Waste meets poor soils: perspectives on sewage sludge recycling

L'abstract è presente nell'allegato / the abstract is in the attachmen

Berlin Wall Anniversary and China: Five Readings

1. “What Came Down Was the Wall and What Stood Up Was the People,” by Shi Zhe, a translation of an op-ed from Southern Weekend (hat tip Danwei): The resurgence of Germany after the war was achieved by each and every person living in a misshaped land. In the end it was regular people that were the main reason West Germany was able to win the peaceful competition between two systems. Their hard work day in and day out the proved themselves to the world, redeeming the dignity of the entire ethnicity. Outsiders usually like to evaluate the Berlin Wall from the vantage point of geopolitics, competing powers, social systems, ideology and economic base, but the legacy of regular Germans is a story permeated with humanity and the freshness of life. There are sad, joyful and even funny stories, such as the first youth to try to sneak over the wall who was shot to death. 2. “The German Wall That Fell–and the Chinese Regime That Didn’t,” by Jeffrey Wasserstrom at Huffington Post: The following paragraphs focus on the considerable strengths and also a couple of weakenesses of a recent publication that I find it very helpful to have on hand whenever I grapple with the puzzle of the longevity of the Beijing regime: David Shambaugh’s China’s Communist Party: Atrophy and Adaptation (University of California Press). Written by a high-profile political scientist and published in hard cover in 2008 and then in a paperback edition this year, Shambaugh’s book is a very fitting one to turn to just now, as the media is filled with retrospective looks at the last days of the Berlin Wall. Why? Because the destruction of that great Cold War symbol, more than any of the other wondrous events of 1989, inspired the erroneous belief that the days of all Communist Party regimes were about to end (they live on not just in China but also Vietnam, Cuba, and North Korea). And because Shambaugh provides one of the best accounts yet of the post-1989 reinvention of the Chinese Communist Party that has kept China a Leninist country during what many assumed would be a post-Leninist era — not just for Europe, but for the world. He sheds important light, in other words, on why, when speaking of China, we need to think not of a Leninist Extinction but rather a Leninist Mutation

ASR error management for improving spoken language understanding

This paper addresses the problem of automatic speech recognition (ASR) error detection and their use for improving spoken language understanding (SLU) systems. In this study, the SLU task consists in automatically extracting, from ASR transcriptions , semantic concepts and concept/values pairs in a e.g touristic information system. An approach is proposed for enriching the set of semantic labels with error specific labels and by using a recently proposed neural approach based on word embeddings to compute well calibrated ASR confidence measures. Experimental results are reported showing that it is possible to decrease significantly the Concept/Value Error Rate with a state of the art system, outperforming previously published results performance on the same experimental data. It also shown that combining an SLU approach based on conditional random fields with a neural encoder/decoder attention based architecture , it is possible to effectively identifying confidence islands and uncertain semantic output segments useful for deciding appropriate error handling actions by the dialogue manager strategy .Comment: Interspeech 2017, Aug 2017, Stockholm, Sweden. 201

« Segalen médecin, archéologue et poète “en temps de détresse” »

International audienc

Boosting de bonzaïs pour la combinaison efficace de descripteurs : application à l'identification du rôle du locuteur

International audienceDans ce travail, nous nous intéressons au problème de la détection du rôle du locuteur dans les émissions d'actualités radiotélévisées. Dans la littérature, les solutions proposées sont de combiner des indicateurs variés provenant de l'acoustique, de la transcription et/ou de son analyse par des méthodes d'apprentissage automatique. De nombreuses études font ressortir l'algorithme de boosting sur des règles de décision simples comme l'un des plus efficaces à combiner ces différents descripteurs. Nous proposons ici une modification de cet algorithme état-de-l'art en remplaçant ces règles de décision simples par des mini arbres de décision que nous appelons bonzaïs. Les expériences comparatives menées sur le corpus EPAC montrent que cette modification améliore largement les performances du système tout en réduisant le temps d'apprentissage de manière conséquente

« Image simultanée » et « immobilité vive » (Cendrars, Delaunay, Léger)

Affranchies de l’ornement et de l’image rhétorique, la peinture moderne et la poésie moderniste des années 1910-1914 cherchent à répondre à la simultanéité nouvelle des relations au monde par une simultanéité nouvelle des relations entre les couleurs et entre les mots. Il s’agit de confronter la notion de « simultanéisme » à « l’immobilité vive » définie par Roland Barthes, dans la mesure où la simultanéité, pour Blaise Cendrars et Sonia et Robert Delaunay, manifeste un point d’intensité porté à un tel degré qu’il franchit les limites du temps chronologique. Cendrars et les Delaunay ont travaillé ensemble la notion de « simultanéisme » dans des œuvres comme La Prose du Transsibérien et Contrastes. Ezra Pound, lui, vise une condensation extrême du langage poétique dans la forme du haïku.Modern painting and Modernist poems of the years 1910-14, stripped bare of ornament and rhetorical images, appear as a response to the new simultaneity of man’s relation to the surrounding world, which seeks to create a new form of simultaneity between colours or words. The article proposes to compare the notion of “simultaneism” to that of “intense immobility” coined by Roland Barthes. Indeed, Blaise Cendrars’s poetry, as well as Robert and Sonia Delaunay’s paintings, bring the idea of simultaneity to such a degree of intensity that it frees itself from the bounds of chronological time. Cendrars and the Delaunay couple worked together on the notion of “simultaneism”, in works such as La Prose du Transsibérien and Contrasts. As for Ezra Pound, he tries to achieve an extreme condensation of poetic language, in the Japanese form of haiku

Walter Benjamin lecteur d’À la recherche du temps perdu

Walter Benjamin est né en 1892 à Berlin dans une famille bourgeoise aisée – vingt et un ans après Proust. Leur enfance et leur adolescence se sont déroulées dans le même monde, « entre deux siècles » ou, si l’on adopte la périodisation de la plupart des historiens, à la fin du « grand xixe siècle » qui s’achève le 1er août 1914. La « Belle Époque » à Paris et à Berlin (comme à Londres et à Vienne) est marquée par les transformations urbaines, les exploits techniques de la deuxième révolution ..

Biorefarmeries: Milking ethanol from algae for the mobility of tomorrow

The idea of this project is to fully exploit microalgae to the best of its potential, possibly proposing a sort of fourth generation fuel based on a continuous milking of macro- and microorganisms (as cows in a milk farm), which produce fuel by photosynthetic reactions. This project proposes a new transportation concept supported by a new socio-economic approach, in which biofuel production is based on biorefarmeries delivering fourth generation fuels which also have decarbonization capabilities, potential negative CO2 emissions plus positive impacts on mobility, the automotive Industry, health and environment and the econom