights on the affiliation of a number of unclassified viruses. In comparison, some alignment-free methods such as the CV Tree method can be used for recovering the phylogeny of large dsDNA viruses, but they are not suitable for resolving the phylogeny of parvoviruses with a much smaller genome size.