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The RAINBOW workshop addressed the background for the integration of in vivo, in vitro and computer-based ( in silico) methods, to facilitate the study of the toxic properties of chemicals. On the basis of these discussions, we prepared the present paper, outlining the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats of each approach, both alone and integrated into a single testing strategy. The current scheme for evaluation of chemicals needs to be reshaped, in the face of the much larger numbers of chemicals which need to be examined and the availability of a diversified set of tools.

The aim of the current work was to harmonise protocols between three laboratories by performing independent isolations and cultures of human hepatocytes and to assess their responses to prototypical cytochrome P450 (CYP) enzyme inducers, beta-naphthoflavone (BNF), rifampicin (RIF) or phenobarbital (PB). The magnitudes of the induction responses were CYP and donor-dependent but there was a good reproducibility between laboratories. CYP1A2 activity was evident in all cultures treated with BNF but not RIF or PB. Likewise, CYP3A4/5 activity was induced to the same extent by RIF and PB, while BNF did not affect this CYP in any of the cultures tested. All three compounds caused a concentration-dependent increase in CYP2B6 in cultures from 2 of the 3 laboratories and the response to PB was at least twice that of the other two inducers. In conclusion, the harmonised protocols used to study the response of primary cultures of human hepatocytes to prototypical inducers are transferable, reproducible within a given laboratory and between laboratories. The results obtained will support setting up a definitive validation study of the harmonised protocols.

This article reports on work carried out as part of the project Analysis of Spoken London English Using Corpus Tools, namely, an analysis of the use of indefinite article forms in spoken London English in a corpus of transcribed interviews, combining methodologies from sociolinguistics and corpus linguistics.The authors find a relatively high frequency of a before words beginning with a vowel, where Standard English will have an. Social factors, in particular speakers’ age, ethnicity, and place of residence, are more important than linguistic factors affecting the use of a before vowels. The authors argue that the indefinite article a before vowels forms part of Multicultural London English, along with other phonological and grammatical features that have previously been documented. The indefinite article a before vowels seems to have undergone a process of reallocation in which its status has been realigned, possibly because of an increase in social acceptance of nonstandard forms.

Evaluation of the reliability of toxicological data is of key importance for regulatory decision-making. In particular, the new EU Regulations concerning the registration, evaluation, authorisation and restriction of chemicals (REACH) and classification, labelling and packaging (CLP) according to the new globally harmonised system (GHS) rely on the integration of all available toxicological information. The so-called Klimisch categories, although well established and widely used, lack detailed criteria for assigning data quality to categories. A software-based tool (ToxRTool) was developed within the context of a project funded by the European Commission to provide comprehensive criteria and guidance for reliability evaluations of toxicological data. It is applicable to various types of experimental data, endpoints and studies (study reports, peer-reviewed publications) and leads to the assignment to Klimisch categories 1, 2 or 3. The tool aims to increase transparency and to harmonise approaches of reliability assessment. The tool consists of two parts, one to evaluate in vivo and one to evaluate in vitro data. The prototypes of the tool were tested in two independent inter-rater experiments. This approach allowed the analysis of the performance of the tool in practice and the identification and minimisation of sources of heterogeneity in evaluation results. The final version, ToxRTool, is publicly available for testing and use.

Insbesondere in der deutschen Forschungstradition im Bereich der externen Rechnungslegung nehmen Uberlegungen im Hinblick auf die Auslegung und Fortbildung von Normen eine dominierende Stellung ein. Spatestens mit dem Aufkommen der Informationsokonomie wurde jedoch deutlich, dass Rechnungslegung eher als gesamtgesellschaftlich relevante Institution denn als rein technisches Instrument zu betrachten ist. Denn mit der Entscheidung fur die offentliche Bereitstellung bestimmter Rechnungslegungsinformationen konnen Verteilungseffekte einhergehen. Insofern ist die Annahme plausibel, dass diejenigen Akteure die Regelsetzung zu beeinflussen versuchen, deren Wohlfahrt unmittelbar bzw. mittelbar hiervon betroffen ist. Dieser grundlegenden Sichtweise folgt der im deutschsprachigen Raum bislang wenig beachtete Forschungsansatz der Politischen Okonomie der Rechnungslegung. Ziel der Forschungsbemuhungen ist es insbesondere, die Entstehung von Rechnungslegungsregeln unter moglichst umfassender Berucksichtigung der vielschichtigen Interessenslagen innerhalb einer Gesellschaft zu erklaren. Im Rahmen des vorliegenden Beitrags mochten wir den aktuellen Stand dieses Forschungsansatzes naher vorstellen und kunftige Forschungsperspektiven darlegen.

This study charts the early history of canonical tag questions in English (e.g., It is cold, isn't it?) focusing on the sixteenth century and using drama texts as a source. By means of semi-automated retrieval from computerized sources, 136 instances were collected. They were then analyzed in context to ascertain polarity, choice of operator and subject, meter and authorship, and especially pragmatic functions. Even at this early stage, tag questions had functions beyond asking for confirmation, such as expressing speaker attitude, challenging an interlocutor, or issuing directives. Cautious comparisons are made with Present-day English conversational use. The importance of modal verbs and do-support for the emergence of canonical tag questions is discussed, but it is argued that the rise of not as the sole sentence negator in English is the most important single factor in the emergence of canonical tag questions.

Acute systemic toxicity is one of the areas of particular concern due to the 2009 deadline set by the 7th Amendment of the Cosmetics Directive (76/768/EEC), which introduces a testing and marketing ban of cosmetic products with ingredients tested on animals. The scientific community is putting considerable effort into developing and validating non-animal alternatives in this area. However, it is unlikely that validated and regulatory accepted alternative methods and/or strategies will be available in March 2009. Following the initiatives undertaken in the pharmaceutical industry to waive the acute oral toxicity testing before going to clinical studies by using information from other in vivo studies, we proposed an approach to identify non-toxic compounds (LD50>2000mg/kg) using information from 28 days repeated dose toxicity studies. Taking into account the high prevalence of non-toxic substances (87%) in the New Chemicals Database, it was possible to set a NOAEL threshold of 200mg/kg that allowed the correct identification of 63% of non-toxic compounds, while

this series of articles has already addressed in vitro and in vivo tools (Hartung, 2007; Hartung, 2008b). With this contribution addressing computational toxicology we now try to complete considerations on the main methodological approaches in toxicology. However, we do still plan to address specific aspects, such as endpoints (omics, image technologies), high-throughput testing or physiology-based pharmaco-(toxico-)kinetic modelling (PBPK), in later issues. All of these aspects have major in silico components, which already shows how difficult it is to discuss in silico methods on their own. Indeed, their integration and interplay with in vivo and in vitro approaches is critical, at least in the way their development often depends critically on the input of either in vitro or in vivo data. this is a major difference to experimental approaches. An important consideration will thus be whether in silico methods are limited by the limitations of their input and whether we have any hope of overcoming their weaknesses or can only approximate them... there are some excellent introductions to and reviews of computational toxicology (Durham and Pearl, 2001; van de Waterbeemd, 2002; Greene, 2002; Veith, 2004, Helma, 2005; Simon-Hettich et al., 2006; Kavlock et al., 2008; Merlot, 2008; Nigsch et al., 2009; Greene and Naven, 2009). In addition, the ex-eCB website (http://ecb.jrc.ec.europa.eu/qsar/), hosted by Andrew Worth and his team (chronically understaffed given the high expectations) who act as key promoters of computational toxicology, is an excellent resource. the same holds true for the US-based International QSAR Foundation (http://www.qsari. org/) around Gil Veith, non-profit research organization devoted solely to creating alternative methods for identifying chemical hazards without further laboratory testing, and Angelo Vedanis Biographics laboratory 3R in Basel, Switzerland (see his article in this issue). As usual this article aims less at summarizing the state of the art than at feeding discussions and showing up the critical issues faced by a central element of this increasingly important approach to toxicology.

The regulatory assessment of chemical safety is still driven by hazard testing in animals. The Registration, Evaluation, Authorisation and restriction of Chemicals (REACH) legislation and new technologies require a shift in the way in which safety assessments are conducted. Integrated testing strategies (ITSs) help in providing such a framework. Many of the ITS building blocks are already in use, but the concepts for their integration and application in a regulatory setting have yet to be fully implemented. This paper describes a feasibility study investigating how a combination of in silico, in vitro, and in vivo information could be applied in the assessment of skin irritation hazard. Therefore, a database of 100 existing and new chemicals was compiled. A number of strategies, both animal-free and inclusive of animal data were constructed and subsequently evaluated considering predictive capacities, severity of misclassifications and testing costs. Comparison of constructed ITS based on these assessment parameters identified best performing strategies for chemical classification. However, defining the in vivo test as the reference test limited the evaluation of the ITS inclusive of animal data. This study demonstrated that ITS can be constructed, evaluated and compared in a systematic fashion. To promote ITS, further guidance on construction and multi-parameter evaluation need to be developed.

Today’s corpus tools offer the user a wide range of features that greatly facilitate the linguistic analysis of large amounts of authentic language data (e.g. frequency distributions, collocations, keywords, etc.). However, these tools typically fail to address the fundamental need of the linguist to add interpretive information to a concordance or query result, by coding individual concordance lines for structural, functional, discoursal, and other features in a flexible way. The ability to add such qualitative data is indispensable to a fuller understanding of the phenomenon under investigation as it allows the linguist to produce more rigorous descriptions—and theories—about language in use. Our article has two aims: first, to assess the merits and drawbacks of existing solutions, by surveying what can be achieved using state-of-the-art corpus tools and generic database software; second, we draw up a set of desiderata and recommendations for the incorporation of flexible encoding features into future corpus tools. We describe an initial step in this direction, with a recent enhancement to the BNCweb corpus analysis software. More generally, we hope our suggestions will lead to linguists and software developers working together more closely to ensure that the needs of the former are provided for by the available technology.

1. About the authors 2. Introduction (by Hoffmann, Sebastian) 3. Like I said again and again and over and over: On the ADV1 and ADV1 construction with adverbs of direction in English (by Levin, Magnus) 4. Phrases in literary contexts: Patterns and distributions of suspensions in Dickens's novels (by Mahlberg, Michaela) 5. On "true" portraits of Letters to Shareholders - and the importance of phraseological analysis (by Murphy, Amanda C.) 6. The development of formulaic sequences in first and second language writing: Investigating effects of frequency, association, and native norm (by Brook O'Donnell, Matthew) 7. Lexical frames in academic prose and conversation (by Gray, Bethany) 8. 50-something years of work on collocations: What is or should be next ... (by Gries, Stefan Th.) 9. Index

Non-mass enhancing lesions represent a challenge for the radiological reading. They are not well-defined in both morphology (geometric shape) and kinetics (temporal enhancement) and pose a problem to lesion detection and classification. To enhance the discriminative properties of an automated radiological workflow, the correct preprocessing steps need to be taken. In an usual computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) system, motion compensation plays an important role. To this end, we employ a new high accuracy optical flow based motion compensation algorithm with robustification variants. An automated computer-aided diagnosis system evaluates the atypical behavior of these lesions, and additionally considers the impact of non-rigid motion compensation on a correct diagnosis.

We derive new explicit expressions for the components of Moore-Penrose inverses of symmetric difference matrices. These generalized inverses are applied in a new regularization approach for scattered data interpolation based on partial differential equations. The columns of the Moore-Penrose inverse then serve as elements of a dictionary that allow a sparse signal approximation. In order to find a set of suitable data points for signal representation we apply the orthogonal patching pursuit (OMP) method., 16 pages

During surgical procedures, abdominal swabs are routinely used to adsorb blood from the operation field and for the retention of tissues and organs. Due to the material characteristics, abdominal swabs exhibit a slight procoagulant activity, which is usually desirable and mostly harmless. However, during cardiac surgery with heart–lung machine (HLM) support, abnormal clot formation may result in life-threatening thromboembolic complications. Therefore, a simple clotting test (SCT) allowing in vitro detection of abdominal swabs with elevated hypercoagulant potency in the presence of heparinized human blood was developed and validated. In order to establish a SCT, heparinized human blood from 100 donors was incubated with five different cotton abdominal swabs for 30 min at 37 °C and then macroscopically analyzed. In a second study, 10 other swabs were screened with the established SCT (n = 11) to confirm its suitability. Scanning electron microscopy, measurements of activated clotting times and thrombin-antithrombin were further performed. In the SCT, the results are dichotomized as negative (no detectable blood clot) and positive (blood clot formation). In the first study, three of the five tested abdominal swabs exhibited hypercoagulant potency in at least 25 % of the donors. Calculations using the binomial distribution showed that blood of 11 donors is needed for routine testing with the SCT, which was confirmed in the second study using another 10 swabs. The established SCT can be used for detection of abdominal swabs with an elevated procoagulant potency, thereby minimizing the risk of thromboembolic complications during cardiac surgery with HLM support. Graphical Abstract

Recent research has shown that inpainting with the Laplace or biharmonic operator has a high potential for image compression, if the stored data is optimised and sufficiently sparse. The goal of our paper is to connect these linear inpainting methods to sparsity concepts. To understand these relations, we explore the theory of Green’s functions. In contrast to most work in the mathematical literature, we derive our Green’s functions in a discrete setting and on a rectangular image domain with homogeneous Neumann boundary conditions. These discrete Green’s functions can be interpreted as columns of the Moore–Penrose inverse of the discretised differential operator. More importantly, they serve as atoms in a dictionary that allows a sparse representation of the inpainting solution. Apart from offering novel theoretical insights, this representation is also simple to implement and computationally efficient if the inpainting data is sparse.

The development of non-animal skin sensitization test methods and strategies is quickly progressing. Either individually or in combination, the predictive capacity is usually described in comparison to local lymph node assay (LLNA) results. In this process the important lesson from other endpoints, such as skin or eye irritation, to account for variability reference test results - here the LLNA - has not yet been fully acknowledged. In order to provide assessors as well as method and strategy developers with appropriate estimates, we investigated the variability of EC3 values from repeated substance testing using the publicly available NICEATM (NTP Interagency Center for the Evaluation of Alternative Toxicological Methods) LLNA database. Repeat experiments for more than 60 substances were analyzed - once taking the vehicle into account and once combining data over all vehicles. In general, variability was higher when different vehicles were used. In terms of skin sensitization potential, i.e., discriminating sensitizer from non-sensitizers, the false positive rate ranged from 14-20%, while the false negative rate was 4-5%. In terms of skin sensitization potency, the rate to assign a substance to the next higher or next lower potency class was approx.10-15%. In addition, general estimates for EC3 variability are provided that can be used for modelling purposes. With our analysis we stress the importance of considering the LLNA variability in the assessment of skin sensitization test methods and strategies and provide estimates thereof.

In recent years, linguists have become increasingly interested in the language of the Internet—both as an object of investigation as well as a source of authentic data to complement traditional electronic corpora. However, Internet-derived data is typically very messy data and a conversion process is often required in order to enable researchers to carry out a reliable quantitative investigation of the patterns observed with the help of standard corpus tools. In this article, I discuss the technical and methodological aspects involved in creating a large corpus of asynchronous computer-mediated communication by downloading and post-processing hundreds of thousands messages posted in twelve Usenet newsgroups. After describing how messages can be arranged into hierarchically structured discussion threads, I focus at some length on the strategies that are required to correctly assign authorship to the different textual elements in individual messages. My algorithms have a success rate of well over 90% for most newsgroups and the resulting corpus can thus serve as a suitable basis for an investigation into the interactive strategies employed in this particular type of written communication.

This large-scale corpus study charts differences between British English and American English as regards the use of “canonical” tag questions such as It's raining, isn't it?, It's not raining, is it?, or It's raining, is it? Several thousand instances of question tags were extracted from the British National Corpus and the Longman Spoken American Corpus, yielding nine times as many tag questions in colloquial British English as in colloquial American English (but also important register differences in British English). Polarity types and operators in tags also differ in the two varieties. Preliminary results concerning pragmatic functions point to a higher use of “facilitating” tags involving interlocutors in conversation in American English. Speaker age is important in both varieties, with older speakers using more canonical tag questions than younger speakers.

The present paper investigates the emergence of local norms in Indian English at the level of verb complementation, an area which so far has not attracted much attention in research into New Englishes. In attempting to describe the verb-complementational profile of Indian English, we offer a pilot study which combines a descriptive aim and a methodological aim. At the descriptive level, the present article focuses on ditransitive verbs and their complementation and addresses two related questions: (1) To what extent do the frequency and distribution of complementation patterns of specific ditransitive verbs (e.g. give) differ between Indian English and British English? (2) To what extent is the basic ditransitive pattern with two object noun phrases (e.g. in he sent Mary his warmest wishes) associated with different verbs in British English and Indian English? The present paper reveals that in both regards there are clear and identifiable differences in verb complementation between the two varieties. At the methodological level, this pilot study combines the use of balanced and representative subcorpora from the International Corpus of English (ICE) with the in-depth analysis of a much larger database that has been extracted from the Internet archive of the daily Indian newspaper The Statesman. This makes it possible to also detect examples of low-frequency constructions in Indian English, e.g. sporadic cases of ditransitive complementation of verbs such as advise, gift and impart.

The assessment of relevance of toxicological testing was compared with approaches of diagnostic medicine, a discipline that faces a comparable situation. Considering the work of a toxicologist as setting a diagnosis for compounds, assessment tools for diagnostic tests were transferred to toxicological tests. In clinical diagnostics, test uncertainty is well accepted and incorporated in this assessment. Furthermore, prevalence information is considered to evaluate the gain in information resulting from the application of a test. Several common toxicological scenarios, in which test uncertainty and prevalence are combined, are discussed including the interdependence of test accuracy, prevalence and predictive values or the sequential application of a screening and a confirmatory test. In addition, real prevalences derived from prevalences determined by an imperfect test are presented. We conclude that information on prevalences of toxic health effects is required to allow a complete assessment of the relevance of toxicological test. In this process, lessons can be learned from evidence-based approaches in clinical diagnostics.

The rabbit test to detect pyrogenic contamination in parenterals is crucial to ensure patient safety. The pharmacopoeial tests in Europe, the US and Japan are based on the fever reaction of rabbits, but differ in their experimental design and in their algorithms to assess contamination. Employing an international reference endotoxin, fever can be induced in rabbits. Data from 171 rabbits built the base for probabilistic modelling of the fever reaction and for the comparison of the pharmacopoeial tests. The rabbit fever reaction could be modelled as a function of the amount of injected endotoxin (per kg body weight) by linear regression. Combining the pharmacopoeial algorithms of the rabbit pyrogen test with the developed model allowed analysis of differences regarding test results and animal consumption. This showed that the assessment of pyrogenic contamination strongly depends on the respective pyrogen test stipulated by regulations. Additionally, the approach was used to develop a new experimental design. Two specific versions of this design resulted in a reduction of the number of animals used by about 30% while the safety of the test was maintained. A need for harmonisation is evident, allowing optimisation of the experimental design, which promotes animal welfare.

The European Centre for the Validation of Alternative Methods (ECVAM) proposes to make the validation process more flexible, while maintaining its high standards. The various aspects of validation are broken down into independent modules, and the information necessary to complete each module is defined. The data required to assess test validity in an independent peer review, not the process, are thus emphasised. Once the information to satisfy all the modules is complete, the test can enter the peer-review process. In this way, the between-laboratory variability and predictive capacity of a test can be assessed independently. Thinking in terms of validity principles will broaden the applicability of the validation process to a variety of tests and procedures, including the generation of new tests, new technologies (for example, genomics, proteomics), computer-based models (for example, quantitative structure–activity relationship models), and expert systems. This proposal also aims to take into account existing information, defining this as retrospective validation, in contrast to a prospective validation study, which has been the predominant approach to date. This will permit the assessment of test validity by completing the missing information via the relevant validation procedure: prospective validation, retrospective validation, catch-up validation, or a combination of these procedures.

The present chapter provides a comparative study of canonical tag questions in Hong Kong, Indian, and Singapore English on the basis of their respective spoken components of the International Corpus of English (ICE). These three postcolonial Asian Englishes represent different phases in the evolutionary model of variety-formation proposed by Schneider (2003, 2007). The present-day manifestation of their shared historical input variety British English is used as a basis of comparison. Differences across these four varieties in terms of forms, functions, and frequencies of tag questions are described and interpreted from a variational-pragmatic perspective. The findings reveal considerable intervarietal differences, with the variety that has furthest progressed in Schneider’s model, Singapore English, displaying preferences that diverge markedly from the patterns of use in British English. This suggests that a process of ‘pragmatic nativization’—in parallel to well-documented processes of structural nativization—can be observed in the development of New Englishes.

Wie Sie anstehende Enforcement-Prüfungen zielgerichtet vorbereiten und auf welche Bilanzierungsvorschriften Sie besonders achten müssen, um eine Fehlerfeststellung durch die zuständigen Aufsichtsbehörden zu vermeiden, stellt Ihnen die umfassend überarbeitete 2. Auflage dieses Leitfadens auf neuestem Stand vor. Von rechtlichen und organisatorischen Rahmenbedingungen des Enforcement-Prozesses (jetzt erweitert um das neue österreichische Verfahren) zur Analyse sämtlicher aktueller Fehlerveröffentlichungen und einschlägigen Prüfungsschwerpunkten - mit einer detaillierten Fallstudie!

In response to the systematic review by Krauth et al. (2013) of instruments for assessing animal toxicology studies for risk of bias and other aspects of quality, we propose the need for a broader perspective when appraising—and hopefully improving—such studies. Krauth et al. (2013) reviewed 30 instruments, 4 of which were designed for environmental toxicology studies used to evaluate human and ecological health hazards. The authors noted that these instruments were derived from preclinical pharmaceutical research in animal models. Many of these instruments focus on efficacy and not toxicity, and—as acknowledged by the authors—they may have limited potential application in environmental health research because they often have criteria that are not relevant to hazard and risk assessments. Based on these 30 instruments, Krauth et al. concluded that a limited number of risk of bias assessment criteria have been empirically tested for animal research, including randomization, concealment of allocation, blinding, and accounting for all animals. However, the authors did not discuss which elements of risk of bias criteria have been empirically tested, nor did they discuss how they were tested, leaving the reader with no information on their reliability or usefulness. We would like to bring the readers’ attention to several other important publications in environmental chemical health hazard assessment that are pertinent to this topic (Agerstrand et al. 2011; Hulzebos et al. 2010; Schneider et al. 2009), along with a U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) approach developed under the High Production Volume Challenge (U.S. EPA 1999b) as well as relevant and potentially eligible guidance developed by the U.S. EPA (1999a) and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA 2003). In addition, the majority of the procedures specified in Good Laboratory Practices and regulatory in vivo toxicity test guidelines (e.g., U.S. EPA 2013; Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development 1999) were specifically developed to minimize systematic errors, assure high quality data and produce scientifically reliable studies. These additional publications describe design, conduct, and reporting criteria that form the basis of the methodologies employed globally to assure quality and reliability of in vivo toxicological investigations for regulatory assessment of human and ecological health hazards. Because the application of systematic review and related evidence-based approaches in toxicology is still in its infancy, it is especially important at this time to recognize the contributions of these publications. The omission of these publications by Krauth et al. could have major science policy implications. The National Toxicology Program (NTP) (whose parent organization, the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, funded the research of Krauth et al.) has begun relying on Krauth et al. (2013) to identify elements of risk of bias in evaluating animal studies of environmental agents as part of its systematic reviews for assessing health effects (NTP 2013a, 2013b). The reliance on criteria that have not been transparently empirically tested instead of well-established methodological criteria developed by authoritative national and international organizations could result in biased systematic reviews that ultimately lead to regulations or classifications not supported by the science. We suggest that further work is warranted in pulling together published perspectives on how to evaluate study quality in animal toxicology studies. Issues in appraising such studies for evaluating environmental hazards to humans and wildlife go well beyond those of human clinical trials, and would benefit from collaboration of experts in animal toxicology with experts in human clinical trials of medical interventions and human epidemiology.

This session is adressed to companies and educational content providers who are looking for a pragmatic tele-learning approach. We will demonstrate tele-learning as a practical proven method for job oriented training at low costs - especially for big companies. We will report about developments of courses and tele-learning technology from an internet based study with a length of one year, that is currently taught at TELE-AKADEMIE, Furtwangen/Black Forest. The applied distance learning concept (distributed cooperative learning) is highly accepted by participants and coaches. It offers a great chance for efficient and flexible job oriented training. We will present this concept in combination with examples of course development on the internet. The course examples should demonstrate that course production and performance are possible at low costs with the use of internet standard technology. We will demonstrate the supporting potentials of a knowledge management system. In order to manage numerous participants a Virtual Academy for professional training will be shown - suitable for course participation, coaching and course development. The Virtual Academy uses a business support system for tele-learning. It consists of the 4 componentsc Knowledge managements Content and internet relationship managements Groupwares Conferencing. The Virtual Academy can be used for different kinds of distance learning courses and supports a wide range of didactic concepts that companies need for job oriented training. Because tele-learning requires access to knowledge a knowledge management system is an important tool for supporting the work and learn flows.

GMO protein content in maize flours or fresh crops can be easily assessed by the enzyme-linked immunosorbent assays (ELISA) and immunochromatographic (lateral flow) strip tests commercially available. Therefore, ELISA can be seen as a useful tool for screening, for control purposes and for traceability implementation. In order to highlight the importance of monitoring GMO protein presence in food products and to investigate the performance of representative ELISA commercial kits, we evaluated three commercial kits by measuring the amount of Cry1Ab/Cry1Ac in IRMM certified reference materials.

We present an algorithm based on column generation for the real-time scheduling problem of allocating periodic tasks to electronic control units in multiple subsystems connected by a global bus. The allocation has to ensure that tasks can be scheduled, and messages between tasks in different subsystems can be transmitted over the global bus and meet their deadlines. Also tasks and messages occurring in a task chain must be scheduled in a way such that the sequence of execution meets their end-to-end deadline. We show that our approach computes the optimal allocation in our model and due to the column generation approach early provides lower bounds on the optimal value.

Non-mass enhancing lesions represent one of the most challenging types of lesions when it comes to both manual and computer-assisted diagnosis. Compared to the well-characterized mass-enhancing lesions, non-masses have not well-defined and blurred tumor borders and a kinetic behavior that is not easily generalizable and thus non-discriminative for malignant and benign non-masses. A valuable feature descriptor should capture the heterogeneity of enhancement as well as the speed of enhancement in the tissue. We apply and evaluate both textural and spatio-temporal descriptors to the pertinent feature extraction of these lesions. An automated computer-aided diagnosis system evaluates the atypical behavior of these lesions, and additionally considers the impact of non-rigid motion compensation on a correct diagnosis.

Based on understanding accounting as a social construct we aim to raise research questions in context of trust and accounting regulation. While not providing a comprehensive literature overview, we identify opportunities for research which we mainly see in understanding what trust in accounting constitutes. Regulation theory and issues surrounding the communication between organizations and stakeholders qualify for both theoretical and empirical research. In all contexts we fi nd application of interdisciplinary approaches to offer fruitful perspectives, not only within business economics but beyond. We argue that the proposed agenda has implications for practice and policy as it may inform companies as well as regulators on how to adequately deal with trust when reporting fi nancial information.

This instructional resource familiarizes students with the accounting for business combinations under IFRS 3 and illustrates the uncertainty and professional judgment involved in asset valuation and consolidation. First, students need to assess the quality of information generated under IFRS 3 and fair value accounting. Second, they are asked to account for a business combination by identifying possible input parameters to measure several intangible assets and a contingent liability. Based on their valuation results, they compute the amount of goodwill recognized on the acquisition and assess the effects of their parameter choices on the values of different assets and liabilities. As an optional third task, the case asks students to consolidate the financial statements and evaluate the impact of the acquisition on the financial position of the acquirer. © 2013 Copyright Taylor and Francis Group, LLC.

Threats of pyrogenicity were discovered more than a century ago. Measures to determine the safety of parenterals and, more recently, medical devices and cell therapies for human use have been in place for 70 years. Currently, there are three testing possibilities available: the Rabbit Pyrogen Test, the Limulus Amebocyte Lysate test (Bacterial Endotoxin Test), and test systems using human whole blood or human monocytes, called Monocyte Activation Test (MAT). The MAT is based on the human fever reaction and thus most closely reflects the human situation. Unfortunately, regulations and testing guidelines are not fully harmonized, despite formal international validation. Furthermore, data showing that the MAT is capable of covering the totality of possible pyrogens relevant to humans were not included in the MAT validations of the last decade. For this review we collate evidence from published literature, unpublished data of our own, and results from the international validation study to show that there is overwhelming scientific evidence to conclude that the whole blood MAT reliably detects non-endotoxin pyrogens. Therefore, further validation exercises do not seem warranted. Erratum: http://www.altex.org/index.php/altex/article/view/377 Addendum: http://www.altex.org/index.php/altex/article/view/322Addendum: doi:10.14573/altex.1410081

This article examines the regulatory history of asset valuation in Germany from the fifteenth century to the implementation of the European Economic Community's Fourth Directive in 1986. Aiming to explain regulatory changes by reference to preceding socio-economic and political developments, we find that accounting requirements often became more restrictive following economic crises, after which regulation was perceived to be inadequate. In the nineteenth century, fair valuation replaced the early practice of historical cost accounting. Following a severe economic crisis in the 1870s, historical costs were reintroduced as an upper valuation boundary for Aktiengesellschaften (stock companies). However, the requirements were unspecific and discretionary and provoked a lively debate on principles-based accounting after 1900. The interwar years and the Great Depression encouraged the Government also to implement historical cost as a lower boundary to asset valuation. Following the Second World War, the valuation principle was extended to all company forms. © The Author(s) 2013.

This entry provides an overview of a selection of electronic language corpora that are avail-able for the study of English at the time of writ-ing (early 2010), including information about their availability and pricing as well as any specific corpus tools that are required to ac-cess the data, where applicable. Keywords: methods; computational methods and data processing; corpus