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The recent development of biosemiotics has revealed the achievement of knowledge and the development of science to be the results of the semiosis of all life forms, including those commonly regarded as cultural constructs. Education is thus a semiosic structure to which evolution itself has adapted, while learning is the semiotic phenomenon that determines the renewal of life itself. Historically, it was a semiotic paradigm that determined the emergence of institutions such as universities and that underpinned the development of liberal education. The present article considers the history of education in terms of sign emergence and evolution, regarding education as currently being conceived and practised as a stage in the general evolutionary action of signs. This approach differs from the prevailing modern approaches to education, which are mostly applied psychology and sociology.

This paper sets the premises for a translation theory, in light of the contemporary circumstances of new media, based on a concept of mediation originating in Peirce's semiotics, as recently developed, most of all, by Lars Elleström. This view allows for defining translation as the media effects of transferring cognitive import. The approach is justified by a noticed Peirce turn in semiotics and a multimodality turn in translation studies. This view on translation and communication opposes the dominance of language-based translation theories, that regard translation as a bijective operation between two codes. By pointing out to a compatibility between biosemiotics and the multimodality framework, which comes to the fore in Elleström's cognitive semiotic approach to media, the paper argues that an embodiment-aware approach to translation is necessary for avoiding certain pitfalls of cultural and language relativism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper sets a framework for using semiotics as an analytical method for Earth system science. It illustrates the use of such a method by analysing a dataset consisting of 32,383 abstracts of research articles pertaining to Earth system science, modelled as semantic networks. The analysis allows us to explain the epistemological advantages of this method as originating in the systems thinking common in both Earth system science and semiotics. The purpose of this methodological proposal is that of bringing the recent and critical planetary boundaries framework to the attention of ecosemiotics and biosemiotic criticism, and vice versa. Ecosemiotics is a branch of the biosemiotic modelling theory and is thus grounded in Charles Peirce's schematic semiotics, but also developed in inspiration of Juri Lotman's systemic semiotics. Both of these foundations of ecosemiotics are compatible with the rationale of Earth system science, given the schematism of Peirce's semiotics and Lotman's notion of meaning as an affordance of the biosphere. Far from exhausting the hermeneutic possibilities evoked by the discussed dataset, we argue that such semiotic analysis, made possible by the digital capacity of modelling large amounts of data, reveals new horizons for semiotic analysis, particularly regarding humans' modelling of the environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

If all knowing comes from semiosis, more concepts should be added to the semiotic toolbox. However, semiotic concepts must be defined via other semiotic concepts. We observe an opportunity to advance the state-of-the-art in semiotics by defining concepts of cognitive processes and phenomena via semiotic terms. In particular, we focus on concepts of relevance for theory of knowledge, such as learning, knowing, affordance, scaffolding, resources, competence, memory, and a few others. For these, we provide preliminary definitions from a semiotic perspective, which also explicates their interrelatedness. Redefining these terms this way helps to avoid both physicalism and psychologism, showcasing the epistemological dimensions of environmental situatedness through the semiotic understanding of organisms' fittedness with their environments. Following our review and presentation of each concept, we briefly discuss the significance of our embedded redefinitions in contributing to a semiotic theory of knowing that has relevance to both the humanities and the life sciences, while not forgetting their relevance to education and psychology, but also social semiotic and multimodality studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The European biodiesel industry is currently facing several challenges affecting the profitability of investment projects in the industry. Among these challenges are higher prices for oilseeds, which are the main input for biodiesel production, lower fiscal support by national governments for biodiesel producers and high price volatility of oil markets. Thus identifying all opportunities for optimizing the value chain and lower the production cost of biodiesel is a main requirement for an efficient project management in the biodiesel industry. The paper addresses this topic by developing a decision support system tailored to the needs of Romanian investors in biodiesel production. The system optimizes the main activities of the biodiesel value chain and supports the decision making process at management level. In addition the DSS enables the user to perform sensitivity analysis based on varying various input parameters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The European biodiesel industry is currently facing major challenges with governments reducing their fiscal support for biodiesel producers and with rising prices for feedstock. These challenges have a high impact on the profitability and survival of existing investment projects in biodiesel production. In this regard identifying and assessing the main particularities of investment projects have high significance, as they help management understand industry dynamics and better cope with unfavorable events. The paper follows a structured approach towards this objective and analyzes investment projects in Romanian biodiesel based on: a thorough SWOT analysis, current financing sources for biodiesel, risk categories and their impact on profitability of investment projects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]