The NEUMA Project: towards Cooperative On-line Music Score Libraries

Περιέχει το πλήρες κείμενοThe NEUMA project (http://neuma.irpmf-cnrs.fr) aims at designing and evaluating an open cooperative system for musician communities, enabling new search and analysis tools for symbolic musical content sharing and dissemination. The project is organized around the French CNRS laboratory of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France which provides sample collections, user requirements and expert validation. The paper presents the project goals, its achitecture and current state of development. We illustrate our approach with an on-line publication of monodic collections centered on XVIIe century French liturgic chants

Termination of the leprosy isolation policy in the US and Japan : Science, policy changes, and the garbage can model

BACKGROUND: In both the US and Japan, the patient isolation policy for leprosy /Hansen's disease (HD) was preserved along with the isolation facilities, long after it had been proven to be scientifically unnecessary. This delayed policy termination caused a deprivation of civil liberties of the involuntarily confined patients, the fostering of social stigmas attached to the disease, and an inefficient use of health resources. This article seeks to elucidate the political process which hindered timely policy changes congruent with scientific advances. METHODS: Examination of historical materials, supplemented by personal interviews. The role that science played in the process of policy making was scrutinized with particular reference to the Garbage Can model. RESULTS: From the vantage of history, science remained instrumental in all period in the sense that it was not the primary objective for which policy change was discussed or intended, nor was it the principal driving force for policy change. When the argument arose, scientific arguments were employed to justify the patient isolation policy. However, in the early post-WWII period, issues were foregrounded and agendas were set as the inadvertent result of administrative reforms. Subsequently, scientific developments were more or less ignored due to concern about adverse policy outcomes. Finally, in the 1980s and 1990s, scientific arguments were used instrumentally to argue against isolation and for the termination of residential care. CONCLUSION: Contrary to public expectations, health policy is not always rational and scientifically justified. In the process of policy making, the role of science can be limited and instrumental. Policy change may require the opening of policy windows, as a result of convergence of the problem, policy, and political streams, by effective exercise of leadership. Scientists and policymakers should be attentive enough to the political context of policies

Root-emitted volatile organic compounds: can they mediate belowground plant-plant interactions?

peer reviewedBackground Aboveground, plants release volatile organic compounds (VOCs) that act as chemical signals between neighbouring plants. It is now well documented that VOCs emitted by the roots in the plant rhizosphere also play important ecological roles in the soil ecosystem, notably in plant defence because they are involved in interactions between plants, phytophagous pests and organisms of the third trophic level. The roles played by root-emitted VOCs in between- and within-plant signalling, however, are still poorly documented in the scientific literature. Scope Given that (1) plants release volatile cues mediating plant-plant interactions aboveground, (2) roots can detect the chemical signals originating from their neighbours, and (3) roots release VOCs involved in biotic interactions belowground, the aim of this paper is to discuss the roles of VOCs in between- and within-plant signalling belowground. We also highlight the technical challenges associated with the analysis of root-emitted VOCs and the design of experiments targeting volatile-mediated root-root interactions. Conclusions We conclude that root-root interactions mediated by volatile cues deserve more research attention and that both the analytical tools and methods developed to study the ecological roles played by VOCs in interplant signalling aboveground can be adapted to focus on the roles played by root-emitted VOCs in between- and within-plant signalling

The Design and Implementation of NEUMA, a Collaborative Digital Score Library - Requirements, architecture, and models.

ThispaperpresentsthedesignandimplementationoftheNEUMAplatform,adig- ital library devoted to the preservation and dissemination of symbolic music content (scores). NEUMA is open to musicologists, musicians, and music publishers. It consists of a reposi- tory dedicated to the storage of large collections of digital scores, where users/applications can upload their documents. It also proposes services to publish, annotate, query, transform and analyze scores. The long-term goal of the project is to enable an open and collaborative space where musician communities will be able to share music in symbolic notation.The project is organized around the French IRPMF institute (BnF ? CNRS) which chooses and produces collections (or corpora), collects and organizes user requirements and validates new publications. We describe the architecture of NEUMA and develop some of its salient features: score modeling, annotations, search and transformation language, col- laborative and community tools, and digital rights preservation. We illustrate these features with two collections published by NEUMA, and discuss the impact of such on-line score collections from a musicological perspective

Small-Scale Fisheries in France: Activities and Governance Issues

This chapter reviews the major themes and issues related to small-scale fisheries in France. It first examines the definition of small-scale fisheries within the French legal framework and its relation to EU regulations. Some statistics describing the main trends of the small-scale fisheries fleet, gears and target species are presented. The participation of small-scale fishers in fisheries management and their role within fishers’ representative organisations are reviewed. It appears that, despite their numerical importance, as compared to larger-scale fleets, and their vital socio-economic influence within coastal communities, the decision-making power of small-scale fisheries in terms of resource management is limited. Indeed, most management decisions are taken within organisations that encompass all fishing vessels, which have long been dominated by larger-scale fleets. Nevertheless, small-scale fisheries have gradually gained more visibility within these fisheries’ organisations and greater participation in the decision-making process regarding resource management, which is illustrated through some practical examples. Finally, the future of French small-scale fisheries is discussed with regard to the challenges and opportunities for their emancipation and the sustainability of their activities