Souryadeep Das

Despite a large and multifaceted effort to understand the vast landscape of phenotypic data, their current form inhibits productive data analysis. The lack of a community-wide, consensus-based, human- and machine-interpretable language for describing phenotypes and their genomic and environmental contexts is perhaps the most pressing scientific bottleneck to integration across many key fields in biology, including genomics, systems biology, development, medicine, evolution, ecology, and systematics. Here we survey the current phenomics landscape, including data resources and handling, and the progress that has been made to accurately capture relevant data descriptions for phenotypes. We present an example of the kind of integration across domains that computable phenotypes would enable, and we call upon the broader biology community, publishers, and relevant funding agencies to support efforts to surmount today's data barriers and facilitate analytical reproducibility.

In the light of corporate governance standards envisaged by the recent amendments to the Companies Act, 1956, and the provisions of Sebi's revised Clause 49 of the Listing Agreement, this case study evaluates the quality of corporate governance standards and present practices in the textile, synthetics and petrochemical industry in India, based on the annual report of Reliance Industries Limited (RIL), a major Indian corporate house for the financial year 2006-2007. The study is expected to serve as a pointer to the effectiveness of current corporate governance practice in RIL, in particular, and the Indian corporate sector, in general.