European Union REACH regulation

International audienc

Innovation, Credit Constraints and National Banking Systems: A comparison of developing nations

International audienceThis chapter extends exiting micro-level studies on the financing decisions of enterprises in developing countries by connecting these decisions both to firms’ innovation activity and to the wider institutional framework formed by the national banking system. The national banking system is recognized as being central to the ability of developing-country firms to acquire the resources and develop the capabilities needed for innovation. We investigate the links between innovation and financial system characteristics for a sample of 36 developing nations spread across 5 regions of the world: Sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East and North Africa, East Asia and Pacific, South Asia and Central Asia. Our results show that credit constraints have a significant negative impact on innovation performance and that the depth and breadth of the national banking system indirectly affect innovation through their impact on the likelihood that firms face these financing constraints. Moreover, we find that large firms tend to benefit disproportionately from increases in banking system depth while small firms, and to a lesser extent medium-sized firms, reap relative innovation benefits from increases in banking system breadth

Le surendettement des particuliers - Prévention (Chapitre)

International audienc

The axial skeleton of the Siberian sturgeon: development, organization, structure and new insights on ossification and mineralization of vertebral elements

International audienceThis two-volume book set focuses on the Siberian sturgeon. Acipenser baerii Brandt 1869, one of the 27 “existing” sturgeon species, is a native species of the Siberian catchments, where – as in many other parts of the world – the sturgeon populations are now threatened. Sturgeon farming practices targeting caviar and meat production have been expanding worldwide since the 1990s, and have seen a further increase since the turn of the century. Among the handful of sturgeon species used for significant production, the most dominant is the Siberian sturgeon. Given its peculiar phylogenetic position as a chondrostei and its use as a biological model in e.g. France, the species has also attracted the attention of biologists

Quality of Experience-based Routing of Video Traffic for Overlay and ISP Networks

International audienc

Melting of a phase change material in presence of natural convection and radiation: A simplified model

International audienceIn this article, a simplified model for melting of a phase change material (PCM) in presence of natural convection and radiation is presented. A modified enthalpy method is adopted to solve the phase change problem, the natural convection occurring in the liquid PCM is accounted for using the enhanced thermal conductivity approach coupled with the scaling theory, and the absorbed shortwave radiation flux is added into the energy equation as a source term using a simplified solution algorithm. Two dimensional implicit finite volume method is used to solve the energy equation. First, the simplified model for melting with natural convection is validated using a CFD model, in addition to experimental and numerical benchmark solutions for a test case. Then, the simplified model for melting with combined natural convection and radiation is applied to the melting of a fatty acid eutectic filled in glass bricks, which will be used later to model the annual thermal behavior of a special translucent façade. This complete model is validated against the lattice Boltzmann-discrete ordinate method LBM-DOM. It was shown that (1) the proposed simplified model is simple to implement and its simulations run significantly faster than those of CFD models and LBM-DOM model. Consequently, it can be easily integrated into an energy simulation tool for yearly performance evaluation, (2) during PCM melting process, natural convection has a noteworthy role as it enhances the average fraction of liquid and the position of the melting front, (3) shortwave radiation enhances the average liquid fraction

Modified scattering for the critical nonlinear Schrödinger equation.

International audienceWe consider the nonlinear Schr\"o\-din\-ger equation \begin{equation*} iu_t + \Delta u= \lambda |u|^{\frac {2} {N}} u \end{equation*} in all dimensions $N\ge 1$, where $\lambda \in {\mathbb C}$ and $\Im \lambda \le 0$. We construct a class of initial values for which the corresponding solution is global and decays as $t\to \infty$, like $t^{- \frac {N} {2}}$ if $\Im \lambda =0$ and like $(t \log t)^{- \frac {N} {2}}$ if $\Im \lambda <0$. Moreover, we give an asymptotic expansion of those solutions as $t\to \infty$.We construct solutions that do not vanish, so as to avoid any issue related to the lack of regularity of the nonlinearity at $u=0$. To study the asymptotic behavior, we apply the pseudo-conformal transformation and estimate the solutions by allowing a certain growth of the Sobolev norms which depends on the order of regularity through a cascade of exponents

Fully polynomial FPT algorithms for some classes of bounded clique-width graphs

International audienceRecently, hardness results for problems in P were achieved using reasonable complexity theoretic assumptions such as the Strong Exponential Time Hypothesis. According to these assumptions, many graph theoretic problems do not admit truly subquadratic algorithms. A central technique used to tackle the difficulty of the above mentioned problems is fixed-parameter algorithms with polynomial dependency in the fixed parameter (P-FPT). Applying this technique to clique-width, an important graph parameter, remained to be done. In this paper we study several graph theoretic problems for which hardness results exist such as cycle problems, distance problems and maximum matching. We give hardness results and P-FPT algorithms, using clique-width and some of its upper-bounds as parameters. We believe that our most important result is an O(k^4 · n + m)-time algorithm for computing a maximum matching where k is either the modular-width or the P4-sparseness. The latter generalizes many algorithms that have been introduced so far for specific subclasses such as cographs. Our algorithms are based on preprocessing methods using modular decomposition and split decomposition. Thus they can also be generalized to some graph classes with unbounded clique-width

Geoarchaeology of the Roman port-city of Ostia: Fluvio-coastal mobility, urban development and resilience

International audienceOstia is one of the most extensively excavated cities of the Roman period. The port-city of Rome, which today lies 4 km from the coastline, was established in a very constrained environment at the mouth of the River Tiber. Based on a review of the geoarchaeological and archaeological research at Ostia, 4 new cores analysed through palaeoenvionmental methods, and 21 new radiocarbon dates, we propose a new model of the fluvio-coastal landscape of Ostia from its origin: (1) the coastline shifted rapidly westward between the 8th and the 6th c. BCE followed by a slow progradation and possible erosion phases until the end of the 1st c. CE; (2) the castrum of Ostia (c. late 4th–early 3rd c. BCE) was founded away from the river mouth but close to the River Tiber; (3) between the 4th and the 1st c. BCE, the River Tiber shifted from a position next to the castrum, below the northern Imperial cardo of Ostia, to 150 m to the north; (4) a possible harbour was established to the north of the castrum during the Republican period; (5) the city expanded and a district was built over the harbour and the palaeochannel between the Republican period and the beginning of the 2nd c. CE, showing that Ostia was a dynamic and resilient city during that time. Finally, we suggest the possibility to combine urban fabric analysis (the orientation of the structures) and palaeoenvironmental analysis for reconstructing the evolution of the city in relation to the fluvio-coastal mobility

Droit du commerce international 3ème édition

International audienc