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The interleaving of concurrent processes actions leads to the well-known combinatorial explosion problem. Petri nets theory provides some structural reductions to tackle this phenomenon by agglomerating sequences of transitions into a single atomic transition. These reductions are easily checkable and preserve deadlocks, Petri nets liveness and any LTL formula that does not observe the modified transitions. Furthermore, they can be combined with other kinds of reductions such as partial-order techniques to improve the efficiency of state space reduction. We present in this paper an adaptation of these reductions for Promela specifications and propose simple rules to automatically infer atomic steps in the Promela model while preserving the checked property. We demonstrate on typical examples the efficiency of this approach and propose some perspectives of this work in the scope of software model checking. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This work is dedicated to the numerical computations of the primitive equations (PEs) of the ocean without viscosity with the nonlocal (mode by mode) boundary conditions introduced in [RTT05b]. We consider the 2D nonlinear PEs, and firstly compute the solutions in a "large" rectangular domain Ω0 with periodic boundary conditions in the horizontal direction. Then we consider a subdomain Ω1, in which we compute a second numerical solution with transparent boundary conditions. Two objectives are achieved. On the one hand the absence of blow-up in these computations indicates that the PEs without viscosity are well posed when supplemented with the boundary conditions introduced in [RTT05b]. On the other hand they show a very good coincidence on the subdomain Ω1 of the two solutions, thus showing also the computational relevance of these new boundary conditions. We end this study with some numerical simulations of the linearized primitive equations, which correspond to the theoretical results established in [RTT05b], and evidence the transparent properties of the boundary conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Verification tools are part of a new generation of CAD tools, mandatory to cope with the growing complexity of Systems-On-Chip. We believe that all these tools should be built on top of a modern and standard framework. ESys.NET is a design environment based on the .NET Framework. It takes advantage of advanced programming features which facilitate the integration of external tools, such as verification tools. This work presents the implementation of an observer-based verification tool for ESys.NET. We show that our tool's verification capabilities, relying on introspection mechanisms, does modify neither the model nor the simulator while retrieving the state of the model during simulation or checking a set of userdefined rules. Keywords Verification tool, observer, introspection, system-level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The second generation of metal on metal prosthesis benefited from improvements in industrial manufacturing and optimisation of the articular movement [1-3]. Short term clinical results are promising [4-7]. However concerns remain about radiological and biological aspects [8-14]. The questions surrounding "ideal" articular clearance still haven't been answered and the influence of the mode of lubrication seems essential today [15-19]. Release of chromium and cobalt from the bearing couple is one of the problems [20-24]. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite numerous investigations, the number and role of morphotypes involved in the life cycle of Phaeocystis species remain under debate. This is partly due to the application of different methodologies such as light, transmission, scanning electron microscopy and flow cytometry on specific samples. This heterogeneity of approaches results in the incomplete morphometric description of the different cell types existing within one species according to relevant criteria and the indetermination of the ploidy level of each observed stage. We review here the different morphotypes observed within each of the six Phaeocystis species recognized up to now. Four different cell types have been observed. In common to all six species is the occurrence of a scaly flagellate producing star-forming filaments (all species except P. jahnii) or not (P. globosa and P. jahnii). In three colony-forming species, P. globosa, P. pouchetii and P. antarctica, three morphotypes are observed: a flagellate with scales and filaments, a colonial cell, and a flagellate devoid of scales and filaments. In the non-colony-forming species, P. scrobiculata and P. cordata, only flagellates with scales and filaments have been observed. While suspected in P. pouchetii and P. antarctica, a haploid-diploid life cycle has only been evidenced for P. globosa. The two main prominent features of this cycle are that sexuality is prevalent in colony bloom formation and termination and that two types of vegetative reproduction exist. The ecological relevance of alternating haploid and diploid stages is not clearly apparent on the basis of existing ecological studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

New data were obtained from previously unanalysed Grande Pile core samples (GP XXI) corresponding to the penultimate glacial up to the St. Germain 1 interstadial. Parallel sampling for pollen and carbon isotopes was performed. The biostratigraphy is based on pollen grains as proposed byWoillard (1978) for Grande Pile X. The age scale is from Kukla et al. (1997) except for the start of Eemian, which follows the timing defined by Shackleton et al. (2002). The pollen data were first processed to determine their biome scores. The BIOME4 vegetation model was then run in the inverse mode using the determined biome scores and measured δ13C values as constraints to reconstruct the climate parameters. These results are compared with those previously published and show that the Eemian sensu stricto and more generally the penultimate interglacial period was not stable or uniform contrary to previous terrestrial reconstructions but is in agreement with variations observed in the North Atlantic Ocean. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Short-term morbidity and mortality rates of stent graft treatment compare favourably with those of surgery for thoracic aortic aneurysms. It is already the best option in poor surgical candidates, but remains controversial in good surgical candidates because long-term results are unknown. Application on a larger scale, for uncomplicated type B dissections, cannot be considered before comparative studies have evaluated the long-term results of endovascular and medical treatments. A strong collaboration between cardiovascular surgeons, cardiologists and interventional radiologists is needed to guarantee perfect preoperative assessment and subsequent optimal endovascular treatment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Polychromatic beams of hard X-rays from ultrafast laser plasma interaction are studied. Just as in a conventional synchrotron, electrons are accelerated and wiggled, but on a much shorter scale of a few millimeters. By focusing a 50 TW CPA laser system (30 fs duration) onto a helium gas jet, we obtained a polychromatic collimated beam (50 mrad) of X-ray radiation in the keV range. In addition, its perfect synchronization with the laser system, its ultrafast duration (⋍30 fs) and its brightness (up to 108 photons/shot/solid angle at 0.1%BW)will make it applicable to both X-ray science and backlighting to address laboratory astrophysics research issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"Temperament, [is] a moderate and proportionable mixture of any thing, but more peculiarly of the four humours of the body" (Phillips, 1658: sub "Temperament") One of our most acclaimed social scientists, Harvard psychology professor Jerome Kagan, has spent much of his professional career studying temperament as the key to human individuality. The titles of his recent books speak for themselves: Unstable ideas: Temperament, cognition, and self (1989); Galen's prophecy: Temperament in human nature (1994); Three seductive ideas (1998), the salient one being The Long Shadow of Temperament (2004); and dozens of articles featuring temperament as pivotal. Awarded this place of privilege, temperament is the superlative operative word in Kagan's conceptual framework. His theory, in brief, is that every human inherits a physiology determining the emotional temperament and shapes the larger psychological profile when combined with experience. The aim of this essay is to understand why a major psychologist of Kagan's international stature should have chosen temperament; and secondly to historicize Kagan's enterprise and inquire what, if anything, the eighteenth century contributed to temperament's historical map. This goal is worthwhile for several reasons: it explains the historical foundations on which one of the most prominent historical psychologists of our generation has worked and how he selected "temperament" above all other concepts; it serves to highlight Kagan's sites of originality and account for those that are derivative; it unpacks a concept - temperament - that recently has fallen into disuse and dropped out of the historical vocabulary despite Kagan; and - most crucial for this book - it focuses squarely on the eighteenth-century contributions to temperament. It also demonstrates why a book about eighteenth-century neuroscience, whose three key concepts are brain, mind, and medicine, cannot afford to omit temperament, or if it does, does so at its own peril. These goals may be accomplished in addition to glossing the larger perennial riddle about who we are and how we got to be that way. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Due to new economical challenges and recent trends regarding international trade and globalization, many companies from the Canadian forest products industry are now facing the need to reengineer their organizational processes and business practices with their partners. This paper proposes on architecture which aims to enable the development of advanced planning systems for the forest products industry. This architecture combines agent technology with operational research, in order to take advantage of the ability of agent-based technology to integrate distributed decision problems, and the ability of operation research to solve complex decision problems This paper describes how this architecture has been configured into an advanced planning and scheduling tool for the lumber industry, and how it is being validated [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The use of the 3D▲ tripolar joint seems an interesting alternative to optimize T.H.A function, as, in some cases, no ideal solution can be found for acetabular implantation. The "self adaptation" of the intermediate cup can be demonstrated: the additional outer-bearing surface motion creates a second "adjustable acetabulum". The efficiency against dislocation and microseparation can be explained geometrically and experimentally. The tripolar bearing with the mobile ceramic head show very high resistance to wear and stripe wear. To date, functionnal and radiological results confirm the preclinical studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we introduce a framework for the automatic configuration of applications running in dynamic environments where changes are frequent. We propose a way to describe, for each application, its configuration policy, and the execution environment's factors that affect its behavior. On this basis, we can generate application-specific configuration tools, called conflets. The application's source code is not required. The conflet combines the information drawn from the execution environment with the knowledge of the configuration policy. It is therefore able to detect when and how the execution environment modifies its characteristics, and can automatically react by reconfiguring the application and thus adapting it to the dynamic environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents the contracting system ConFract for the open and hierarchical component model Fractal. Contracts are dynamically built from specifications, currently executable assertions, at assembly times, and are updated according to dynamic reconfigurations. These contracts are not restricted to the scope of interfaces, taken separately. On the contrary, new kinds of composition contracts can be built in order to associate several external interfaces of a component, providing an "usage contract", or several interfaces inside the component, providing an "assembly and implementation contract". All these contracts identify fine-grained responsibilities and developers can thus easily organize the handling of contract violations and the resulting reconfigurations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes a novel approach to forming high resolution MR images of the human fetal brain. It addresses the key problem of motion of the fetus by proposing a registration refined compounding of multiple sets of orthogonal fast 2D MRI slices, that are currently acquired for clinical studies, into a single high resolution MRI volume. A robust multi-resolution slice alignment is applied iteratively to the data to correct motion of the fetus that occurs between 2D acquisitions. This is combined with an intensity correction step and a super resolution reconstruction step, to form a single high isotropic resolution volume of the fetal brain. Experimental validation on synthetic image data with known motion types and underlying anatomy, together with retrospective application to sets of clinical acquisitions are included. Results indicate the method promises a unique route to acquiring high resolution MRI of the fetal brain in vivo allowing comparable quality to that of neonatal MRI. Such data is highly valuable in allowing a clinically applicable window into the process of normal and abnormal brain development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Employee Timetabling Problem (ETP) is a general class of problems widely encountered in service organizations (such as call centers for instance). Given a set of activities, a set of demand curves (specifying the demand in terms of employees for each activity for each time period) the problem consists of constructing a set of work shifts such that each activity is at all time covered by a sufficient number of employees. Work shifts can cover many activities and must meet work regulations such as breaks, meals and maximum working time constraints. Furthermore, it is often desired to optimize a global objective function such as minimizing labor costs or maximizing a quality of service measure. This paper presents variants of this problem which are modeled with the Dantzig formulation. This approach consists of first generating all feasible work shifts and then selecting the optimal set. We propose to address the shift generation problem with constraint satisfaction techniques based on expressive and efficient global constraints such as gcc and regular. The selection problem, which is modeled with an integer linear program, is solved by a standard MIP solver for smaller instances and addressed by column generation for larger ones. Since a column generation procedure needs to generate only shifts of negative reduced cost, the optimization constraint cost-regular is introduced and described. Preliminary experimental results are given on a typical ETP. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Type II collagen, the most abundant protein of cartilage matrix, is synthesized as a procollagen molecule including the N-(PIINP) and C-(PIICP) propeptides at each end. Type II procollagen is produced in two forms as the result of alternative RNA splicing. One form (IIA) includes and the other form (IIB) excludes a 69-amino acid cysteine-rich globular domain encoded by exon 2 in PIINP. During the process of synthesis, these N-propeptides are removed by specific proteases and released in the circulation, and their levels are believed to reflect type II collagen synthesis. In this chapter we describe the development of a specific enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) for the measurement of the IIA form of PIINP (PIIANP) in serum based on a polyclonal antibody raised against recombinant human exon 2 fusion protein of type II procollagen. We show that this ELISA is highly specific for circulating PIIANP and has adequate technical precision. In patients with knee osteoarthritis and rheumatoid arthritis, serum PIIANP was decreased by 53% (p < 0.0001) and 35% (p < 0.001), respectively, suggesting that type IIA collagen synthesis is altered in these arthritic diseases. The measurement of serum PIIANP may be useful for the clinical investigation of patients with joint diseases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents an excerpt from the book On the Origin of Inequality by Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

This article presents an excerpt from the book On the Origin of Inequality, by Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

This article presents an excerpt from the book The Social Contract, by Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

Quantitative polymerase chain reaction (PCR) is aimed to determine the absolute or relative amounts of RNA or DNA sequences in a given sample. There are two facts limiting the convenience of this approach. First, in most cases, only one or two sequences are amplified in a given round of amplification. If a family of sequences are to be quantitated, as many amplification reactions are necessary. However, it has been shown that complex populations could be amplified in a sequential independent way (1-3). A major concern about the amplification of whole populations are the biases for or against some sequences. In fact, it appears that these biases are not important and that the amplified populations are quite representative of the original mixture of sequences (1,4). This makes possible a score of PCR applications such as differential display analysis (5) or representational difference analysis (6), which are aimed to detect qualitative and quantitative differences between sequences present in genomes or messenger RNA (mRNA) populations. This also implies that it is possible to measure the amount of numerous sequences in the amplicons. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the need to have surge protection. With the increasing use of electronic components in all electric equipment and for all types of applications, the need for surge protection has escalated. This increased equipment susceptibility to surge voltages has led to an identified need for extensive research in the field of surges occurring in low-voltage (LV) systems. The characteristics of LV systems are complex, with many factors affecting the severity of surges. There is also the effect of many parallel load drops and the characteristics of the actual loads.

This paper presents an adjustable way of syntactic prediction on the basis of left context with token automata. Our purpose is to predict the end of a word on the basis of its first letters keyboarding. We illustrate our intention with the presentation of a prototype software for disabled communication aid, called HandiAS. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We report the first single-shot measurements of transverse and longitudinal structure of laser-generated wakefields. Real-time, non-averaged measurements of resonant wakes reveal detailed temporal and spatial features that depend on pulse energy and electron density. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]