Citoyen ou consommateur face à la PFI: Des questions en suspens.

International audienceThe PFI (Private Finance Initiative) is a method for financing major procurement projects that relies on heavy private sector involvement. It has been controversial ever since its introduction on a large scale by the Conservatives in the 1990s. Remarkably, PFI has become popular among New Labour ministers. This paper analyses the impact of PFI on the relationship between citizens and governmentLa Private Finance Initiative, système de financement d'infrastructures publiques, fait partie d'un vaste ensemble de politiques visant à mettre en oeuvre des synergies entre les secteurs public et privé dont l'objectif ultime affiché est d'améliorer la quantité et la qualité des prestations fournies aux usagers. À ce titre, la PFI n'est qu'une des composantes du grand domaine des partenariats publics privés (PPPs, public-private partnerships). Cette volonté de dépasser ce qui est perçu comme un clivage démodé entre le public et le privé ne se limite pas à l'aspect purement financier de l'investissement public et irrigue l'ensemble de la rhétorique néo-travailliste. Par delà le discours technicien, cette approche interroge, de façon fondamentale, la conception du citoyen qui la sous-tend

High Purity Germanium: From Gamma-Ray Detection to Dark Matter Subterranean Detectors

High purity germanium remains the material of choice for the detection of photons in the range of MeV or higher, down to the hard X-ray range. Since the operation of HPGe-based detectors is possible only at or below the liquid nitrogen temperature, their advantage is mainly the resolution, which matches the Fano factor if appropriate cooled electronic readout is used. We focus here on present-day applications of HPGe detectors, which are now broader than ever despite the recent development of room-temperature photon detectors based on binary compounds. We present in particular dark matter detectors and γ-ray trackers as examples of the recent applications of HPGe as a detecting medium. More generally, we discuss the future of γ-ray detectors and the role that the semiconductor detectors will keep with respect to alternative detection materials. This chapter is an introduction to this general topic, and the reader is encouraged to refer to research and review articles on this subject published in the past or recently

AN APPROXIMATE CALCULATION OF ACTIVE PIXEL SENSORS TEMPORAL NOISE FOR HIGH ENERGY PHYSICS

Research NoteA simple calculation of the temporal noise of an elementary pixel is made. The equivalent noise charge takes into consideration the series and parallel noise as a function of the observation time

Data Set Modelability by QSAR

We introduce a simple MODelability Index (MODI) that estimates the feasibility of obtaining predictive QSAR models (Correct Classification Rate above 0.7) for a binary dataset of bioactive compounds. MODI is defined as an activity class-weighted ratio of the number of the nearest neighbor pairs of compounds with the same activity class versus the total number of pairs. The MODI values were calculated for more than 100 datasets and the threshold of 0.65 was found to separate non-modelable from the modelable datasets

Fishing out the signal in polypharmacological high-throughput screening data using novel navigator cheminformatics software

Many drugs are characterized by polypharmacological mechanisms of action. Thus, prospective drug discovery studies often start by testing large compound libraries in multiple and diverse High-Throughput Screening (HTS) assays. These large heterogeneous data collections pose numerous computational challenges concerning processing, curation, and analysis of untreated output files generated by plate readers. We have developed the freely-accessible HTS Navigator software to enable and facilitate the processing and analysis of polypharmacological HTS data. We report on the capabilities of Navigator and present several case studies where we employed cheminformatics approaches embedded within the Navigator to curate and analyze large datasets of compounds tested toward different panels of targets