Modelling the initial expansion of the Neolithic out of Anatolia

Using the space-time distribution of 1162 uniformly recalibrated dates from 71 sites in Asia Minor, the Aegean Basin, Southern Thrace and Macedonia, this article presents geostatistical (kriging) and graphical simulations of the Neolithic expansion out of Anatolia. How fast was the advance of the agricultural pioneer front? Did it proceed in a single wave, moving at a steady pace, or did it involve instead long periods of stasis, punctuated by rapid advances? The article suggests that the expansion was more arrhythmic than linear. The spread of farming halted in Central Anatolia for several hundred years, before quickly expanding into Europe.S pomočjo prostorsko-časovne distribucije 1162 rekalibriranih datumov z 71 najdišč v Mali Aziji, Egejskem bazenu, južni Trakiji in Makedoniji predstavljamo geostatistično (‘kriging’) in grafično simulacijo neolitske ekspanzije iz Anatolije. Kako hitro je bilo napredovanje meje pionirskih poljedelcev? Ali se je le-ta premikala v enem valu in enakomernem tempu, ali pa so bila pri premikanju meje vključena tudi dolga statična obdobja, ki so prekinjala hitro napredovanje? V članku predlagamo, da je bila ekspanzija bolj aritmična kot linearna. Širitev kmetijstva se je v osrednji Anatoliji najprej ustavila za več stoletij in zatem hitro nadaljevala v Evropo

Comment l'information et le conseil sur les aides techniques contribuent-ils de manière pertinente au processus d'expression des besoins de la personne?

National audienceL'expression des besoins en aide technique d'une personne en situation de handicap passe par la confrontation de son appréciation de ses incapacités dans le cadre de son projet de vie, avec les informations disponibles sur les aides existantes et leurs usages possibles. Dans ce texte nous essayons de cerner les apports des différents acteurs dans ce processus d'expression des besoins. Quelles informations doit-on regrouper, rechercher, lesquelles donner et par qui pour que la personne concernée puisse exprimer ce besoin de façon efficace

Origines de la musique en l’homme, selon Pascal Quignard

Parmi les écrivains français contemporains, Quignard est peut-être celui dont l’œuvre se caractérise le plus par sa constante référence à la musique. Pensons à Tous les matins du monde, qui est peut-être son roman le plus connu, consacré à l’histoire complexe et tumultueuse de deux compositeurs et violistes baroques, Marin Marais et Sainte Colombe. Ce roman n’est pourtant que la partie visible de l’iceberg : les livres de Quignard sont tous peuplés de musiciens. Mais le discours sur la musiqu..

Une évolution du cadre jurisprudentiel du traitement de la demande de report d’audience devant la CNDA

Dans une décision du 18 juin 2014, le Conseil d’Etat affirme que des motifs exceptionnels tirés des exigences du débat contradictoire peuvent imposer au juge de l’asile de faire droit à une demande de report d’audience. Il juge irrégulière la procédure suivie devant la Cour nationale du droit d’asile (CNDA) en raison de ce que le refus de différer une affaire enrôlée à tort un jour d’indisponibilité déclarée de l’avocat a eu pour conséquence de priver les demandeurs de la possibilité d’être assistés par leur conseil lors de l’audience sans qu’aucune considération tirée d’une bonne administration de la justice ne le justifie. Cette décision, qui intervient dans un contexte de réforme de l’asile, porte sur une question particulièrement sensible à la CNDA et qui fait régulièrement polémique entre les avocats intervenant régulièrement devant la Cour et la présidence de la CNDA

Intégration commerciale et politique fiscale au Brésil.

Le retour du Brésil à la démocratie s’est accompagné d’une ouverture aux échanges au niveau multilatéral (OMC) et régional(Mercosur). Simultanément, la constitution de 1988 affirmait une volonté forte de décentralisation fiscale. Vingt ans plus tard, le bilan de l’intégration commerciale régionale du Brésil reste relativement faible et le plan Real de 1994 a conduit à une recentralisation budgétaire sans pour autant s’attaquer aux inefficacités fiscales. Notre communication a pour but d’isoler et d’analyser les liens entre, d’une part, l’intégration commerciale du Brésil, et, d’autre part, ce mouvement de recentralisation fiscale. Il examine les distorsions créées par la « TVA » brésilienne, l’ICMS, perçu par les Etats fédérés sur les flux de commerce interne et externe. L’article conclut que, contrairement à ce qui a pu être observé dans d’autres pays, l’ouverture du Brésil s’est traduite par l’expansion des dépenses budgétaires et une tendance à la recentralisation des recettes fiscales. Pour autant, cette évolution ne peut être expliquée comme le résultat d’un effet de compensation des effets inégalitaires de l’ouverture.Brésil; Intégration économique;

Modifying upper-limb inter-joint coordination in healthy subjects by training with a robotic exoskeleton

Background: The possibility to modify the usually pathological patterns of coordination of the upper-limb in stroke survivors remains a central issue and an open question for neurorehabilitation. Despite robot-led physical training could potentially improve the motor recovery of hemiparetic patients, most of the state-of-the-art studies addressing motor control learning, with artificial virtual force fields, only focused on the end-effector kinematic adaptation, by using planar devices. Clearly, an interesting aspect of studying 3D movements with a robotic exoskeleton, is the possibility to investigate the way the human central nervous system deals with the natural upper-limb redundancy for common activities like pointing or tracking tasks. Methods: We asked twenty healthy participants to perform 3D pointing or tracking tasks under the effect of inter-joint velocity dependant perturbing force fields, applied directly at the joint level by a 4-DOF robotic arm exoskeleton. These fields perturbed the human natural inter-joint coordination but did not constrain directly the end-effector movements and thus subjects capability to perform the tasks. As a consequence, while the participants focused on the achievement of the task, we unexplicitly modified their natural upper-limb coordination strategy. We studied the force fields direct effect on pointing movements towards 8 targets placed in the 3D peripersonal space, and we also considered potential generalizations on 4 distinct other targets. Post-effects were studied after the removal of the force fields (wash-out and follow up). These effects were quantified by a kinematic analysis of the pointing movements at both end-point and joint levels, and by a measure of the final postures. At the same time, we analysed the natural inter-joint coordination through PCA. Results: During the exposition to the perturbative fields, we observed modifications of the subjects movement kinematics at every level (joints, end-effector, and inter-joint coordination). Adaptation was evidenced by a partial decrease of the movement deviations due to the fields, during the repetitions, but it occurred only on 21% of the motions. Nonetheless post-effects were observed in 86% of cases during the wash-out and follow up periods (right after the removal of the perturbation by the fields and after 30 minutes of being detached from the exoskeleton). Important inter-individual differences were observed but with small variability within subjects. In particular, a group of subjects showed an over-shoot with respect to the original unexposed trajectories (in 30% of cases), but the most frequent consequence (in 55% of cases) was the partial persistence of the modified upper-limb coordination, adopted at the time of the perturbation. Temporal and spatial generalizations were also evidenced by the deviation of the movement trajectories, both at the end-effector and at the intermediate joints and the modification of the final pointing postures towards targets which were never exposed to any field. Conclusions: Such results are the first quantified characterization of the effects of modification of the upper-limb coordination in healthy subjects, by imposing modification through viscous force fields distributed at the joint level, and could pave the way towards opportunities to rehabilitate pathological arm synergies with robots

The diffusion of Neolithic practices from Anatolia to Europe. A contextual study of residential and construction practices 8,500-5,500 BC cal.

Ever since Vere Gordon Childe’s seminal work on The Dawn of European Civilization (Childe 1925), it has been widely accepted that European agriculture originated in Southwest Asia. Exactly how farming spread to Europe from its origins in Southwest Asia remains, however, a matter of debate. Much of the argument has revolved around the manners of spreading of the Neolithic, whether through colonisation, acculturation or a combination of both. Far less attention has been given to the actual content of the Neolithic pattern of existence that spread into Europe. In my thesis, I review one particular type of content, practices, defined by reference to the theories of social action as normative acts or ways of doing. Practices are marked out by repetitive patterns in the material record, such as burnt houses for the practice of house-burning. Accordingly, practices are inferred, rather than instantiated, from their material expression, using information about the context and the sequence of stratigraphic events. Beyond farming practices, the Neolithic witnessed the inception of a new set of residential and construction practices, pertaining to the way in which houses were built, lived in and discarded at the end of their use-lives. This research tracks each of five main areas of practices from their origins in the Near East: house ‘closure’, house replacement, residential burial, spatial organisation in the rectangular house and agglutination. The aim is to examine whether some of the more distinctive Near Eastern practices, such as the deliberate infilling of houses at ‘closure’, the vertical superimposition of houses, the burial of the dead under active households, the spatial division of the main room into two flooring areas and the agglutination of houses in cellular house patterns, spread into Europe. I find that this older habitus of practices, which was involved in upholding a static repetition, house upon house, of the same pattern of existence, did not spread or only marginally into Europe. Over the course of the 7th millennium BC cal., however, it was superseded by another habitus of practices with a focus on collective action, which had wider relevance and appeal. The sequence of Çatalhöyük East, which spans both horizons of practices, serves as a guide to examine the broader dynamics of change in this period. My thesis claims, on the basis of inference drawn from compiling together a database of 848 radiocarbon dates from 59 sites, uniformly re-calibrated and displayed with the same confidence interval in an interactive interface, the 14C Backbone, that there was a two-thousand year lag, plus or minus a few hundred years, between the advent of Neolithic economy on the Central Anatolian Plateau and in the Aegean Basin. As it stands, the Western Anatolian Neolithic, which starts at or shortly before 6,500 BC cal., matches the Southeast European sequence more than it does the Southwest Asian one. New research in Western Anatolia suggests that there is ground to link up Thessaly and Macedonia with the Lake District and the Aegean coast of Anatolia, and Thrace with the Eastern Marmara region, regarding the advent of Neolithic practices