Organic Farming Training and needs of stakeholders (Teachers and advisers); Status and proposals

The work carried out made it possible to better understand the devices of training, the knowledge of the training and development stakeholders, their expectations in the domainof organic farming. If the general principles and techniques of organic farming are fairly well known, their variation in practice is not easily normative. The courses, primarily based on knowledge transfer, are not very effective and the surveyed actors highlighted the value of networks and non-formal trainings. Proposals for changing devices are presented being based on such an innovative action in the Loire Valley with teachers and trainers. The issue of the integration of e-learning in these devices is presented with its potentialsand limits. The issue of educational resources concerning their format, their contents as the media used and their accessibility is addressed with proposals based on Swiss and the Loire Valley achievements

A lower bound on CNF encodings of the at-most-one constraint

Constraint "at most one" is a basic cardinality constraint which requires that at most one of its $n$ boolean inputs is set to $1$. This constraint is widely used when translating a problem into a conjunctive normal form (CNF) and we investigate its CNF encodings suitable for this purpose. An encoding differs from a CNF representation of a function in that it can use auxiliary variables. We are especially interested in propagation complete encodings which have the property that unit propagation is strong enough to enforce consistency on input variables. We show a lower bound on the number of clauses in any propagation complete encoding of the "at most one" constraint. The lower bound almost matches the size of the best known encodings. We also study an important case of 2-CNF encodings where we show a slightly better lower bound. The lower bound holds also for a related "exactly one" constraint.Comment: 38 pages, version 3 is significantly reorganized in order to improve readabilit

Tau Be or not Tau Be? - A Perspective on Service Compatibility and Substitutability

One of the main open research issues in Service Oriented Computing is to propose automated techniques to analyse service interfaces. A first problem, called compatibility, aims at determining whether a set of services (two in this paper) can be composed together and interact with each other as expected. Another related problem is to check the substitutability of one service with another. These problems are especially difficult when behavioural descriptions (i.e., message calls and their ordering) are taken into account in service interfaces. Interfaces should capture as faithfully as possible the service behaviour to make their automated analysis possible while not exhibiting implementation details. In this position paper, we choose Labelled Transition Systems to specify the behavioural part of service interfaces. In particular, we show that internal behaviours (tau transitions) are necessary in these transition systems in order to detect subtle errors that may occur when composing a set of services together. We also show that tau transitions should be handled differently in the compatibility and substitutability problem: the former problem requires to check if the compatibility is preserved every time a tau transition is traversed in one interface, whereas the latter requires a precise analysis of tau branchings in order to make the substitution preserve the properties (e.g., a compatibility notion) which were ensured before replacement.Comment: In Proceedings WCSI 2010, arXiv:1010.233

Analysis and Verification of Service Interaction Protocols - A Brief Survey

Modeling and analysis of interactions among services is a crucial issue in Service-Oriented Computing. Composing Web services is a complicated task which requires techniques and tools to verify that the new system will behave correctly. In this paper, we first overview some formal models proposed in the literature to describe services. Second, we give a brief survey of verification techniques that can be used to analyse services and their interaction. Last, we focus on the realizability and conformance of choreographies.Comment: In Proceedings TAV-WEB 2010, arXiv:1009.330

DOSCATs: Double standards for protein quantification

The two most common techniques for absolute protein quantification are based on either mass spectrometry (MS) or on immunochemical techniques, such as western blotting (WB). Western blotting is most often used for protein identification or relative quantification, but can also be deployed for absolute quantification if appropriate calibration standards are used. MS based techniques offer superior data quality and reproducibility, but WB offers greater sensitivity and accessibility to most researchers. It would be advantageous to apply both techniques for orthogonal quantification, but workflows rarely overlap. We describe DOSCATs (DOuble Standard conCATamers), novel calibration standards based on QconCAT technology, to unite these platforms. DOSCATs combine a series of epitope sequences concatenated with tryptic peptides in a single artificial protein to create internal tryptic peptide standards for MS as well as an intact protein bearing multiple linear epitopes. A DOSCAT protein was designed and constructed to quantify five proteins of the NF-κB pathway. For three target proteins, protein fold change and absolute copy per cell values measured by MS and WB were in excellent agreement. This demonstrates that DOSCATs can be used as multiplexed, dual purpose standards, readily deployed in a single workflow, supporting seamless quantitative transition from MS to WB

Constraint solving in uncertain and dynamic environments - a survey

International audienceThis article follows a tutorial, given by the authors on dynamic constraint solving at CP 2003 (Ninth International Conference on Principles and Practice of Constraint Programming) in Kinsale, Ireland. It aims at offering an overview of the main approaches and techniques that have been proposed in the domain of constraint satisfaction to deal with uncertain and dynamic environments

Distribution of Alarin Immunoreactivity in the Mouse Brain

Alarin is a 25 amino acid peptide that belongs to the galanin peptide family. It is derived from the galanin-like peptide gene by a splice variant, which excludes exon 3. Alarin was first identified in gangliocytes of neuroblastic tumors and later shown to have a vasoactive function in the skin. Recently, alarin was demonstrated to stimulate food intake as well as the hypothalamic–pituitary–gonadal axis in rodents, suggesting that it might be a neuromodulatory peptide in the brain. However, the individual neurons in the central nervous system that express alarin have not been identified. Here, we determined the distribution of alarin-like immunoreactivity (alarin-LI) in the adult murine brain. The specificity of the antibody against alarin was demonstrated by the absence of labeling after pre-absorption of the antiserum with synthetic alarin peptide and in transgenic mouse brains lacking neurons expressing the GALP gene. Alarin-LI was observed in different areas of the murine brain. A high intensity of alarin-LI was detected in the accessory olfactory bulb, the medial preoptic area, the amygdala, different nuclei of the hypothalamus such as the arcuate nucleus and the ventromedial hypothalamic nucleus, the trigeminal complex, the locus coeruleus, the ventral chochlear nucleus, the facial nucleus, and the epithelial layer of the plexus choroideus. The distinct expression pattern of alarin in the adult mouse brain suggests potential functions in reproduction and metabolism

A Seven-Marker Signature and Clinical Outcome in Malignant Melanoma: A Large-Scale Tissue-Microarray Study with Two Independent Patient Cohorts

Current staging methods such as tumor thickness, ulceration and invasion of the sentinel node are known to be prognostic parameters in patients with malignant melanoma (MM). However, predictive molecular marker profiles for risk stratification and therapy optimization are not yet available for routine clinical assessment.; Using tissue microarrays, we retrospectively analyzed samples from 364 patients with primary MM. We investigated a panel of 70 immunohistochemical (IHC) antibodies for cell cycle, apoptosis, DNA mismatch repair, differentiation, proliferation, cell adhesion, signaling and metabolism. A marker selection procedure based on univariate Cox regression and multiple testing correction was employed to correlate the IHC expression data with the clinical follow-up (overall and recurrence-free survival). The model was thoroughly evaluated with two different cross validation experiments, a permutation test and a multivariate Cox regression analysis. In addition, the predictive power of the identified marker signature was validated on a second independent external test cohort (n?=?225). A signature of seven biomarkers (Bax, Bcl-X, PTEN, COX-2, loss of ?-Catenin, loss of MTAP, and presence of CD20 positive B-lymphocytes) was found to be an independent negative predictor for overall and recurrence-free survival in patients with MM. The seven-marker signature could also predict a high risk of disease recurrence in patients with localized primary MM stage pT1-2 (tumor thickness ?2.00 mm). In particular, three of these markers (MTAP, COX-2, Bcl-X) were shown to offer direct therapeutic implications.; The seven-marker signature might serve as a prognostic tool enabling physicians to selectively triage, at the time of diagnosis, the subset of high recurrence risk stage I-II patients for adjuvant therapy. Selective treatment of those patients that are more likely to develop distant metastatic disease could potentially lower the burden of untreatable metastatic melanoma and revolutionize the therapeutic management of MM