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Abstract
This descriptive paper explores the role of Southern European academics within social and environmental accounting (SEA) research. It is the first survey on SEA research in Southern Europe. This review specifically targeted international journals to see how much Southern European research had penetrated the international SE A academic discourse. The research that is reported in this paper is based on an electronic search of the online databases which include journals which publish SEA research. The paper reviews journal articles published in specialized journals over the period 1998 to 2008 and reaches several conclusions: 1. The volume of published research is low and quite recent; 2. Research is more or less evenly split between empirical and theoretical articles; 3. Empirical research is somewhat more qualitative in orientation, and 4. Most empirical papers focus on the countries of origin of the researchers. Hence, there is great scope for expanding the amount of research on SEA in Southern Europe, as well as improving its geographic coverage.

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Abstract
Data base clusters based on share-nothing replication techniques are currently widely accepted as a practical solution to scalability and availability of the data tier. A key issue when planning such systems is the ability to meet service level agreements when load spikes occur or cluster nodes fail. This translates into the ability to provision and deploy additional nodes. Many current research efforts focus on designing autonomic controllers to perform such reconfiguration, tuned to quickly react to system changes and spawn new replicas based on resource usage and performance measurements. In contrast, we are concerned about the inherent impact of deploying an additional node to an online cluster, considering both the time required to finish such an action as well as the impact on resource usage and performance of the cluster as a whole. If noticeable, such impact hinders the practicability of self-management techniques, since it adds an additional dimension that has to he accounted for. Our approach is to systematically benchmark a number of different reconfiguration scenarios to assess the cost of bringing a new replica online. We consider factors such as: workload characteristics, incremental and parallel recovery, flow control and outdatedness of the recovering replica. As a result, we show that research should be refocused from optimizing the capture and transmition of changes to applying them, which in a realistic setting dominates the cost of the recovery operation.

Abstract
To get the most out of powerful tools, expert knowledge is often required. Experts are the ones with the suitable knowledge to tune the tools' parameters. In this paper we assess several techniques which can automatically fine-tune ANN parameters. Those techniques include the use of GA and stratified sampling. The fine-tuning includes the choice of the best ANN structure and the best network biases and their weights. Empirical results achieved in experiments performed using nine heterogeneous data sets show that the use of the proposed Stratified Sampling technique is advantageous. © 2009 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC.

Abstract
We present a new, efficient and scalable tool, named BIORED, for pattern discovery in proteomic and genomic sequences. It uses a genetic algorithm to find interesting patterns in the form of regular expressions, and a new efficient pattern matching procedure to count pattern occurrences. We studied the performance, scalability and usefulness of BIORED using several databases of biosequences. The results show that BIORED was successful in finding previously known patterns, thus an excellent indicator for its potential. BIORED is available for download under the GNU Public License at http://www.dcc.fc.up.pt/bi-ored/. An online demo is available at the same address.