Characterization of in-situ Doped Polycrystalline Silicon Using Schottky Diodes and Admittance Spectroscopy

In this work, Schottky Au-Polycrystalline silicon diodes are successfully realised. The barrier height is around ФB = 0.74 eV as determined from Capacitance – Bias (C-V) characteristics. The depth profile of the apparent doping is deduced from these measurements. Its behaviour leads to the experimental profile. Moreover, the diode admittance measurements versus the frequency and the temperature at different biases show the possibility to use this device to characterise the electrical quality of the polycrystalline silicon

Ability to fatten Tunisian lambs in Sheepfold

L’aptitude à l’engraissement des agneaux de races tunisienne en fonction des régimes alimentaires disponibles est une demande importante voire obligatoire pour nos éleveurs à nos jours afin de trouver une synergie entre le coût de production d’un kg de viande et le prix de vente. Pour cela, on a procédé à réaliser un essai de performances des agneaux de races différentes conduits en bergerie et recevant une ration alimentaire classique à base de foin d’avoine et d’aliment concentré dans la ferme pédagogique de l'École Supérieure d’Agriculture de Mateur. Les résultats obtenus étaient dans les normes en tenant compte de la ration et l’âge des agneaux. L’ingestion moyenne de la matière sèche de foin d’avoine était de 551 g /j/agneau, l’indice de consommation moyen a été de 6,34 Kg MS/Kg de gain de poids, le poids vifs des agneaux évolue d’un semaine à l’autre pour atteindre un poids final de 18,2 kg. Mots clés: Engraissement, race ovine, Tunisie, Indice de consommationThe ability to fatten lambs of Tunisian breeds according to the diets available is an important or even a compulsory demand of our breeders today in order to find a synergy between the cost of production of one kg of meat and the price of sale. For this, we carried out a performance test of lambs of different breeds in sheepfolds and receiving a classic food ration based on oat hay and feed concentrate in the educational farm of the Higher School of Agriculture of Mateur. The obtained results were within the standards taking into account the ration and the age of the lambs. The average dry matter intake of oat hay was 551 g / day / lamb, the average consumption index was 6.34 Kg DM / Kg of weight gain, the live weight of lambs increased weekly to reach a final weight of 18.2 kg. Keywords: Fattening, sheep breed, Tunisia, Consumption inde

A novel context ontology to facilitate interoperation of semantic services in environments with wearable devices

The LifeWear-Mobilized Lifestyle with Wearables (Lifewear) project attempts to create Ambient Intelligence (AmI) ecosystems by composing personalized services based on the user information, environmental conditions and reasoning outputs. Two of the most important benefits over traditional environments are 1) take advantage of wearable devices to get user information in a nonintrusive way and 2) integrate this information with other intelligent services and environmental sensors. This paper proposes a new ontology composed by the integration of users and services information, for semantically representing this information. Using an Enterprise Service Bus, this ontology is integrated in a semantic middleware to provide context-aware personalized and semantically annotated services, with discovery, composition and orchestration tasks. We show how these services support a real scenario proposed in the Lifewear project

A Convex Max-Flow Segmentation of LV Using Subject-Specific Distributions on Cardiac MRI

Abstract. This work studies the convex relaxation approach to the left ventricle (LV) segmentation which gives rise to a challenging multi-region seperation with the geometrical constraint. For each region, we consider the global Bhattacharyya metric prior to evaluate a gray-scale and a ra-dial distance distribution matching. In this regard, the studied problem amounts to finding three regions that most closely match their respective input distribution model. It was previously addressed by curve evolution, which leads to sub-optimal and computationally intensive algorithms, or by graph cuts, which result in heavy metrication errors (grid bias). The proposed convex relaxation approach solves the LV segmentation through a sequence of convex sub-problems. Each sub-problem leads to a novel bound of the Bhattacharyya measure and yields the convex formulation which paves the way to build up the efficient and reliable solver. In this respect, we propose a novel flow configuration that accounts for labeling-function variations, in comparison to the existing flow-maximization con-figurations. We show it leads to a new convex max-flow formulation which is dual to the obtained convex relaxed sub-problem and does give the exact and global optimums to the original non-convex sub-problem. In addition, we present such flow perspective gives a new and simple way to encode the geometrical constraint of optimal regions. A comprehen-sive experimental evaluation on sufficient patient subjects demonstrates that our approach yields improvements in optimality and accuracy over related recent methods.

Asymptotic analysis for radial sign-changing solutions of the Brezis-Nirenberg problem in low dimensions

We consider the classical Brezis-Nirenberg problem in the unit ball of $\mathbb{R}^N$, $N\geq 3$ and analyze the asymptotic behavior of nodal radial solutions in the low dimensions $N=3,4,5,6$ as the parameter converges to some limit value which naturally arises from the study of the associated ordinary differential equation

An interactive approach for the post-processing in a KDD process

Association rule mining is a technique widely used in the field of data mining, which consists in discovering relationships and/or correlations between the attributes of a database. However, the method brings known problems among which the fact that a large number of association rules may be extracted, not all of them being relevant or interesting for the domain expert. In that context, we propose a practical, interactive and helpful guided approach to visualize, evaluate and compare the extracted rules following a step by step methodology, taking into account the interaction between the industrial domain expert and the data mining expert

Frequency and genome load of Epstein-Barr virus in 509 breast cancers from different geographical areas

Since the few data exploring a possible association between Epstein–Barr virus (EBV) and breast cancer are conflicting, we investigated this association together with the influences of geographical areas. 509 breast cancers were sampled from areas with varying risks of nasopharynx carcinoma (NPC) such as North Africa (Algeria and Tunisia, high-risk area); southern France (Marseille, intermediate-risk area); and northern Europe (northern France, the Netherlands and Denmark; low-risk areas). Polymerase chain reaction (PCR) of a subregion of EBV BamHIC encoding the EBERs demonstrated that 31.8% of the tumours contained the viral genome. No significant differences were observed among the geographical areas. However, positive samples showed higher loads of the EBV genome in the NPC high- and intermediate-risk areas than in the low-risk areas. EBV type 1 was the dominant strain. In situ hybridization studies using a35S-labelled riboprobe for EBER1 and a laser capture microdissection, combined with quantitative PCR, showed that EBV localization was restricted to some tumour epithelial cell clusters. EBV could not be detected in the stroma. Considering the whole population covered, the presence of the EBV genome was not correlated with age, menopausal status, tumour, size, nodal status or histological grade. © 2001 Cancer Research Campaign http://www. bjcancer.co

Blow-up solutions for linear perturbations of the Yamabe equation

For a smooth, compact Riemannian manifold (M,g) of dimension N \geg 3, we are interested in the critical equation $$\Delta_g u+(N-2/4(N-1) S_g+\epsilon h)u=u^{N+2/N-2} in M, u>0 in M,$$ where \Delta_g is the Laplace--Beltrami operator, S_g is the Scalar curvature of (M,g), $h\in C^{0,\alpha}(M)$, and $\epsilon$ is a small parameter