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To reduce total test time and increase the efficiency of statistical analysis of a life-testing experiment adaptive progressive Type-II censoring scheme has been proposed. This paper addresses the statistical inference of the unknown parameters, reliability, and hazard rate functions of logistic exponential distribution under adaptive progressive Type-II censored samples. Maximum likelihood estimates (MLEs) and maximum product spacing estimates (MPSEs) for the model parameters, reliability, and hazard rate functions can not be obtained explicitly, hence these are derived numerically using the Newton–Raphson method. Bayes estimates for the unknown parameters and reliability and hazard rate functions are computed under squared error loss function (SELF) and linear exponential loss function (LLF). It has been observed that the Bayes estimates are not in explicit forms, hence an approximation method such as Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) method is employed. Further, asymptotic confidence intervals (ACIs) and highest posterior density (HPD) credible intervals for the unknown parameters, reliability, and hazard rate functions are constructed. Besides, point and interval Bayesian predictions have been derived for future samples. A Monte Carlo simulation study has been carried out to compare the performance of the proposed estimates. Furthermore, three different optimality criteria have been considered to obtain the optimal censoring plan. Two real-life data sets, one from electronic industry and other one from COVID-19 data set containing the daily death rate from France are re-analyzed to demonstrate the proposed methodology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on day-ahead electricity load forecasting for substations of the distribution network in France; therefore, the corresponding problem lies between the instability of a single consumption and the stability of a countrywide total demand. Moreover, this problem requires to forecast the loads of over one thousand substations; consequently, it belongs to the field of multiple time series forecasting. To that end, the paper applies an adaptive methodology that provided excellent results at a national scale; the idea is to combine generalized additive models with state-space representations. However, extending this methodology to the prediction of over a thousand time series raises a computational issue. It is solved by developing a frugal variant that reduces the number of estimated parameters: forecasting models are estimated only for a few time series and transfer learning is achieved by relying on aggregation of experts. This approach yields a reduction of computational needs and their associated emissions. Several variants are built, corresponding to different levels of parameter transfer, to find the best trade-off between accuracy and frugality. The selected method achieves competitive results compared to individual models. Finally, the paper highlights the interpretability of the models, which is important for operational applications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In his report to the president of the French Republic in November 2012 assessing France's return into the North Atlantic Treaty Organization's (NATO's) military command structure, Hubert Védrine, the former French Minister of Foreign Affairs, noted that France had no interest in leaving it again. His recommendations called for renewed action within the Alliance and the emergence of a European pillar. The timing should have been perfect, with France's draft White Paper on defence and security about to be published. However, at a time when budget cuts prevail, are these recommendations applicable and do they amount to more than just paying lip-service? This article focuses on a one-year period, from November 2012 to the latest debates around the Military Programming Law, reminiscent of Pierre Mendès-France's famous quote that governing is all about making choices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While a rich literature investigates how and why NPOs use social media, research on why they differ in their social media adoption (SMA) is limited. In this paper we examine how NPOs' interorganizational partner portfolio characteristics can enable or constrain their adoption of social media, including blogs and videos, conventional social media (Facebook, Twitter...) and crowd-based platforms (crowdfunding and petitions). Based on a survey distributed to a sample of environmental NPOs in France, results indicate that NPOs having open networks, whose partners are physically distant, and that have more cross-sectoral partners have higher SMA. Network portfolio management can thus make up for a shortage of financial resources to invest in social media. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents an analysis of the impact of the indoor classroom environment on students' learning efficiency. The research is based on a classroom smart monitoring and a questionnaire about the students' assessment of the comfort conditions and learning efficiency. Multisensor devices are used to measure the indoor temperature, relative humidity, and CO2 concentration at the students' desks. Data analysis concerned an investigation of the spatial and temporal variation of the comfort parameters and their correlation with students' assessment of comfort conditions and learning efficiency. The results show a significant spatial variation in the indoor comfort conditions, particularly for temperature and CO2 concentration. The indoor temperature could exceed by up to 5 °C, the temperature threshold limits value in France's public buildings. At the beginning of the class, the learning efficiency correlates well with the students' assessment of comfort conditions. At the end of the class, the results show a weak correlation with both recorded comfort parameters and the students' assessment of the indoor conditions. The results indicate a decrease in learning efficiency during the class. However, students do not mainly attribute this decrease to the degradation in indoor conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Solar Photovoltaic (SPV) technology advancements are primarily aimed at decarbonizing and enhancing the resiliency of the energy grid. Incorporating SPV is one of the ways to achieve the goal of energy efficiency. Because of the nonlinearity, modeling of SPV is a very difficult process. Identification of variables in a lumped electric circuit model is required for accurate modeling of the SPV system. This paper presents a new state-of-the-art control technique based on human artefacts dubbed Drone Squadron Optimization for estimating 15 parameters of a three-diode equivalent model solar PV system. The suggested method simulates a nonlinear relationship between the P–V and I–V performance curves, lowering the difference between experimental and calculated data. To evaluate the adaptive performance in every climatic state, two different test cases with commercial PV cells, RTC France and photo watt-201, are used. The proposed method provides a more accurate parameter estimate. To validate the recommended approach's performance, the data are compared to the results of the most recent and powerful methodologies in the literature. For the RTC and PWP Photo Watt Cell, the DSO technique has the lowest Root Mean Square Error (RMSE) of 6.7776 × 10–4 and 0.002310324 × 10–4, respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on day-ahead electricity load forecasting for substations of the distribution network in France; therefore, the corresponding problem lies between the instability of a single consumption and the stability of a countrywide total demand. Moreover, this problem requires to forecast the loads of over one thousand substations; consequently, it belongs to the field of multiple time series forecasting. To that end, the paper applies an adaptive methodology that provided excellent results at a national scale; the idea is to combine generalized additive models with state-space representations. However, extending this methodology to the prediction of over a thousand time series raises a computational issue. It is solved by developing a frugal variant that reduces the number of estimated parameters: forecasting models are estimated only for a few time series and transfer learning is achieved by relying on aggregation of experts. This approach yields a reduction of computational needs and their associated emissions. Several variants are built, corresponding to different levels of parameter transfer, to find the best trade-off between accuracy and frugality. The selected method achieves competitive results compared to individual models. Finally, the paper highlights the interpretability of the models, which is important for operational applications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction: Trans-fatty acids (TFAs) can be produced either from bio-hydrogenation in the rumen of ruminants or by industrial hydrogenation. While most of TFAs' effects from ruminants are poorly established, there is increasing evidence that high content of industrial TFAs may cause deleterious effects on human health and life span. Material and methods: Indeed, several epidemiological and experimental studies strongly suggest that high content of most TFA isomers could represent a higher risk of developing cardiovascular diseases by a mechanism that lowers the 'good HDL cholesterol' and raises the 'bad LDL cholesterol.' Results: With respect to the general precautionary principle and considering the existence of an international policy consensus regarding the need for public health action, some industrialized countries, such as France, are still not sufficiently involved in preventive strategies that aim to efficiently reduce TFAs content and TFAs consumption and produce alternative healthier fat sources. Conclusion: In this manuscript, we provide an overview about TFAs origins, their use and consumption among French population. We also discuss their potential human health implications as well as the preventive and regulatory measures undertaken in France. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes the geography of multi-dimensional poverty across French communes in 2017. We build an extended data set documenting 7 key dimensions of well-being (income, unemployment, housing, education, civic engagement, life expectancy and air quality) in about 35,000 communes. Life expectancy at commune-level is obtained from an original small-area estimation method combining commune and department-level data. We derive an index of multi-dimensional poverty to provide an unprecedented degree of granularity in the description of spatial inequality and poverty in France. The results show that joint deprivation in at least 5 dimensions of well-being is starkly concentrated among 316 communes, representing as much as 5.2 million inhabitants (7.7% of the French population). About 70% of these people are also in extreme poverty, which suggests that the concepts of multi-dimensional poverty and extreme income poverty significantly overlap. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The use of high energy transients such as Gamma Ray Bursts (GRBs) as probes of the distant universe relies on the close collaboration between space and ground facilities. In this context, the Sino-French mission SVOM has been designed to combine a space and a ground segment and to make the most of their synergy. On the ground, the 1.3 meter robotic telescope COLIBRI, jointly developed by France and Mexico, will quickly point the sources detected by the space hard X-ray imager ECLAIRs, in order to detect and localise their visible/NIR counterpart and alert large telescopes in minutes. COLIBRI is equipped with two visible cameras, called DDRAGO-blue and DDRAGO-red, and an infrared camera, called CAGIRE, designed for the study of high redshift GRBs candidates. Being a low-noise NIR camera mounted at the focus of an alt-azimutal robotic telescope imposes specific requirements on CAGIRE. We describe here the main characteristics of the camera: its optical, mechanical and electronics architecture, the ALFA detector, and the operation of the camera on the telescope. The instrument description is completed by three sections presenting the calibration strategy, an image simulator incorporating known detector effects, and the automatic reduction software for the ramps acquired by the detector. This paper aims at providing an overview of the instrument before its installation on the telescope. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

SEIR (Susceptible–Exposed–Infected–Recovered) approach is a classic modeling method that is frequently used to study infectious diseases. However, in the vast majority of such models transitions from one population group to another are described using the mass-action law. That causes inability to reproduce observable dynamics of an infection such as the incubation period or progression of the disease's symptoms. In this paper, we propose a new approach to simulate the epidemic dynamics based on a system of differential equations with time delays and instant transitions to approximate durations of transition processes more correctly and make model parameters more clear. The suggested approach can be applied not only to Covid-19 but also to the study of other infectious diseases. We utilized it in the development of the delay-based model of the COVID-19 pandemic in Germany and France. The model takes into account testing of different population groups, symptoms progression from mild to critical, vaccination, duration of protective immunity and new virus strains. The stringency index was used as a generalized characteristic of the non-pharmaceutical government interventions in corresponding countries to contain the virus spread. The parameter identifiability analysis demonstrated that the presented modeling approach enables to significantly reduce the number of parameters and make them more identifiable. Both models are publicly available. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By revisiting three empirical qualitative studies, the paper elaborates on conceptual and methodological issues pertaining to clarification of the use of the concept of politicization and "ordinary relationships to politics." The first study was conducted at the end of the 1990s on voluntary associations of young people of foreign descent in the French suburbs; the second was devoted to ordinary relationships to politics among young people in working-class neighborhoods in France; the third involves ongoing fieldwork examining non-profit organizations and their relationship to the state, focusing notably on evangelical non-profits in the Boston area of the USA. Although the research questions were different, they dealt with ordinary relationships to politics (ORP). This notion encompasses two dimensions. On the one hand, the idea that what determines one's relationship to politics is not only political, but also social: that we need to "embed" the study of relationships to politics into social dimensions. This is related to the study of the determination of relationships to politics. On the other hand, the idea that a relationship to politics is not only a relationship to the institutionalized political field, but that we need to adopt a broader definition of what politicization is, in order to grasp its ordinary forms, especially—but not only—when we deal with the working class. In this case, what is at stake is the definition of politicization. Nowadays, there is relative consensus in the literature regarding the determination of relationships to politics, but the definition of what politicization is remains much more controversial. In this paper, I present the terms of this controversy and the value in and limits of the various perspectives and, more specifically, I elaborate on how the changes in the type of fieldwork I conducted, in the national contexts, and the theoretical questions I asked impacted on the way I chose to define politicization. I suggest combining three definitions of politicization: (i) the legitimist or realist conception based on the relationship to the institutional political sphere; (ii) the conception of politicization as the identification of shared problems calling for collective solutions; and finally, (iii) approaching politicization as the readiness to be moved, to consider points of view other than those initially adopted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For many patients, notably among elderly nursing home residents, no plans about end-of-life decisions and palliative care are made. Consequently, when these patients experience life-threatening events, decisions to withhold or withdraw life-support raise major challenges for emergency healthcare professionals. Emergency department premises are not designed for providing the psychological and technical components of end-of-life care. The continuous inflow of large numbers of patients leaves little time for detailed assessments, and emergency department staff often lack training in end-of-life issues. For prehospital medical teams (in France, the physician-staffed mobile emergency and intensive care units known as SMURs), implementing treatment withholding and withdrawal decisions that may have been made before the acute event is not the main focus. The challenge lies in circumventing the apparent contradiction between the need to make immediate decisions and the requirement to set up a complex treatment project that may lead to treatment withholding and/or withdrawal. Laws and recommendations are of little assistance for making treatment withholding and withdrawal decisions in the emergency setting. The French Intensive Care Society (Société de Réanimation de Langue Française, SRLF) and French Society of Emergency Medicine (Société Française de Médecine d'Urgence, SFMU) tasked a panel of emergency physicians and intensivists with developing a document to serve both as a position paper on life-support withholding and withdrawal in the emergency setting and as a guide for professionals providing emergency care. The task force based its work on the available legislation and recommendations and on a review of published studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

SEIR (Susceptible–Exposed–Infected–Recovered) approach is a classic modeling method that is frequently used to study infectious diseases. However, in the vast majority of such models transitions from one population group to another are described using the mass-action law. That causes inability to reproduce observable dynamics of an infection such as the incubation period or progression of the disease's symptoms. In this paper, we propose a new approach to simulate the epidemic dynamics based on a system of differential equations with time delays and instant transitions to approximate durations of transition processes more correctly and make model parameters more clear. The suggested approach can be applied not only to Covid-19 but also to the study of other infectious diseases. We utilized it in the development of the delay-based model of the COVID-19 pandemic in Germany and France. The model takes into account testing of different population groups, symptoms progression from mild to critical, vaccination, duration of protective immunity and new virus strains. The stringency index was used as a generalized characteristic of the non-pharmaceutical government interventions in corresponding countries to contain the virus spread. The parameter identifiability analysis demonstrated that the presented modeling approach enables to significantly reduce the number of parameters and make them more identifiable. Both models are publicly available. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What role does nationality—or the image of a nation—play in how one thinks and receives scientific ideas? This paper investigates the commonly held ideas about "German science" and "French science" in early nineteenth-century France. During the politically turbulent time, the seemingly independent scientific community found itself in a difficult position: first, between the cosmopolitan ideals of scientific community and the invasive political reality, and second, between the popularized image of national differences and the actual comparisons of international scientific ideas. The tension between multiple sets of fictions and realities underscores the fragility of the concept of nationality as a scientific measure. A case study comparing morphological ideas, receptions in France, and the actual scientific texts of J. W. von Goethe and A. P. de Candolle further illustrates this fragility. Goethe and Candolle make an ideal comparative case because they were received in very different lights despite their similar concept of the plant type. Our sentence-classification and visualization methods are applied to their scientific texts, to compare the actual compositions and forms of the texts that purportedly represented German and French sciences. This paper concludes that there was a gap between what French readers assumed they read and what they really read, when it came to foreign scientific texts. The differences between Goethe's and Candolle's texts transcended the perceived national differences between German Romanticism and French Classicism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Fradkin and Seymour (J Comb Theory Ser B 110:19–46, 2015) defined the class of digraphs of bounded independence number as a generalization of the class of tournaments. They argued that the class of digraphs of bounded independence number is structured enough to be exploited algorithmically. In this paper, we further strengthen this belief by showing that several cut problems that admit sub-exponential time parameterized algorithms (a trait uncommon to parameterized algorithms) on tournaments, including Directed Feedback Arc Set, Directed Cutwidth and Optimal Linear Arrangement, also admit such algorithms on digraphs of bounded independence number. Towards this, we rely on the generic approach of Fomin and Pilipczuk (in: Proceedings of the Algorithms—ESA 2013—21st Annual European Symposium, Sophia Antipolis, France, September 2–4, 2013, pp. 505–516, 2013), where to get the desired algorithms, it is enough to bound the number of k-cuts in digraphs of bounded independence number by a sub-exponential FPT function (Fomin and Pilipczuk bounded the number of k-cuts in transitive tournaments). Specifically, our main technical contribution is a combinatorial result that proves that the yes-instances of the problems (defined above) have a sub-exponential number of k-cuts. We prove this bound by using a combination of chromatic coding, inductive reasoning and exploiting the structural properties of these digraphs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the recent years, fire departments started to build databases containing detailed information about their interventions during fires, road accidents, and other types of incidents. Their goal is to invest this information using data analysis methods in order to better understand the trends of certain events. This could help them enhance the management of their allocated resources, which leads to a reduction in the operational costs, increase in efficiency and the overall intervention speed. Therefore, in this research paper, we investigate the possibility of predicting future incidents using machine learning algorithms that are trained on a set of data containing information on almost 200,000 interventions that happened during the last 6 years. These data, provided by the fire department in the region of Doubs, France, were not sufficient to detect patterns. Thus, we have imported additional information from external resources that we thought it would improve the accuracy of the predictions. Finally, we tested multiple machine learning algorithms and we compared their results, aiming to determine which algorithm performs better. The results look promising as we were able to predict the number of interventions for each 3 hours block for a whole year, with an acceptable error margin. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Context: Documenting trends in the health impacts of ambient temperature is key to supporting adaptation strategies to climate change. This paper explores changes in the temperature-related mortality in 18 French urban centers between 1970 and 2015. Method: A multicentric time-series design with time-varying distributed lag nonlinear models was adopted to model the shape of the relationship and assess temporal changes in risks and impacts. Results: The general shape of the temperature-mortality relationship did not change over time, except for an increasing risk at very low percentiles and a decreasing risk at very high percentiles. The relative risk at the 99.9th percentile compared to the 50th percentile of the 1970–2015 temperature distribution decreased from 2.33 [95% confidence interval (CI): 1.95:2.79] in 1975 to 1.33 [95% CI: 1.14:1.55] in 2015. Between 1970 and 2015, 302,456 [95% CI: 292,723:311,392] deaths were attributable to non-optimal temperatures, corresponding to 5.5% [95% CI: 5.3:5.6] of total mortality. This burden decreased progressively, representing 7.2% [95% CI: 6.7:7.7] of total mortality in the 1970s to 3.4% [95% CI: 3.2:3.6] in the 2000s. However, the contribution of hot temperatures to this burden (higher than the 90th percentile) increased. Discussion: Despite the decreasing relative risk, the fraction of mortality attributable to extreme heat increased between 1970 and 2015, thus highlighting the need for proactive adaptation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Elevated nitrate from human activity causes ecosystem and economic harm globally. The factors that control the spatiotemporal dynamics of riverine nitrate concentration remain difficult to describe and predict. We analyzed nitrate concentration from 4450 sites throughout France to group sites that exhibit similar trend and seasonal behaviors during 2010–2017 and relate these dynamics to catchment characteristics. We employed a latent-variable, Bayesian mixture of harmonic regressions model to infer site clustering based on multi-year trend and annual cycle amplitude and phase. We examined clustering patterns and relationships among nitrate level, trend, and seasonality parameters. Cluster membership probabilities were governed by continuous, latent variables that were informed with seven classes of covariates encompassing geology, hydrology, and land use. To relate interpretable parameters to the covariates, we modeled amplitude and phase separately in a novel framework employing a bivariate phase regression with the projected normal distribution. The analysis identified regional regimes of nitrate dynamics, including trend classifications. This approach can reveal general patterns that transcend small-scale heterogeneity, complementing site-level assessments to inform regional- to national-level progress in water quality. Supplementary materials accompanying this paper appear on-line. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The magnitudes recorded in seismic catalogues are subject to uncertainties that can have a significant impact when estimating the parameters of seismic recurrence models. In this paper, we propose an innovative approach based on a Poisson point process of dimension 2 that models both the magnitude hazard and the associated uncertainty. We define estimators of the parameters of the Gutenberg Richter model that maximize the likelihood of the data. We apply the approach to the Alps region in France and we compare it to other approaches proposed in the literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we introduce the 3D physics-based numerical simulations (PBS) of ground motion during the Nov 11, 2019, MW 4.9 Le Teil earthquake, which occurred in a low-to-moderate seismicity area in the South-East of France, within the Rhône river valley, which hosts several operating nuclear installations. The numerical code SPEED, developed at Politecnico di Milano, Italy, was used to produce the PBS. After introducing the criteria to construct the numerical model, based on the relatively limited data available, a numerical convergence test was made to identify the frequency range for accurate simulations. Furthermore, the performance of the numerical results against the available strong motion records was assessed quantitatively using Goodness-of-fit (GoF) measures. According to the GoF scores, a good-to-excellent agreement was found on the horizontal components up to 8 Hz, showing that, even without a very detailed 3D numerical model of the medium, that would imply detailed knowledge of the basin shape, of the bedrock-to-basin impedance ratio, as well as of the damping ratio in the basin and its dependence on frequency, the PBS may provide realistic broadband predictions of earthquake ground motion. Nevertheless, as shown by the poorer performance on the vertical component, the high-frequency limitations of PBS, also in relation to the energy radiated by the kinematic source model, is still an issue to be carefully addressed. In spite of these limitations, the results obtained in this work demonstrate that PBS, if suitably calibrated and validated, can be either an alternative or a useful complement to empirical ground motion models, especially in those cases where the region- and site-specific features of ground shaking, including near-source conditions, are typically not accounted for by ergodic empirical models, such as for the seismic risk evaluation of large urban areas and/or of strategic structures, infrastructures and industrial plants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the acknowledged benefits of crop diversification, the transition towards more diversified cropping systems needs to be supported, mainly due to socio-technical lock-ins favoring major dominant crop species. This calls for the development of new approaches to support the design of locally tailored diversified cropping systems. This paper aims to present an original participatory and multi-actor design approach, developed to support the introduction of camelina (Camelina sativa) into the cropping systems of northern France and to provide some insights about the characteristics, the specificities, and the limits of this approach to support its use and adaptation to other contexts. For 3 years, and in connection with the development of an oilseed biorefinery, we gathered a variety of actors (farmers, advisors, engineers in agronomy, researchers, and industrialists) to locally support the introduction of camelina in the cropping systems. First, we illustrate the diversity of the modalities that have been collectively imagined to introduce and manage camelina in the local cropping systems. Then, we describe the originality and the diversity of the knowledge produced on camelina, especially during the assessment of some of these modalities within on-farm experiments. Finally, drawing on concepts and theories from design sciences, we show that (i) the pre-existence of networks of actors, (ii) the rationale involvement of the actors, (iii) the implementation of a situated design process fueled by action and distributed among actors, (iv) the sharing and the circulation of knowledge among a diversity of actors involved in the production and use of the new crop, and (v) the implementation of an effective network management contributed to foster the three key elements that we identified as crucial to support crop diversification, namely, the production of actionable knowledge, the exploration of new ideas/concepts, and the active participation of a diversity of actors of the agri-food system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the era of positivism and anticlericalism of France's Belle Époque, scientist Alexis Carrel stood in stark contrast as one preoccupied with his faith and its relation to scientific scrutiny. Despite his early adult agnosticism, he sought proof of the divine and chose verification of the miraculous cures reported from the shrine at Lourdes, France. It so happened that on his first visit there, he encountered a truly remarkable "cure" of a young woman in the terminal stages of tubercular peritonitis. On a return visit, for the second time, he witnessed the restoration of sight to a blind child. Throughout the rest of his life, Carrel was struck by the proximity of the supernatural to corporeal interactions. He ultimately found a place for his faith as a parallel pathway and not in juxtaposition to the scientific. This paper chronicles Carrel's evolution of belief and reconciliation of faith and science. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this paper is to present the results of a study that draws upon a collaborative research strategy and has two main objectives: 1) Translating and adapting into French the Measure of Victim Empowerment Related to Safety (MOVERS scale) (Goodman et al. Psychology of Violence, 5(4), 355-366, 2015a); 2) Validating the French version of the MOVERS scale in a population of French-Canadian women receiving shelter services. The French-Canadian MOVERS (FCM) was administered to 189 women receiving shelter services in the province of Québec (Canada). The factorial structure, reliability and validity of the FCM were tested. This paper highlights that the FCM replicates the three dimensions found in the original version (Goodman et al. Psychology of Violence, 5(4), 355-366, 2015a), displays significant correlations with measures of depression, anxiety and stress, self-esteem, perceived social support, satisfaction with life and self-efficacy, and has overall good reliability estimates. The FCM is a valid and reliable scale to assess safety-related empowerment among women receiving shelter services. Furthermore, the scale provides interesting opportunities to shelter workers, which will be discussed in the paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Today, the understanding of environmental concerns is of great significance, making it desirable for children to investigate the scientific concepts underlying a growing list of emerging environmental issues. This paper deals with young children's preconceptions. The authors have stressed the importance of investigating children's ideas at an early stage, with some of these ideas leading to knowledge far removed from scientific knowledge. Our study focused on the knowledge about organic matter processes among five-year-old children who were only exposed to informal learning within the context of home waste management. We used semi-structured interviews with 48 young children to determine their knowledge about the organic matter cycling in composters. The determination of five significant stages for a global understanding of the cycle of organic matter and the construction of three levels of formulation have allowed us to conclude that young children are able to understand scientific processes involved in composting in the context of their family practice of organic waste management. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The MétéEAU Nappes water-resource-management tool is presented. It is usable on the aquifer or part-of-aquifer scale for real-time observation of the state of the groundwater resource, and it is already operating in France. This online decision support tool is also able to predict the state of the resource in the short- and mid-terms. The paper explains the use of the tool in a case study in the Authion Valley, in the north-west of France, chosen for its context of tension surrounding the groundwater resource resulting from high volumes of abstraction for irrigation. The results of the simulation highlight the advantages of MétéEAU Nappes as a tool for prediction and simulation of the state of the groundwater resource. The results also show the advantages of this type of tool for water resource management, such as supplying local actors with reliable and real-time observations of the aquifer and providing forecasts to anticipate possible water shortage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

At the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic, several countries declared “states of exception,” that is, authorized legal devices that, in the face of circumstances deemed catastrophic, permit the implementation of extraordinary measures and the temporary suspension of some rights in order to restore the previous state of affairs as soon as possible. This paper offers a comparative textual analysis of the different states of exception declared in the USA, France, and Spain. I argue that these texts constitute a privileged site to explore how prevalent global political logics and mainstream discourses on illness are interwoven. Regarding the global political logics in play, I hold that these declarations constitute an instantiation of democracy’s autoimmune character; it attacks itself in order to protect itself. Regarding mainstream discourses on illness, I explore how illness is regarded as a threat to one’s self (by something seemingly other) and the notion that therapy must consist of securing the self’s triumph over anything seemingly other. This twofold analysis reveals that an aporetic dialectic between self and other—as regards politics and illness—operates in these declarations, most likely because it is, in fact, one and the same dialectic, upon which Western epistemology rests. Furthermore, I suggest that these texts reflect and promote these dominant logics, contributing to shape human relationships around the globe in a certain dangerous way. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Emergency departments (EDs) have a key role in the public health system. They are facing a constant growth of their volume. Forecasting the daily volume is a major tool to adapt the allocation of resources. In this paper, we focus on pediatric EDs. They are specific by their strong seasonal variation, determined by the academic pace. The main contribution of this paper is to integrate the effects of this pace to the annual seasonality. We also tried out to improve the daily forecasting by forecasting the week means of the flow first. We trained and tested these models specifically on the pediatric EDs of Paris university hospital trust. For the eight pediatric EDs gathered, on average for the years 2016 to 2019, we forecasted the daily volume with a Mean Absolute Percentage Error (MAPE) of 6.6% for a 7-days forecasting, 7.1% for a 14-days forecasting and 7.6% for a 28-days forecasting. Account of rhythm allows a performance increase, with results respectively 7%, 10.1% and 8.4% better relatively to a baseline model based on a periodic regression on the weeks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Our aim is to determine the more significant parameters acting on the water vapour condensation in a partly closed structure, submitted to external constraints (temperature and humidity). These constraints locally lead to condensation of the water vapour, initially contained in the air of the volume and/or on the walls. Previously we have presented the results obtained in two papers. In the first one [1], by using a simplified model in which the inside bottom wall was remained dry, we highlighted the role of external parameters such as the Relative humidity RH and the Temperature T. In the second paper [2] comparison was made between the role played by the presence of a small layer of water on the structure bottom wall and the results previously obtained in the case of a dry bottom. From these results it appeared that condensed water quantities depend on: 1) dimensions of the structure, 2) the air humidity and its renewing under the action of the outside-inside thermal gradient, 3) the phase (φ = T/RH) between thermal and hydrometric conditions. These results highlighted that peculiar conditions are needed to obtain a maximum of condensation. On this basis, by using our modelling and by digitizing a lot of meteorological data, locally registered, we have attempted to determine the quantity of condensed atmospheric water vapour which can be obtained inside a similar structure. Now we present the results obtained by using the meteorological data recorded during the year 1999 by Beysens and al [3]. Comparison is made with the quantities of condensed water vapour values estimated by this author and which could be obtained inside the Arles-sur-Tech sarcophagus (France (66)). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of the paper is to propose two new procedures that deal with overfitting problem using neural techniques for variable selection and business failure prediction. The first procedure, called HVS-AUC, is based simultaneously on (i) the backward search, (ii) the HVS measure (Heuristic for Variable Selection), and (iii) the AUC criterion (Area Under Curve). The second procedure, called forward-AUC, is based on (i) the forward search and (ii) the AUC criterion. Using a sample of bankrupt and non-bankrupt firms in France, the implementation of the procedures using neural networks shows that the profitability, the repayment capacity, the taxation, and the importance of investment have a strong explanatory power in bankruptcy prediction. These procedures also provide more parsimonious and more efficient models compared to Linear Discriminant Analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Increasingly, French citizens are prosecuted for the 'crime of solidarity': hosting undocumented migrants in defiance of state laws forbidding it (and subsequently named 'solidarity delinquents'). This paper explores contemporary 'crimes of solidarity' by investigating why indignant subjects defy the state and, in so doing, constitute themselves as citizens. Drawing on the concepts of hospitality and governmentality, the paper examines France's vexed relation with hospitality alongside a particular mode of governing the state as a home ('domopolitics') in relation to citizenship and migrancy. Hospitality as a governmentality rationalises processes of classification and identification that determine which mobile presences in the home are least disruptive to its social and moral order. Yet French 'solidarity delinquents' are savvy to the instrumentalisation and politicisation of hospitality. I show they too have a use for politicising hospitality and themselves. Mobilising these ideas through Isin's (2008) 'acts of citizenship' framework, I capture a citizenly response to domopolitical rule: hospitality becomes the terrain upon which republican citizens demonstrate liberté, égalité and especially fraternité, will not be suspended in the home. More broadly, the hospitality and citizen identity that is at present claimed must be seen in one crucial respect: state and dissident see in hospitality a tactic for realising a conception of Frenchness and citizenship, albeit in two competing, and perhaps irreconcilable, ways. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The global trend of increasing participation rates, coupled with regional goals to increase participation in higher education, such as the European Union's Europe 2020 Strategy target of 40% of all young people to hold a tertiary education qualification by 2020, has led to a strain on public resources, and a review of funding priorities in mass higher education systems, in some cases prioritising funding towards an elite. Reforms within European higher education systems have been further prompted by the lacklustre performance of European higher education institutions in international university rankings. The paper aims to contextualise French reforms within the broader European Union agenda for the modernisation of higher education, and its focus on greater differentiation, in order to assess how this has been disseminated and translated in the French context, and how it breaks with the French egalitarian tradition. Through a policy document analysis of French and EU strategies for higher education and research and political communications and data extracted from the Ministry of Higher Education, Research and Innovation's Excellence Initiatives scheme, the paper seeks to understand whether France is creating a multi-tiered higher education system for which no precedent has existed before. However, because of the sui generis structure of French higher education that makes it difficult to classify within the various structural models of higher education, policy implications for other countries will not be discussed. The French case will provide insights on the converging trends of globalisation, and the agency of institutional carriers such as the European Commission in interpreting and disseminating particular strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Coherent elastic neutrino–nucleus scattering ( CE ν NS ) offers a unique way to study neutrino properties and to search for new physics beyond the Standard Model. Nuclear reactors are promising sources to explore this process at low energies since they deliver large fluxes of anti-neutrinos with typical energies of a few MeV. In this paper, a new-generation experiment to study CE ν NS is described. The NUCLEUS experiment will use cryogenic detectors which feature an unprecedentedly low-energy threshold and a time response fast enough to be operated under above-ground conditions. Both sensitivity to low-energy nuclear recoils and a high event rate tolerance are stringent requirements to measuring CE ν NS of reactor anti-neutrinos. A new experimental site, the Very-Near-Site (VNS), at the Chooz nuclear power plant in France is described. The VNS is located between the two 4.25 GW th reactor cores and matches the requirements of NUCLEUS. First results of on-site measurements of neutron and muon backgrounds, the expected dominant background contributions, are given. In this paper a preliminary experimental set-up with dedicated active and passive background reduction techniques and first background estimations are presented. Furthermore, the feasibility to operate the detectors in coincidence with an active muon veto at shallow overburden is studied. The paper concludes with a sensitivity study pointing out the physics potential of NUCLEUS at the Chooz nuclear power plant. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reviews real estate price estimation in France, a market that has received little attention. We compare seven popular machine learning techniques by proposing a different approach that quantifies the relevance of location features in real estate price estimation with high and fine levels of granularity. We take advantage of a newly available open dataset provided by the French government that contains 5 years of historical data of real estate transactions. At a high level of granularity, we obtain important differences regarding the models' prediction powers between cities with medium and high standards of living (precision differences beyond 70% in some cases). At a low level of granularity, we use geocoding to add precise geographical location features to the machine learning algorithm inputs. We obtain important improvements regarding the models' forecasting powers relative to models trained without these features (improvements beyond 50% for some forecasting error measures). Our results also reveal that neural networks and random forest techniques particularly outperform other methods when geocoding features are not accounted for, while random forest, adaboost and gradient boosting perform well when geocoding features are considered. For identifying opportunities in the real estate market through real estate price prediction, our results can be of particular interest. They can also serve as a basis for price assessment in revenue management for durable and non-replenishable products such as real estate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The next generation of water Cherenkov neutrino telescopes in the Mediterranean Sea are under construction offshore France (KM3NeT/ORCA) and Sicily (KM3NeT/ARCA). The KM3NeT/ORCA detector features an energy detection threshold which allows to collect atmospheric neutrinos to study flavour oscillation. This paper reports the KM3NeT/ORCA sensitivity to this phenomenon. The event reconstruction, selection and classification are described. The sensitivity to determine the neutrino mass ordering was evaluated and found to be 4.4 σ if the true ordering is normal and 2.3 σ if inverted, after 3 years of data taking. The precision to measure Δ m 32 2 and θ 23 were also estimated and found to be 85. 10 - 6 eV 2 and (- 3.1 + 1.9) ∘ for normal neutrino mass ordering and, 75. 10 - 6 eV 2 and (- 7.0 + 2.0) ∘ for inverted ordering. Finally, a unitarity test of the leptonic mixing matrix by measuring the rate of tau neutrinos is described. Three years of data taking were found to be sufficient to exclude event rate variations larger than 20% at 3 σ level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Early detection of cervical lesions, accurate diagnosis of cervical lesions, and timely and effective therapy can effectively avoid the occurrence of cervical cancer or improve the survival rate of patients. In this paper, the spectra of tissue sections of cervical inflammation (n = 60), CIN (cervical intraepithelial neoplasia) I (n = 30), CIN II (n = 30), CIN III (n = 30), cervical squamous cell carcinoma (n = 30), and cervical adenocarcinoma (n = 30) were collected by a confocal Raman micro-spectrometer (LabRAM HR Evolution, Horiba France SAS, Villeneuve d'Ascq, France). The Raman spectra of six kinds of cervical tissues were analyzed, the dominant Raman peaks of different kinds of tissues were summarized, and the differences in chemical composition between the six tissue samples were compared. An independent sample t test (p ≤ 0.05) was used to analyze the difference of average relative intensity of Raman spectra of six types of cervical tissues. The difference of relative intensity of Raman spectra of six kinds of tissues can reflect the difference of biochemical components in six kinds of tissues and the characteristic of biochemical components in different kinds of tissues. The classification models of cervical inflammation, CIN I, CIN II, CIN III, cervical squamous cell carcinoma, and cervical adenocarcinoma were established by using a support vector machine (SVM) algorithm. Six types of cervical tissues were classified and identified with an overall diagnostic accuracy of 85.7%. This study laid a foundation for the application of Raman spectroscopy in the clinical diagnosis of cervical precancerous lesions and cervical cancer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the last few years, an increasing number of agricultural R&D actors have sought to discover and get to know farmers' practices that they consider as innovative, unconventional, or promising. We refer to these approaches, all of which aim to support the design of farming systems, as 'farmer innovation tracking'. There is still a lack of knowledge, however, about the specificities of the approaches adopted to track innovations and how they contribute to design processes. To explore these questions, we studied 14 initiatives in France led by actors from different R&D networks. We analysed the data collected using agronomy and design science concepts. Three outcomes emerge from this work. (1) We shed light on the common features of innovation tracking. We outline five stages that structure all the approaches: formulating an innovation tracking project, unearthing innovations, learning about them, analysing them, and generating agronomic content. (2) We characterize six contributions of farmer innovation tracking to design processes: giving rise to creative anomalies, shedding light on systemic mechanisms to fuel design processes on other farms, uncovering research questions, stimulating design in orphan fields of innovation, circulating innovation concepts, and connecting farmer-designers with each other. (3) Finally, we highlight three tracking strategies: the targeted tracking of proven practices, the targeted tracking of innovations under development, and the exploratory tracking of proven practices. This article is the first to propose a theorization of the farmer innovation tracking approaches, thus enriching the agronomic foundations supporting farming system design. The purpose of our paper is not to provide a turnkey method, but to highlight concepts, mechanisms, and points of reference for actors who might wish to develop farmer innovation tracking in different contexts in the future. By revealing their contributions to design processes, this article seeks to contribute to the institutionalization of innovation tracking. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Fracture density is an important parameter for characterizing fractured reservoirs. Stochastic object-based simulation algorithms that generate fracture networks commonly rely on a fracture density to populate the reservoir zones with individual fracture surfaces. Reservoirs, including fracture corridors, represent particular challenges in petroleum reservoir studies. Indeed, it is difficult to identify fracture corridor zones objectively and precisely along one-dimensional well data, which are characterized by high fracture densities compared to diffuse fractures. To estimate fracture density, a common practice is to graphically depict only fracture corridors on fracture cumulative intensity curves. In this paper, an approach is proposed to formalize this technique using hypothesis testing. This method precisely compartmentalizes the well data into several zones having specific fracture densities. The method consists of the following steps: (i) dividing the diagram into zones depending on a priori drastic changes in density, (ii) computing the local accurate fracture density for each zone and (iii) clustering the zones characterized by similar densities statistically. The key point is to couple regression and hypothesis testing. The regression aims at computing local average fracture density and the hypothesis testing aims at clustering zones for which the densities are statistically the most similar. The proposed approach is dedicated to one-dimensional fracture surveys, such as well data and outcrop scanlines. First, a synthetic case study is presented to prove the ability to highlight changes in fracture density. Second, the procedure is applied on a scanline dataset collected in a quarry (Calvisson, SE France) to show the usefulness of characterizing fracture corridors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In post-mining regions with seismic hazard, timely decision making for risk management faces the challenge of quick and reliable detection and location of seismic events. As a response to the increasing density of monitoring stations, generating large volumes of seismic data, automatic, full waveform-based methods have been developed in recent years in global seismology. Such methods often cannot be directly applied to post-mining monitoring with a limited station coverage, as it is the case when temporarily networks are installed as an emergency response. In this paper we propose a new methodology that bridges this gap and enables the application of a full waveform, backprojection based method (BackTrackBB) to data of sparse network. The methodology was successfully tested on an abandoned and flooded underground coalmine in South-eastern France. Steps preceding BackTrackBB application were implemented in order to remove the coherent noise that otherwise results in numerous false detections. First results indicate that seismic activity in the study area is controlled by water level variation within former room-and-pillar mine works and fault segments (re)activation below them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores factors that influenced the quality of stay of Chinese-speaking mobile students in France, as the living experience abroad is one of the most-cited difficulties for international students. For practicality, we sieve through previous researches to identify 20 factors (grouped into 4 Dimensions: Personal Dimension Teacher's Effectiveness Dimension, Campus Environment Dimension, and Daily Environment Dimension), which most likely correlated with the quality of the stay of mobile Chinese-speaking students in France. We adopt the DANP (DEMATEL-based ANP) model, i.e., combining the Decision Making and Trial Evaluation Laboratory (DEMATEL) method and the Analysis Network Process (ANP), to construct the Influential Network Relation Maps, identifying the hierarchical structure among the factors and the dimensions. We find that the "Teacher's Effectiveness" is the most influential dimension to the other 3 dimension. Our research can provide more insights on the French educational system improvement, and help define a more effective policy strategy focus. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The hype surrounding the emergence of nanotechnology proved extremely effective to raise public attention and controversies in the early 2000s. A proactive attitude prevailed resulting in the integration of social scientists upstream at the research level, research programs on Ethical, Legal and Societal Impacts (ELSI), and various public engagement initiatives such as nanojury and citizen conferences. Twenty years later, what happened to the promises of SHS integration and public engagement in nanotechnology? Was it part of the hype, one of the many promises made by the champions of nanotechnology initiatives that never materialized? As a contribution to this broad question, this paper focuses on public engagement initiatives in France and ventures some general reflections on their fate. I will first report, from an insider's perspective, the public debates conducted by a civil society organization VivAgora, in the national context of fierce controversies (2005–2009). Then I will describe the permanent forum NanoRESP opened in 2013 when nano controversies waned out. On the basis of this case study, I will argue that the STS ideal of co-production of science and society gradually gave way to a more modest co-learning process between stakeholders in the 2010s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The COVID-19 pandemic is one of the defining events of our time. National Governments responded to the global crisis by implementing mobility restrictions to slow down the spread of the virus. To assess the impact of those policies on human mobility, we perform a massive comparative analysis on geolocalized data from 13 M Facebook users in France, Italy, and the UK. We find that lockdown generally affects national mobility efficiency and smallworldness—i.e., a substantial reduction of long-range connections in favor of local paths. The impact, however, differs among nations according to their mobility infrastructure. We find that mobility is more concentrated in France and UK and more distributed in Italy. In this paper we provide a framework to quantify the substantial impact of the mobility restrictions. We introduce a percolation model mimicking mobility network disruption and find that node persistence in the percolation process is significantly correlated with the economic and demographic characteristics of countries: areas showing higher resilience to mobility disruptions are those where Value Added per Capita and Population Density are high. Our methods and findings provide important insights to enhance preparedness for global critical events and to incorporate resilience as a relevant dimension to estimate the socio-economic consequences of mobility restriction policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Assessing seismic risk in low-to-moderate seismic activity areas like French mainland is a challenge. In these areas, the estimation of large earthquake hazard calls for models driven by sparse observation data and interpretative seismic knowledge. This leads models used in probabilistic seismic hazard assessment (PSHA) and declustering algorithms to large epistemic uncertainties that are overrepresented due to the large amount of parameters used in it. To concentrate epistemic uncertainties into one single method, we intend to limit the number of parameters under consideration by using the non-parametric inter-event time method. This method is empirical and needs a lot of data to be accurate. In the context of sparse large earthquake data, this paper proposes an implementation of the inter-event time method that ensures the stability of main shock proportions for sparse seismic data. We call this implementation magnitude of inferred main shock proportion (MIMP). This method is applied to the historical French seismic catalogue. We use a Monte Carlo Markov Chain to sample the whole space of magnitude uncertainties contained in this catalogue. We produce a set of equiprobable main shock proportion–magnitude and frequency–magnitude distributions. Results are discussed in the light of reference works published in the literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The terrorist attack of July 14, 2016 in Nice (France) was a devastating event. A man voluntarily drove a truck into a crowd gathered for the fireworks display on the seaside "Promenade des Anglais," plowing pedestrians down over more than 2 km before being shot dead. At the time of this report, a total of 86 casualties and more than 1200 formal complaints for physical and psychological injuries have been recorded. The aim of this work is to describe the forensic management of this event and its immediate aftermath. This paper reaffirms the basic tenets of disaster management: a single place of work, teamwork in times of crisis, a single communication channel with families and the media, and the validation of the identifications by a multidisciplinary commission. This paper highlights other essential aspects of the organization of the forensic effort put in place after the Nice attack: the contribution of the police at the crime scene, the cooperation between the disaster victim identification (DVI) team, and the forensic pathologists at the morgue, applying the identification (ID) process to unconscious victims in the intensive care unit, the input of volunteers, and the logistics associated with the management of the aftermath of the event. All of the victims were positively identified within 4 and a half days. For the first time in such a paper, the central role of medical students in the immediate aftermath of the disaster is outlined. The need to address the possible psychological trauma of the non-medical and even the medical staff taking part in the forensic effort is also reaffirmed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Part of the international reflection on the use of history in mathematics teaching consists in a quest of frameworks and models suitable for empirical studies. Following this demand, this paper explores the way Balacheff’s cKȼ model, a model taken from the didactics of mathematics, can be used in the analysis of learning at student level. In the first part of this paper, Balacheff’s cKȼ model (conceptions, knowledge, ȼoncepts) is shortly presented, and in the second part, the relationship between the epistemological background of the model and the use of the history of mathematics is explored in order to show a possible suitableness. The third part addresses an example of a school activity (about ancient Indian geometry) in which the model is applied and the historical issues clarified. Questioning the role of problems both in the cKȼ model and in the use of history, the last part shows how a study at the students’ conception level enlightens the way in which historical elements can interact with contemporary mathematical learning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Monitoring vine water status is a major issue for vineyard management because water constraints impact both the quality and the quantity of the harvest. Existing methods are often costly and complex to implement. ApeX-Vigne is a free mobile application developed to facilitate the collection and geolocation of 50 vine apex observations to characterise vine shoot growth and classify it into 3 growth categories. The application also provides the user with a simple estimate of vine water status based on shoot growth. This paper presents the results obtained over two seasons (2019 and 2020) after the launch of the Apex-Vigne application and its use over a large wine producing region in the south of France. An existing method was adapted for evaluating the interest of the application based on the number of installations and uninstallations. The results showed that the application had more than 1200 downloads and 6000 observations made in the 2020 season. Examples from the commercially collected data showed that ApeX-Vigne can be used as a tool for characterizing water stress at within-field and inter-field scales. Finally, it was also demonstrated that by enabling the massive and centralized collection of spatial field and within-field scale observations of shoot growth, the ApeX-Vigne data was able to characterise the spatial structure of vine water status at the regional scale. Access to this new source of information offers opportunities for the management of water resources at a regional scale as well as for site- and vineyard-specific management. These results also raised new research questions on the joint use of this new source of spatial data with other sources of high spatial resolution information. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Soft soil subjected to cyclic loading typically exhibits an increase in excess pore pressure under undrained condition which brings the soil to an overconsolidated state. Then, under a subsequent large number of cycles (e.g. more than one million) which also takes time, the creep at overconsolidated state influences the cyclic effect and thus results in a complicated long-term undrained behavior. This paper aims to clarify this long-term undrained behavior of overconsolidated clay. The reconstituted samples are prepared from natural samples retrieved in the north of France. First, the shear strength characteristics along monotonic triaxial stress paths are identified. Then load control cyclic tests on overconsolidated specimens are conducted in fully saturated and undrained conditions. Small cyclic deviatoric stresses are applied in order to investigate more particularly the behavior under a very large number of cycles, during which an unusual pore pressure evolution is observed. To explain this, undrained triaxial creep tests are performed on reconstituted specimens with different values of OCRs under some specified stress states. The evolutions of axial strain, excess pore pressure, stress ratio, stress path, plastic strain rates and stress dilatancy during undrained creep are discussed. The additional undrained creep tests also show that two processes are simultaneously acting in a competitive manner: increase in the pore pressure due to the cyclic loading and decrease in the pore pressure because of creep. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In karst catchments where only sparse temporal monitoring is performed, it is generally difficult to correctly assess the overall hydrodynamics of the basin. However, sparse temporal spring-discharge data may contain information of major importance for the characterization of such catchments, especially when sparse spring-discharge data over a long period are available and combined with higher frequency discharge and/or piezometric-level data. This paper proposes a methodology for the characterization and hydrodynamic modeling of karst catchments by coupling sparse temporal data of discharge at a karstic spring over a 30-year measurement period, with higher frequency (i.e. hourly) data of hydrodynamic (piezometry, discharge), physicochemical (temperature, electrical conductivity) and meteorological data over a short monitoring period of 21 months. The study area is the Oeillal spring catchment, one of the main outlets of the Fontfroide-Montredon limestone aquifer located at the border of the Narbonne-Sigean sedimentary basin, southern France. The present study focuses on the use of numerical tools such as time-series analysis (recession analysis, auto-correlation and cross-correlation analysis) coupled with a lumped-parameter modeling approach, to assess the hydrodynamic behaviour of the karst system. The main results of the study highlight the necessity to couple the results from lumped-parameter rainfall-runoff modeling with results from high-resolution time-series analysis to evaluate the physical significance of the model, since classical numerical performance criteria such as the Nash-Sutcliff efficiency, Kling-Gupta efficiency and balance error, can be poorly estimated when only subsampled time series exist for model calibration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]