Réaction à Mohamed Said Nakhli et al. à propos de l'article: "Quand le bloc axillaire reste la seule alternative chez un enfant de 5 ans". The Pan African Medical Journal. 2015;21:36

Le bloc axillaire chez l'enfant est une technique facile et recommandée chez l'enfant. Sa réalisation chez un enfant présentant une hépatite A aigue n'est pas démunie de risques surtout lorsqu'il est associé à une sédation au propofol avec du remifentanil. De même, la présence d'un kyste hydatique unique laisse la possibilité de l'anesthésie générale avec ventilation uni pulmonaire.Mots clés: Bloc axillaire, anesthésie générale, hépatite A, kyste hydatiqueEnglish Title: Reaction to Mohamed Said Nakhli et al. concerning the article: "When the axillary block remains the only alternative in a 5 year old child". The Pan African Medical Journal. 2015;21:36English AbstractAxillary block is an easy and recommended technique in children. Its use in children with acute hepatitis A is not risk free especially when associated with sedation using remifentanil and propofol. Similarly, the presence of a single hydatid cyst allows general anesthesia with mono-pulmonary ventilation.Keywords: Axillary block, general anesthesia, hepatitis A, hydatid cys

Persuasion in Political Discourse: Tunisian President Ben Ali\u27s Last Speech as a Case Stud

Within a discourse analysis framework, this research investigates persuasion in political discourse in the last speech of the former Tunisian president Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, delivered one day before he left the country in the middle of the Tunisian Revolution that sparked the so-called Arab Spring. Sentences are analyzed to check their illocutionary force in light of Searle\u27s typology of Speech Act Theory. Then, an analysis of agency is carried out to investigate the persuasive dimension of the use of deictic pronouns to construct the self-image as well as the image of the Other. The speech is also examined using the three appeals of Aristotle, and its use of diglossia is analyzed. Lastly, the Gricean maxims are used to check whether the Cooperative Principle is observed or not and whether the deviation is intended for persuasive ends. The findings of this study indicate that multiple speech acts are used in the same utterance either with or without an explicit performative verb. Some speech acts may be used as a medium to carry others. It also shows how the strategic use of deictic pronouns and agency with certain illocutionary forces helps construct otherness as well as the self. This process is enforced by the marked use of ethos, which is a crucial strategy of persuasion in political discourse. Although the use of Tunisian dialect represents a deviation from the norm, the findings show that emotions are more effectively conveyed in dialect than in Standard Arabic. The non-observance of the Gricean maxims is found to be a persuasive strategy to manipulate the audience. However, persuasion cannot be achieved only through linguistic tools. It has to be paralleled with a good awareness of the context

The Impact of Partial Sleep Deprivation on the Diurnal Variations of Cognitive Performance in Trained Subjects

AbstractThe aim of this study was to investigate the effect of partial sleep deprivation on the diurnal variations of cognitive performance of handball goalkeepers. Twelve handball goalkeepers (18.5±1.7 years; 8.3±2.4 years of experiment) performed 3 cognitive tasks by the use of the reaction time (RT), the stroop, and the barrage tests (to evaluate the RT, the selective and supported attention respectively) following 2 situations of sleep deprivation (in the beginning or in the end of the night) and a control situation. The tests were performed at 08:00 and 16:00. Our results showed an increased RT and a fall of the level of the attention after the partial sleep deprivation in the afternoon hours. However, the partial sleep deprivation didn’t affect the morning cognitive performance. In conclusion, partial sleep deprivation affects the diurnal variation of cognitive performance by increasing the RT and reducing the attentional capacities in the afternoon hours

Matching model of flow table for networked big data

Networking for big data has to be intelligent because it will adjust data transmission requirements adaptively during data splitting and merging. Software-defined networking (SDN) provides a workable and practical paradigm for designing more efficient and flexible networks. Matching strategy in the flow table of SDN switches is most crucial. In this paper, we use a classification approach to analyze the structure of packets based on the tuple-space lookup mechanism, and propose a matching model of the flow table in SDN switches by classifying packets based on a set of fields, which is called an F-OpenFlow. The experiment results show that the proposed F-OpenFlow effectively improves the utilization rate and matching efficiency of the flow table in SDN switches for networked big data.Comment: 14 pages, 6 figures, 2 table

Lien entre la préférence d’oviposition et la performance subséquente des larves chez la mineuse des agrumes Phyllocnistis citrella Stainton [Lepidoptera : Gracillariidae]

La femelle de la mineuse des agrumes Phyllocnistis citrella [Lepidoptera : Gracillariidae] recherche de façon préférentielle les jeunes feuilles, riches en éléments nutritifs, pour pondre ses oeufs et délaisse les feuilles âgées. La femelle a aussi tendance à revenir sur un hôte où un dépôt d’oeufs en surnombre a préalablement été effectué par d’autres femelles. Il s’en suit une forte mortalité larvaire. Toutefois, la taille des survivants n’est pas affectée parce que la régulation se fait par élimination des individus surnuméraires.[Relationship between oviposition preference and the subsequent performance of citrus leafminer Phyllocnistis citrella [Lepidoptera: Gracillariidae] larvae]The female citrus leafminer Phyllocnistis citrella [Lepidoptera: Gracillariidae] principally favours young leaves that are the richest in nutritive elements to lay eggs and leaves aside the oldest ones. Females also tend to come back to a host already infested with supernumerary egg deposition by other females. The result of this behaviour is a high larval mortality, but the size of the survivors is not affected as regulation occurs through the elimination of supernumerary individuals

Efficiency concept and investigations in insurance industry: A survey

Most recent studies are based on benchmarking analysis allowing the measure of company efficiency relatively to a reference performance. Benchmarking is a helpful tool to analyze and promote efficiency in insurance companies. The fast development of X-efficiency notion makes traditional performance measures (ROA, ROE, etc.) obsolete. Indeed, various methods have been used, various input-output measures have been proposed and various research fields have been explored in insurance company investigation. So, after reviewing most known efficiency concepts and their definitions, this section explores the literature review of two principal points of discussion: the first point is focused on the different used techniques to measure efficiency, including the developed approaches to define inputs, outputs and their prices. The second point represents an overview of efficiency investigations in insurance industry

Dehydration and decomposition behavior of the NaH2(PO4)0,48AsO4)0,52.H2O compound in the temperature range from 253 K to 333 K.

The mixed compound NaH2(PO4)0.48(AsO4)0.52.H2O, which has been examined by Raman spectroscopy, XRD powder and dielectric, exhibits solid–solid phase transitions and one reversible solid–liquid phase transition. Besides, the investigation of dehydration behavior of sodium dihydrogenate phosphate-arsenate monohydrate was undertaken in a temperature range from 253 K to 333 K. The onset temperature of dehydration was determined from changes in ionic conductivity and X-ray powder on heating. It was confirmed by the Raman study not only in the disappearance of the vibrations assigned to the PO4, AsO4  but also in the appearance of the new vibrations attributed to the (PO3), which constitutes the P-O-P chain, giving a polymer with the formula: NaH2(P2O7)x(As2O7)(1-x).  The important variation was observed in all studies at 313 K, which could correspond to the transformation of the NDAP compounds of a solid crystal into a liquid form

A Multi-Agent Architecture for the Design of Hierarchical Interval Type-2 Beta Fuzzy System

This paper presents a new methodology for building and evolving hierarchical fuzzy systems. For the system design, a tree-based encoding method is adopted to hierarchically link low dimensional fuzzy systems. Such tree structural representation has by nature a flexible design offering more adjustable and modifiable structures. The proposed hierarchical structure employs a type-2 beta fuzzy system to cope with the faced uncertainties, and the resulting system is called the Hierarchical Interval Type-2 Beta Fuzzy System (HT2BFS). For the system optimization, two main tasks of structure learning and parameter tuning are applied. The structure learning phase aims to evolve and learn the structures of a population of HT2BFS in a multiobjective context taking into account the optimization of both the accuracy and the interpretability metrics. The parameter tuning phase is applied to refine and adjust the parameters of the system. To accomplish these two tasks in the most optimal and faster way, we further employ a multi-agent architecture to provide both a distributed and a cooperative management of the optimization tasks. Agents are divided into two different types based on their functions: a structure agent and a parameter agent. The main function of the structure agent is to perform a multi-objective evolutionary structure learning step by means of the Multi-Objective Immune Programming algorithm (MOIP). The parameter agents have the function of managing different hierarchical structures simultaneously to refine their parameters by means of the Hybrid Harmony Search algorithm (HHS). In this architecture, agents use cooperation and communication concepts to create high-performance HT2BFSs. The performance of the proposed system is evaluated by several comparisons with various state of art approaches on noise-free and noisy time series prediction data sets and regression problems. The results clearly demonstrate a great improvement in the accuracy rate, the convergence speed and the number of used rules as compared with other existing approaches

Verification and validation of UML and SysML based systems engineering design models

In this thesis, we address the issue of model-based verification and validation of systems engineering design models expressed using UML/SysML. The main objectives are to assess the design from its structural and behavioral perspectives and to enable a qualitative as well as a quantitative appraisal of its conformance with respect to its requirements and a set of desired properties. To this end, we elaborate a heretofore unattempted unified approach composed of three well-established techniques that are model-checking, static analysis, and software engineering metrics. These techniques are synergistically combined so that they yield a comprehensive and enhanced assessment. Furthermore, we propose to extend this approach with performance analysis and probabilistic assessment of SysML activity diagrams. Thus, we devise an algorithm that systematically maps these diagrams into their corresponding probabilistic models encoded using the specification language of the probabilistic symbolic model-checker PRISM. Moreover, we define a first of its kind probabilistic calculus, namely activity calculus, dedicated to capture the essence of SysML activity diagrams and its underlying operational semantics in terms of Markov decision processes. Furthermore, we propose a formal syntax and operational semantics for the input language of PRISM. Finally, we mathematically prove the soundness of our translation algorithm with respect to the devised operational semantics using a simulation preorder defined upon Markov decision processes