Saidabad, Pretoria, Sarajevo, The Hague, Brussels: conflicts and cooperation in security and policing

International audienc

Auditory-Visual Object Recognition Time Suggests Specific Processing for Animal Sounds

cote interne IRCAM: Suied09bNone / NoneNational audienceAuditory-visual object recognition time suggests specific processing for animal sound

Divergent mind-sets, convergent policies: Policing models against organized crime in Italy and in England within international frameworks

The fight against organized crime is a very fertile ground for policymaking at various levels. On one side, because of the perceived transnationality of the phenomenon, national states are inclined to develop harmonized responses within the European or international law frameworks. On the other side, national conceptualizations and manifestations of organized crime often make these harmonizations quite challenging. This paper shares the findings of a socio-legal investigation carried out in England and in Italy through interviews and document analysis, comparing the two national models against organized crime. The paper presents these two models ? the Italian Structure Model and the English Activity Model, which are very different in many ways ? in order to identify divergences and convergences of policies and practices. This comparative exercise not only improves our understanding of national approaches, beyond cultural, linguistic and legal boundaries, but also improves the dialogue towards concerted efforts at the international level. Nevertheless, the globalization of criminal markets and the internationalization of policies have influenced perceptions of organized crime and related policing tactics at national levels too. This paper will briefly look at international perspectives to assess to what extent divergent and convergent areas between the two models are also areas of interest and focus at the international level, in order to conclude with an enhanced understanding of both models before drawing conclusions

Representation of Time-Varying Stimuli by a Network Exhibiting Oscillations on a Faster Time Scale

Sensory processing is associated with gamma frequency oscillations (30–80 Hz) in sensory cortices. This raises the question whether gamma oscillations can be directly involved in the representation of time-varying stimuli, including stimuli whose time scale is longer than a gamma cycle. We are interested in the ability of the system to reliably distinguish different stimuli while being robust to stimulus variations such as uniform time-warp. We address this issue with a dynamical model of spiking neurons and study the response to an asymmetric sawtooth input current over a range of shape parameters. These parameters describe how fast the input current rises and falls in time. Our network consists of inhibitory and excitatory populations that are sufficient for generating oscillations in the gamma range. The oscillations period is about one-third of the stimulus duration. Embedded in this network is a subpopulation of excitatory cells that respond to the sawtooth stimulus and a subpopulation of cells that respond to an onset cue. The intrinsic gamma oscillations generate a temporally sparse code for the external stimuli. In this code, an excitatory cell may fire a single spike during a gamma cycle, depending on its tuning properties and on the temporal structure of the specific input; the identity of the stimulus is coded by the list of excitatory cells that fire during each cycle. We quantify the properties of this representation in a series of simulations and show that the sparseness of the code makes it robust to uniform warping of the time scale. We find that resetting of the oscillation phase at stimulus onset is important for a reliable representation of the stimulus and that there is a tradeoff between the resolution of the neural representation of the stimulus and robustness to time-warp. Author Summary Sensory processing of time-varying stimuli, such as speech, is associated with high-frequency oscillatory cortical activity, the functional significance of which is still unknown. One possibility is that the oscillations are part of a stimulus-encoding mechanism. Here, we investigate a computational model of such a mechanism, a spiking neuronal network whose intrinsic oscillations interact with external input (waveforms simulating short speech segments in a single acoustic frequency band) to encode stimuli that extend over a time interval longer than the oscillation's period. The network implements a temporally sparse encoding, whose robustness to time warping and neuronal noise we quantify. To our knowledge, this study is the first to demonstrate that a biophysically plausible model of oscillations occurring in the processing of auditory input may generate a representation of signals that span multiple oscillation cycles.National Science Foundation (DMS-0211505); Burroughs Wellcome Fund; U.S. Air Force Office of Scientific Researc

Competing Sound Sources Reveal Spatial Effects in Cortical Processing

Neurons in the avian auditory forebrain show strong sensitivity to the spatial configuration of two competing sources, even though there is only weak spatial dependence for any single source

Acquired A amyloidosis from injection drug use presenting with atraumatic splenic rupture in a hospitalized patient: a case report

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Introduction</p> <p>Little is known about splenic rupture in patients who develop systemic acquired A amyloidosis. This is the first report of a case of atraumatic splenic rupture in a patient with acquired A amyloidosis from chronic injection drug use.</p> <p>Case presentation</p> <p>A 58-year-old Caucasian man with a long history of injection drug use, hospitalized for infective endocarditis, experienced atraumatic splenic rupture and underwent splenectomy. Histopathological and microbiological analyses of the splenic tissue were consistent with systemic acquired A amyloidosis, most likely from injection drug use, that led to splenic rupture without any recognized trauma or evidence of bacterial embolization to the spleen.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>In patients with chronic inflammatory conditions, including the use of injection drugs, who experience acute onset of left upper quadrant pain, the diagnosis of atraumatic splenic rupture must be considered.</p

Outcome after failure of allogeneic hematopoietic stem cell transplantation in children with acute leukemia: a study by the Société Francophone de Greffe de Moelle et de Thérapie Cellulaire (SFGM-TC)

Allogeneic hematopoietic stem cell transplantation (SCT) contributes to improved outcome in childhood acute leukemia (AL). However, therapeutic options are poorly defined in case of post-transplantation relapse. We aimed to compare treatment strategies in 334 consecutive children with acute leukemia relapse or progression after SCT in a recent ten-year period. Data could be analyzed in 288 patients (157 ALL, 123 AML and 8 biphenotypic AL) with a median age of 8.16 years at transplantation. The median delay from first SCT to relapse or progression was 182 days. The treatment consisted in chemotherapy alone (n=108), chemotherapy followed by second SCT (n=70), supportive/palliative care (n=67), combination of chemotherapy and DLI (n=30), or isolated reinfusion of donor lymphocytes (DLI) (n=13). The median OS duration after relapse was 164 days and differed according to therapy: DLI after chemotherapy = 385 d, second allograft = 391d, chemotherapy = 174d, DLI alone = 140d, palliative care = 43d. A second SCT or a combination of chemotherapy and donor lymphocytes infusion yielded similar outcome (HR=0.85, p=0.53) unlike chemotherapy alone (HR 1.43 p=0.04), palliative care (HR=4.24, p<0.0001) or isolated DLI (HR=1,94, p<0.04). Despite limitations in this retrospective setting, strategies including immunointervention appear superior to other approaches, mostly in AML

Adaptation and Selective Information Transmission in the Cricket Auditory Neuron AN2

Sensory systems adapt their neural code to changes in the sensory environment, often on multiple time scales. Here, we report a new form of adaptation in a first-order auditory interneuron (AN2) of crickets. We characterize the response of the AN2 neuron to amplitude-modulated sound stimuli and find that adaptation shifts the stimulus–response curves toward higher stimulus intensities, with a time constant of 1.5 s for adaptation and recovery. The spike responses were thus reduced for low-intensity sounds. We then address the question whether adaptation leads to an improvement of the signal's representation and compare the experimental results with the predictions of two competing hypotheses: infomax, which predicts that information conveyed about the entire signal range should be maximized, and selective coding, which predicts that “foreground” signals should be enhanced while “background” signals should be selectively suppressed. We test how adaptation changes the input–response curve when presenting signals with two or three peaks in their amplitude distributions, for which selective coding and infomax predict conflicting changes. By means of Bayesian data analysis, we quantify the shifts of the measured response curves and also find a slight reduction of their slopes. These decreases in slopes are smaller, and the absolute response thresholds are higher than those predicted by infomax. Most remarkably, and in contrast to the infomax principle, adaptation actually reduces the amount of encoded information when considering the whole range of input signals. The response curve changes are also not consistent with the selective coding hypothesis, because the amount of information conveyed about the loudest part of the signal does not increase as predicted but remains nearly constant. Less information is transmitted about signals with lower intensity