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Landscape configuration and composition can influence the spatial distribution of species. Cross-scale interactions may exist when multiscale effects interplay to shape species’ distribution patterns. We investigated how the spatial distribution of a semiaquatic mammal, muskrat (Ondatra zibethicus), is influenced by local-scale resource characteristics. We also assessed how fetch, the unobstructed distance wind can travel across water, influences fine-scale habitat use by muskrats. We used 2 years of presence-absence surveys (2015–2016) at 71 wetland sites to evaluate the spatial distribution of muskrats in a lacustrine system in Minnesota, USA. We expected site occupancy and colonization to be positively associated with the amount of Typha x glauca (a rapidly establishing invasive hybrid cattail species) at sites, and negatively associated with fetch impact, water depths, and open water areas. As expected, sites with greater coverage of T. x glauca, shallower water depths, and less open water had greater initial occupancy probabilities. Muskrats were more likely to colonize fetch-impacted sites if there were also greater coverages of T. x glauca present. The distribution and intensity of fetch, dictated by the watershed-scale configuration of upland landscapes, influenced site colonization by muskrats. Our results suggest that this landscape-scale effect is mediated by the amount of T. x glauca present at much finer scales. This cross-scale interaction may facilitate distribution expansions of wetland-obligate species into otherwise unsuitable habitats.

In this work, we present experimental results on the behavior of liquid water at megabar pressure. The experiment was performed using the HIPER (High-Intensity Plasma Experimental Research) laser facility, a uniaxial irradiation chamber of GEKKO XII (GXII) at the Institute of Laser Engineering (ILE), and the PHELIX at GSI (GSI Helmholtz Centre for Heavy Ion Research), a single-beam high-power laser facility, to launch a planar shock into solid multilayered water samples. Equation-of-state data of water (H2O) are obtained in the pressure range 0.50–4.6 Mbar by tuning the laser-drive parameters. The Hugoniot parameters (pressure, density, etc.) and the shock temperature were simultaneously determined by using VISAR and SOP as diagnostic tools and quartz as the standard material for impedance mismatch experiments. Finally, our experimental results are compared with hydrodynamic simulations tested with different equations of state, showing good compatibility with tabulated SESAME tables for water., The authors would like to acknowledge the support of the laser technical team at GEKKO XII (ILE) and PHELIX (GSI). This work received funding from the Euratom Research and Training Program 2014–2018 and 2019-2020 (Grant agreement no. 633053). The involved teams were operated within the framework of the Enabling Research Project ENR-IFE19.CEA-01, Study of Direct Drive and Shock Ignition for IFE: Theory, Simulations, Experiments, Diagnostics Development. JIHT RAS team members were supported by the Ministry of Science and Higher Education of the Russian Federation (State Assignment no. 075-00460-21-00).

This paper deals with the optimization of the hyperthermia treatment of skin cancer, with gold nanoshells loaded in the tumor. The physical problem involves a one-dimensional bioheat transfer problem, coupled to a radiation problem for the laser propagation within a multi-layered medium that includes several tissues. The corresponding bioheat transfer problem is governed by Pennes' equation, while the laser radiation propagation in the tissues is modelled with the diffusion δ-P1 approximation. The solution of the direct problem was obtained by finite volumes and verified with an analytic solution, as well as with the Matlab function pdepe. The thermal decomposition in the tissues was modelled with an Arrhenius equation, while the objective function was given by a quadratic form involving the difference between the predicted and the desired spatial variation of the thermal damage at a specific final time. Both the Levenberg-Marquardt and the Particle Swarm methods were implemented and provided similar results for the two design variables of interest in this work: the volume fraction of nanoparticles within the tumor and the laser power, by considering a fixed duration of 10 minutes for the treatment. The results obtained in this work also show that more than one treatment session is required for the total eradication of the tumor.

This thesis defines a campaign of experimentation to guide UTACC development from concept to reality. It also applies design methodologies to reduce costs and increase the quality, effectiveness, and speed of UTACC's development. UTACC is a system of systems that teams Marines with unmanned robotic systems to reduce the Marine's cognitive load and enhance mission accomplishment. Bringing UTACC from concept to reality requires extensive experimentation, but prior to this thesis no experimentation plan has existed. A series of UTACC theses have been written starting with a CONOPS. Then theses red-celled the CONOPS, explored Coactive Design methodology, analyzed UAV alternatives, and generated measures of effectiveness and performance for the system. Using information learned from the previous theses, the campaign of experimentation described in this thesis identifies key developmental relationships, associates measures with them, and organizes them in an incremental order. This thesis also emphasizes Coactive Design and Model Driven Software Development to reduce cost and improve the quality and flexibility of the system. The goal of the campaign is to provide a plan to develop a robust, cost-efficient system that Marines can use as a part of their team to increase victory on the battlefield. http://archive.org/details/unmannedtactical1094550577 Captain, United States Marine Corps Approved for public release; distribution is unlimited.

Resume Le cadre legislatif indique que l’accompagnement de la personne handicapee est centre sur son « projet de vie ». Mais qu’en est-il lorsque la personne hospitalisee n’est pas encore en capacite de se projeter pour preparer sa sortie ? Qui sont ces patients en difficulte pour elaborer un projet de sortie et dont la duree de sejour se prolonge ? Les situations complexes des personnes dont l’atteinte corporelle se cumule avec une precarite psychosociale revelent avec acuite ces questionnements. Le cumul constate des situations de precarite et de handicap conduit a observer leur interdependance. Il fait emerger des liens de causalite, il convoque la dialectique entre exclusion et participation sociale, il revele la convergence de processus de souffrances psychiques, sources d’insecurite. Des lors, l’accompagnement en ergotherapie vise la restauration d’un sentiment de securite, comme condition de la capacite a se projeter dans l’avenir. Ainsi, l’activite est envisagee comme le moyen pour la personne de s’approprier le temps et l’espace dans le sens d’un projet de sortie. Cet article, issu d’un memoire soutenu pour l’obtention du DU « strategies de compensation du handicap », plaide pour une meilleure identification de ces situations complexes et pour une definition des moyens a mettre en œuvre dans le respect d’une demarche de reinsertion centree sur « le projet de vie » de la personne. Parallelement, l’etude revele l’enjeu, lie au contexte actuel, des reformes du financement des etablissements de soins de suite. Au regard du cheminement du patient, la duree des sejours comme critere determinant pour la valorisation financiere s’opposerait a l’accomplissement des missions de reinsertion qui incombent aux etablissements de soins de suite.

This paper presents a three-dimensional numerical simulation of a nitriding process applied to an industrial component. The aim of the simulation is to predict the residual stresses and distortions due to volume changes induced by chromium nitride (CrN) and carbides (M23C6 et M4C3) formation. The simulation is performed in two steps. The diffusion of nitrogen and the precipitation of chrome nitride and carbides are first simulated. Then stresses and strains are calculated, assuming an elastic behaviour of the component, and using a volume expansion due to the precipitate concentration. The proposed approach is applied on a gear tooth. Small holes and details were neglected. For symmetry reasons, only half a tooth is taken into account. As the main phenomena take place through the first millimetre from the outer surface, a special attention was paid on meshing. The mesh used for the diffusion and precipitation analysis is composed of 1 130 000 nodes and 1 110 000 elements. For the mechanical analysis, a coarser mesh including only 165 000 nodes and 290 000 elements was used.

Speech Synthesis by dyads concatenation produces an intelligible speech, but the lack of prosodic features like rythm and intonation gives the speech an unnatural and unpleasant sound. Having regard to the short-dated applied objectives, It's proving necessary to find a simple set of intonation patterns without taking the complexity of syntactic sentence structuration and the many derived rules into account. Intrinsic characteristics of each dyad are stored and a very simplified grammar is used to surimpose them automatically a pitch pattern, function of the following parameters: Type of sentences, End of each kind of syntagms, words boundaries, and words position inside a sentence.

The main features of the CNET diphone-based text-to-speech system for French language are described. The linguistic analysis works in three steps. First, a morphosyntactic analysis module assigns a grammatical value to each word in the text and transcribes it phonetically. A second module parses the text into hierarchical syntactico-prosodic groups. Finally, prosodic patterns are automatically assigned to each word by queries to a database of prosodic events. The phonetic and prosodic information serves as commands to the synthesis component. The synthesis component is based on diphone concatenation. A time-domain formulation of the pitch-synchronous overlap-add scheme (TD-PSOLA) is used to modify the speech prosody and to concatenate diphone waveforms. It is combined with a low bit-rate speech decoder to reduce the memory requirement for storing the diphone inventory. The system runs in real time on a PC equipped with a TMS320C25 DSP board and provides notably improved sound quality and naturalness in comparison to commercially available systems. >

Work done at CNET on developing multilingual concatenation-based PSOLA TTS (text-to-speech) systems well adapted to their use in interactive voice services is reviewed. A new system architecture SYC (synthesis control) has been specifically designed for assuring real-time, multichannel, and interactive operation. The data control and transfer methods within the system are now fully independent of the content of the modules, allowing for an easy adaptation of the system to multilingual operation. A complete version has been developed for German, and mixed systems have been elaborated for Italian and English in collaboration with other laboratories, using the same PSOLA synthesizer as for French. The overall quality of the French version has been improved both in naturalness (optimization of the linguistico-prosodic processings) and in articulation accuracy (use of longer units to be concatenated). An automatic segmentation procedure has been developed for the rapid building of new repertories of speech from recordings by new speakers, i.e., for the creation of new synthetic voices. >