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Low-cost personal computers, wireless access technologies, the Internet, and computer-equipped classrooms allow the design of novel and complementary methodologies for teaching digital information security in electrical engineering curricula. The challenges of the current digital information era require experts who are effectively able to counteract piracy, forgery, copyright infringement, and so on. Digital watermarking is one possible technique for fighting piracy, which consists of the insertion of invisible but robust information to protect the data. In this paper, a new teaching approach, designed for testing student skills and progressing in multimedia data protection, is presented. This consists of a distributed security game where students compete by first using the developed watermarking techniques and then attacking each other's methods, thus verifying their robustness. Groups of students from different universities and countries play against each other, trying to compromise other teams' hiding systems while protecting their own data from attacks. The proposed methodology can be considered as an appealing approach for stimulating learning, cooperation, and team competition. The effectiveness of the teaching method is verified by a student survey and their academic results. (Contains 4 tables and 2 figures.)

Quality assurance in higher education is one of the cornerstones of the Bologna agenda and the Lisbon strategy, which aims at establishing the world's most competitive knowledge economy. Extensive literature up to now has addressed quality assurance as a regulatory and policy mechanism and has presented quality assurance and market forces as antagonistic. However, what policymakers in the field fail to see is that the 'official' quality assurance processes also have implications in terms of competition. Indeed, higher education institutions are using the results of these, in principle aseptic, non-market-related evaluation processes, as a way to achieve competitive advantage. This paper analyses the case of higher education institutions in engineering in France. The institutional websites of 163 higher education institutions have been analysed through code-based content analysis techniques and Multiple Correspondence Analysis. This study shows that the analysis of institutional websites can be used as a tool to gauge the importance of the different dimensions of quality assurance for higher education institutions in a given national system. Furthermore, a clear association has been found between the ranking position of an institution and its communication behaviour. The results have been interpreted in the light of Neoinstitutional Theory and Porter's generic competitive strategies. Practical implications for quality assurance practitioners and managers at higher education institutions have been highlighted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we analyze and compare two didactical designs for introducing primary school pupils to proportional reasoning in the context of plane polygons. One of them is well-documented in the literature; the other one is based on our own data and is accordingly presented and discussed in more detail in this paper. The two designs come from different cultural and intellectual environments: lesson study in Japan (implicitly based on the “open approach method”) and “didactical engineering” in France (based on the theory of didactical situations). The general aim of our paper is to compare these two environments and their approaches to didactical design, basing our discussion on the concrete designs mentioned above. Clear differences among them are presented, while we also identify links which hold potential for integrating research and practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article introduces the October-November 2004 issue of "The International Journal of Robotics Research." This issue contains a selection of research papers presented at CLAWAR 2002 conference which was held in Paris, France, in September 2001. CLAWAR conferences are mainly dedicated to climbing and walking robots. The increasing interest in this new field of robot research is motivated by advanced applications such as exploration, intervention in extreme environments, personal services, emergency rescue operations, transportation, entertainment, etc,. and to envision robots evolving into electromechanical replica of humans.

This paper describes the French initiative in materials research against both a national and an international background, in an attempt to disentangle the local circumstances, which prompted this governmental initiative, and to characterize the specific profile of materials research in France. In presenting a biography of the interdisciplinary program in materials research (PIRMAT), we argue that: i) the PIRMAT denotes a failure of the French science policy in materials research; ii) the leadership of the CNRS led to a specific style of research, quite different from the engineering approach of Materials Science and Engineering, and characteristic of a French style in materials research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Paper makes a comparative analysis of the distinct engineering cultures France and the United States in the nineteenth century. The object is to explain why French engineers characteristically excelled in theoretical analysis while tending to neglect empirical research, whereas just the opposite was true of American engineers. Toward this end, the paper considers difference in the structure and organization of the engineering community in each country. It also looks at difference in the French and American systems of technical education, in their reward systems, and in their ideologies of engineering (especially the way they conceptualized the relation between theory, experiment and practice in engineering research). Finally, the paper attempts to show, in a specific case, how these social institutional and ideological differences led to distinct paths of technological development - that is, to the elaboration of distinct bodies of knowledge and design tradition. The paper closes with some more general reflections on the methodological value of comparative analysis for social studies of technology. Brief attention is also given to the possible influence of engineering cultures on rates technological and economic development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents a tribute and personal profile of Alain Glavieux, an icon of French telecommunication engineering. The whole French telecommunications committee and people all over the world were saddened by the death of Alain Glavieux, who passed away on Saturday, 25 September 2004. After completing his graduation in engineering, Alain worked at &Eacutecole; Nationale Supérieurc des Télécomniunications (ENST), of Paris, France in 1978, and his last position was Deputy Director of this engineering school. Alain was co-inventor of turbo codes with Claude Berrou, another engineer an invention now considered by the international community one of the biggest events in shaping the filed of communication. Merely 10 years after their invention, turbo codes are today in almost every recent international standard and many products. In recognition of this spectacular discovery, Claude Berrou and Main Glavieux received numerous international awards and distinct ions, one of which was the 2003 IEEE Richard W. Hamming Medal.

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Abstract: In 2005, the National Observatory for Training, Research and Innovation on Disability (ONFRIH) was established by French law (Law 2005-102). The mission of ONFRIH is to provide an overview and recommendations for research, training and prevention in the field of disability. In this paper, the authors, respectively the Chairman and Rapporteur of the ONFRIH Working Group “Research and Innovation”, present the Observatory''s conclusions reached in its 2009 report about engineering sciences research and innovation. After introducing the ONFRIH and recalling the stakes and working methods, they highlight the current state of French research in this area and their thoughts about innovation chain. They evoke the broad outlines of their working group''s analysis of this inventory. They conclude by identifying four action plans that express the Observatory''s recommendations and were submitted to the responsible ministers. The four main objectives proposed are: (1) to consolidate disability as a major challenge for engineering sciences applications; (2) to reinforce the cooperation between operators at all levels of research and innovation; (3) to encourage the expression of needs within the research and innovation process, and (4) to facilitate the access of disabled people to technological innovations that promote their autonomy and social inclusion. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Knowledge systems in agriculture need to devise new forms of collaboration between farmers, development agents and researchers in the current socio-economic context in which the social functions of agriculture are being questioned. So far very few research studies have addressed the issue of the knowledge content to be produced in such situations. Our paper rests on the hypothesis that the synergy between the empirical knowledge of producers and scientific knowledge is able to generate new agronomic knowledge. We explored this new form of knowledge production by examining two situations: saffron cultivation in southwestern France and French truffle production, for which the technical management is a major hindrance to their development. We show that neither scientific nor empirical knowledge on their own are sufficient to improve it. On the basis of an "engineering of agronomic knowledge" approach that makes explicit and combines knowledges from different sources, we then propose four modes of synergy: (1) translating the objectives and practices of producers into action-oriented scientific questions; (2) scientifically grounding heuristic knowledge by referring it to explicative scientific knowledge; (3) linking the indicators used by the producers to scientifically measurable parameters; (4) selecting on a scientific basis appropriate equivalent plants for transposing knowledge from one to the other. These four modes are then discussed; it is underlined that this cognitive approach to the synergy between empirical and scientific knowledge could effectively be completed by analysing the socio-organisational settings in which this knowledge finds its meaning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The French Academy of Sciences established many important precedents in the development of modern science. One of these was the prize system, which originally involved the conferral of a few highly prestigious prizes. Yet the advance of experimental science in the nineteenth century demanded the availability of funds to carry out future research, rather than the reward of a few successful examples of past research. This paper shows how the members of the Academy gradually transformed the traditional system of prizes awarded with great honour into a less prestigious but more widely shared system of monetary awards, which finally led to a system of grants for younger researchers of promise. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Klebsiella pneumoniae is one of the most important pathogens responsible for nosocomial outbreaks worldwide. Epidemiological analyses are useful in determining the extent of an outbreak and in elucidating the sources and the spread of infections. The aim of this study was to investigate the epidemiological spread of K. pneumoniae strains using a MALDI-TOF MS approach. Methods: Five hundred and thirty-five strains of K. pneumoniae were collected between January 2008 and March 2011 from hospitals in France and Algeria and were identified using MALDI-TOF. Antibiotic resistance patterns were investigated. Clinical and epidemiological data were recorded in an Excel file, including clustering obtained from the MSP dendrogram, and were analyzed using PASW Statistics software. Results: Antibiotic susceptibility and phenotypic tests of the 535 isolates showed the presence of six resistance profiles distributed unequally between the two countries. The MSP dendrogram revealed five distinct clusters according to an arbitrary cut-off at the distance level of 500. Data mining analysis of the five clusters showed that K. pneumoniae strains isolated in Algerian hospitals were significantly associated with respiratory infections and the ESBL phenotype, whereas those from French hospitals were significantly associated with urinary tract infections and the wild-type phenotype. Conclusions: MALDI-TOF was found to be a promising tool to identify and differentiate between K. pneumoniae strains according to their phenotypic properties and their epidemiological distribution. This is the first time that MALDI-TOF has been used as a rapid tool for typing K. pneumoniae clinical isolates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Describes the distance learning approach used by the Georgia Institute of Technology's campus, Georgia Tech Lorraine, in Metz, France for electrical and mechanical engineering graduate programs. Use of videotapes in the delivery of the course programs; Disadvantages of using video tapes in delivering courses; Delivery of graduate electrical engineering courses in real-time.