Logical segmentation for article extraction in digitized old newspapers

Newspapers are documents made of news item and informative articles. They are not meant to be red iteratively: the reader can pick his items in any order he fancies. Ignoring this structural property, most digitized newspaper archives only offer access by issue or at best by page to their content. We have built a digitization workflow that automatically extracts newspaper articles from images, which allows indexing and retrieval of information at the article level. Our back-end system extracts the logical structure of the page to produce the informative units: the articles. Each image is labelled at the pixel level, through a machine learning based method, then the page logical structure is constructed up from there by the detection of structuring entities such as horizontal and vertical separators, titles and text lines. This logical structure is stored in a METS wrapper associated to the ALTO file produced by the system including the OCRed text. Our front-end system provides a web high definition visualisation of images, textual indexing and retrieval facilities, searching and reading at the article level. Articles transcriptions can be collaboratively corrected, which as a consequence allows for better indexing. We are currently testing our system on the archives of the Journal de Rouen, one of France eldest local newspaper. These 250 years of publication amount to 300 000 pages of very variable image quality and layout complexity. Test year 1808 can be consulted at plair.univ-rouen.fr.Comment: ACM Document Engineering, France (2012

From Growth to Green Growth - a Framework

Green growth is about making growth resource-efficient, cleaner and more resilient without slowing it. This paper aims at clarifying this in an analytical framework and proposing foundations for green growth. This framework identifies channels through which green policies can potentially contribute to economic growth. Finally, the paper discusses the policies that can be implemented to capture co-benefits and environmental benefits. Since green growth policies pursue a variety of goals, they are best served by a combination of instruments: price-based policies are important but are only one component in a policy tool-box that can also include norms and regulation, public production and direct investment, information creation and dissemination, education and moral suasion, or industrial and innovation policies.

Empirical Evidence on Satisfaction with Privatization in Latin America: Welfare Effects and Beliefs

Since the 1980s, privatization of formerly state-owned firms has been extensively implemented by governments across Latin America. Despite the fact that most evaluations of the process fail to find significant adverse welfare effects, there has been a strong surge in public discontent with such policy in the region. This paper performs a systematic empirical analysis of the determinants of such discontent with privatizations in Latin America, using survey data from Latinobarometro covering 18 countries over the period 1995-2005, complemented by country level data on macroeconomic, political, and institutional aspects as well as data on privatization. Dissatisfaction appears to respond to absolute and relative welfare effects, as well as to individual beliefs and expectations.

Determination of betatron tunes, Twiss parameters and sum and difference coupling coefficients with an AC dipole

The control of the mechanical and dynamic aperture of the LHC requires a tight control of linear optics parameters such as the tune, the beta-functions and the linear coupling resonance driving terms. This report presents a non-standard measurement method of these parameters based on a transverse excitation of the beam in "AC-dipole" mode, that is at one or several frequencies close to but outside the eigenfrequency spectrum of the beam. After having derived the general expression of the beam response in four dimensions, the measurement protocol and different possible hardware configurations will be described and simulation results obtained for the LHC will be presented

A Statistical Approach to Analyse Effect of Misalignments and Correction Algorithms in High-Energy Linacs

This paper presents a new and general tracking method capable of analysing, in a statistical way, the dipole wakefield effects on a high-energy charged-particle beam

LHC Installation Scenarios and Dynamic Aperture

The nominal installation strategy of the LHC assumes that each of the 8 arcs of the ring will be equipped with dipoles coming from the same production line. One of the main arguments used to justify this option was the possibility to compensate most of the non-linearities induced by the dipole field errors via a single corrector circuit per arc and per multipole. Indeed, assuming small variations from magnet to magnet within a given production line, the multipolar components of the main dipoles appear as a systematic per arc in this scenario, which, de facto, guarantees their correctability even with a small number of corrector families. All the tracking studies done so far have used this installation scheme to model the field imperfections of the main LHC magnets. According to latest error tables, with the improvement of the dipole field quality, the uncertainty on the systematic field errors per production line has been strongly reduced and becomes quite comparable or even lower than the random multipolar components expected from dipole to dipole. It is then relevant to check if the present installation scenario is still justified and to compare it with other options less constraining from the installation point of view. Two other options will be studied in terms of dynamic aperture at injection: (1) the case where the dipoles are randomly installed in the LHC tunnel independently of their production line, (2) the case where the dipoles are installed end to end by batches of a small number of magnets (24 dipoles in our study) coming from the same production line. With the error table 9901, the LHC dynamic aperture at injection does not depend significantly on the installation strategy chosen for the main magnets

Chromatic Coupling Induced by Skew Sextupolar Field Errors in the LHC Main Dipoles and its Correction

In a recent study dealing with the chromatic behaviour of the LHC in the presence of multi-polar field errors, it has been clearly shown that the skew sextupolar systematic component of the arc dipoles was liable to generate a spectacular second order chromaticity, up to 50 times higher than its tolerance value estimated at Q" = 1000 at injection. This result was qualitatively explained by transverse coupling phenomena induced in the arcs (dispersive regions) and affecting the dynamics of off-momentum particles (linear coupling proportional to deltap=p or chromatic coupling). This paper presents an analytical approach of the problem based on the canonical perturbation theory and explaining perfectly the chromatic coupling phenomena induced in the LHC. This understanding is used to design a simple and powerful a3 compensation scheme which consists in replacing in each arc two pairs of lattice (normal) sextupoles by two pairs of skew sextupoles judiciously positioned. Tracking results performed on the LHC lattice version 6 illustrate the beneficial impact of the correction on the dynamic aperture of the ring