What absent switch costs and mixing costs during bilingual language comprehension can tell us about language control.

Epub 2019 Mar 28.In the current study, we set out to investigate language control, which is the process that minimizes cross-language interference, during bilingual language comprehension. According to current theories of bilingual language comprehension, language-switch costs, which are a marker for reactive language control, should be observed. However, a closer look at the literature shows that this is not always the case. Furthermore, little to no evidence for language-mixing costs, which are a marker for proactive language control, has been observed in the bilingual language comprehension literature. This is in line with current theories of bilingual language comprehension, as they do not explicitly account for proactive language control. In the current study, we further investigated these two markers of language control and found no evidence for comprehension-based language-switch costs in six experiments, even though other types of switch costs were observed with the exact same setup (i.e., task-switch costs, stimulus modality-switch costs, and production-based language-switch costs). Furthermore, only one out of three experiments showed comprehension-based language-mixing costs, providing the first tentative evidence for proactive language control during bilingual language comprehension. The implications of the absence and occurrence of these costs are discussed in terms of processing speed and parallel language activation. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved)This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement No 706128. This research was also supported by grants ANR-11-LABX-0036 (BLRI), ANR-16-CONV-0002 (ILCB), and ANR-11-IDEX-0001-02 from the French National Research Council (ANR)

Natural Language Dialogue Service for Appointment Scheduling Agents

Appointment scheduling is a problem faced daily by many individuals and organizations. Cooperating agent systems have been developed to partially automate this task. In order to extend the circle of participants as far as possible we advocate the use of natural language transmitted by e-mail. We describe COSMA, a fully implemented German language server for existing appointment scheduling agent systems. COSMA can cope with multiple dialogues in parallel, and accounts for differences in dialogue behaviour between human and machine agents. NL coverage of the sublanguage is achieved through both corpus-based grammar development and the use of message extraction techniques.Comment: 8 or 9 pages, LaTeX; uses aclap.sty, epsf.te

Transport properties of 2D graphene containing structural defects

We propose an extensive report on the simulation of electronic transport in 2D graphene in presence of structural defects. Amongst the large variety of such defects in sp$^2$ carbon-based materials, we focus on the Stone-Wales defect and on two divacancy-type reconstructed defects. First, based on ab initio calculations, a tight-binding model is derived to describe the electronic structure of these defects. Then, semiclassical transport properties including the elastic mean free paths, mobilities and conductivities are computed using an order-N real-space Kubo-Greenwood method. A plateau of minimum conductivity ($\sigma^{min}_{sc}= 4e^2/\pi h$) is progressively observed as the density of defects increases. This saturation of the decay of conductivity to $\sigma^{min}_{sc}$ is associated with defect-dependent resonant energies. Finally, localization phenomena are captured beyond the semiclassical regime. An Anderson transition is predicted with localization lengths of the order of tens of nanometers for defect densities around 1%.Comment: 17 pages, 17 figures, submitted to Phys. Rev.

Two-Dimensional Graphene with Structural Defects: Elastic Mean Free Path, Minimum Conductivity, and Anderson Transition

4 páginas, 4 figuras.-- PACS numbers: 73.23. b, 72.15.Rn, 73.43.Qt.-- et al.Quantum transport properties of disordered graphene with structural defects (Stone-Wales and divacancies) are investigated using a realistic π-π* tight-binding model elaborated from ab initio calculations. Mean free paths and semiclassical conductivities are then computed as a function of the nature and density of defects (using an order-N real-space Kubo-Greenwood method). By increasing the defect density, the decay of the semiclassical conductivities is predicted to saturate to a minimum value of 4e2/πh over a large range (plateau) of carrier density (>0.5×1014  cm-2). Additionally, strong contributions of quantum interferences suggest that the Anderson localization regime could be experimentally measurable for a defect density as low as 1%.J.-C. C. and A. L. acknowledge financial support from the FNRS of Belgium. Parts of this work are connected to the Belgian Program on Interuniversity Attraction Poles (PAI6), to the NanoHymo ARC, to the ETSF e-I3 project (Grant No. 211956), and to the NANOSIM-GRAPHENE Project No. ANR-09-NANO-016-01.Peer reviewe

Management of pregnant women infected with Ebola virus in a treatment centre in Guinea, June 2014

We report two cases of confirmed Ebola virus disease in pregnant women, who presented at the Médecins Sans Frontières Ebola treatment centre in Guéckédou. Despite the very high risk of death, both pregnant women survived. In both cases the critical decision was made to induce vaginal delivery. We raise a number of considerations regarding the management of Ebola virus-infected pregnant women, including the place of amniocentesis and induced delivery, and whether certain invasive medical acts are justified

Does root plasticity contribute to crop tolerance to abiotic stresses?

Poster that presents the experiments, the main results and take home messages

The GEN-ERA toolbox: unified and reproducible workflows for research in microbial genomics

Microbial culture collections play a key role in taxonomy by studying the diversity of their strains and providing well-characterized biological material to the scientific community for fundamental and applied research. These microbial resource centers thus need to implement new standards in species delineation, including whole-genome sequencing and phylogenomics. In this context, the genomic needs of the Belgian Coordinated Collections of Microorganisms (BCCM) were studied, resulting in the GEN-ERA toolbox, a unified cluster of bioinformatic workflows dedicated to both bacteria and small eukaryotes (e.g., yeasts). This public toolbox is designed for researchers without a specific training in bioinformatics (launched by a single command line). Hence, it facilitates all steps from genome downloading and quality assessment, including genomic contamination estimation, to tree reconstruction. It also offers workflows for average nucleotide identity comparisons and metabolic modeling. All the workflows are based on Singularity containers and Nextflow to increase reproducibility. The GEN-ERA toolbox can be used to infer completely reproducible comparative genomic and metabolic analyses on prokaryotes and small eukaryotes. Although designed for routine bioinformatics of culture collections, it can also be used by all researchers interested in microbial taxonomy, as exemplified by our case study on Gloeobacterales (Cyanobacteria). This study is published at https://doi.org/10.1093/gigascience/giad022GENER

The challenges of applying planetary boundaries as a basis for strategic decision-making in companies with global supply chains

YesThe Planetary Boundaries (PB) framework represents a significant advance in specifying the ecological constraints on human development. However, to enable decision-makers in business and public policy to respect these constraints in strategic planning, the PB framework needs to be developed to generate practical tools. With this objective in mind, we analyse the recent literature and highlight three major scientific and technical challenges in operationalizing the PB approach in decision-making: first, identification of thresholds or boundaries with associated metrics for different geographical scales; second, the need to frame approaches to allocate fair shares in the 'safe operating space' bounded by the PBs across the value chain and; third, the need for international bodies to co-ordinate the implementation of the measures needed to respect the Planetary Boundaries. For the first two of these challenges, we consider how they might be addressed for four PBs: climate change, freshwater use, biosphere integrity and chemical pollution and other novel entities. Four key opportunities are identified: (1) development of a common system of metrics that can be applied consistently at and across different scales; (2) setting 'distance from boundary' measures that can be applied at different scales; (3) development of global, preferably open-source, databases and models; and (4) advancing understanding of the interactions between the different PBs. Addressing the scientific and technical challenges in operationalizing the planetary boundaries needs be complemented with progress in addressing the equity and ethical issues in allocating the safe operating space between companies and sectors