Étude des intrusions cognitives et des croyances dysfonctionnelles reliées au trouble obsessionnel-compulsif

Thèse numérisée par la Division de la gestion de documents et des archives de l'Université de Montréal

Evaluation of the personal health budget pilot programme

1. The personal health budget initiative is a key aspect of personalisation across health care services in England. Its aim is to improve patient outcomes, by placing patients at the centre of decisions about their care. Giving people greater choice and control, with patients working alongside health service professionals to develop and execute a care plan, given a known budget, is intended to encourage more responsiveness of the health and care system. 2. The personal health budget programme was launched by the Department of Health in 2009 after the publication of the 2008 Next Stage Review. An independent evaluation was commissioned alongside the pilot programme with the aim of identifying whether personal health budgets ensured better health and care outcomes when compared to conventional service delivery and, if so, the best way for personal health budgets to be implemented

DRIVE: Data-driven Robot Input Vector Exploration

An accurate motion model is a fundamental component of most autonomous navigation systems. While much work has been done on improving model formulation, no standard protocol exists for gathering empirical data required to train models. In this work, we address this issue by proposing Data-driven Robot Input Vector Exploration (DRIVE), a protocol that enables characterizing uncrewed ground vehicles (UGVs) input limits and gathering empirical model training data. We also propose a novel learned slip approach outperforming similar acceleration learning approaches. Our contributions are validated through an extensive experimental evaluation, cumulating over 7 km and 1.8 h of driving data over three distinct UGVs and four terrain types. We show that our protocol offers increased predictive performance over common human-driven data-gathering protocols. Furthermore, our protocol converges with 46 s of training data, almost four times less than the shortest human dataset gathering protocol. We show that the operational limit for our model is reached in extreme slip conditions encountered on surfaced ice. DRIVE is an efficient way of characterizing UGV motion in its operational conditions. Our code and dataset are both available online at this link: https://github.com/norlab-ulaval/DRIVE.Comment: 6 pages, 7 figures, submitted to 2024 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA 2024

Orbits for the Impatient: A Bayesian Rejection Sampling Method for Quickly Fitting the Orbits of Long-Period Exoplanets

We describe a Bayesian rejection sampling algorithm designed to efficiently compute posterior distributions of orbital elements for data covering short fractions of long-period exoplanet orbits. Our implementation of this method, Orbits for the Impatient (OFTI), converges up to several orders of magnitude faster than two implementations of MCMC in this regime. We illustrate the efficiency of our approach by showing that OFTI calculates accurate posteriors for all existing astrometry of the exoplanet 51 Eri b up to 100 times faster than a Metropolis-Hastings MCMC. We demonstrate the accuracy of OFTI by comparing our results for several orbiting systems with those of various MCMC implementations, finding the output posteriors to be identical within shot noise. We also describe how our algorithm was used to successfully predict the location of 51 Eri b six months in the future based on less than three months of astrometry. Finally, we apply OFTI to ten long-period exoplanets and brown dwarfs, all but one of which have been monitored over less than 3% of their orbits, producing fits to their orbits from astrometric records in the literature.Comment: 32 pages, 28 figures, Accepted to A

Neighbourhood cohesion and mental wellbeing among older adults:A mixed methods approach

There is now a body of evidence that demonstrates strong links between neighbourhood characteristics and mental health and wellbeing. There is an increasing interest in how this relationship varies for individuals of different ages. Understanding the link between neighbourhood and wellbeing for older adults is of particular significance, given the changing age structure of the population and the desire among policy makers and practitioners to promote healthy and active ageing. This paper provides further evidence on the nature and strength of the link between individual perceptions of neighbourhood belonging and mental wellbeing among those over age fifty using both qualitative and quantitative data from three British cohort studies. Between 2008 and 2011 quantitative data were collected from 10,312 cohort members, and 230 of them took part in qualitative biographical interviews.Quantitative analysis confirms that there is a moderate association between neighbourhood cohesion and wellbeing measured at the individual level in each of the three cohorts. This association persists after controlling for a range of covariates including personality. The association between neighbourhood cohesion and wellbeing is stronger for individuals in the older two cohorts than in the younger cohort.Using qualitative biographical interviews with 116 men and 114 women we illustrate how individuals talk about their sense of neighbourhood belonging. The importance of social participation as a mechanism for promoting neighbourhood belonging, and the use of age and life stage as characteristics to describe and define neighbours, is clear. In addition, the qualitative interviews point to the difficulties of using a short battery of questions to capture the varied and multi-dimensional nature of neighbourhood relations.<br/

Molecular recognition of the native HIV-1 MPER revealed by STED microscopy of single virions

Antibodies against the Membrane-Proximal External Region (MPER) of the Env gp41 subunit neutralize HIV-1 with exceptional breadth and potency. Due to the lack of knowledge on the MPER native structure and accessibility, different and exclusive models have been proposed for the molecular mechanism of MPER recognition by broadly neutralizing antibodies. Here, accessibility of antibodies to the native Env MPER on single virions has been addressed through STED microscopy. STED imaging of fluorescently labeled Fabs reveals a common pattern of native Env recognition for HIV-1 antibodies targeting MPER or the surface subunit gp120. In the case of anti-MPER antibodies, the process evolves with extra contribution of interactions with the viral lipid membrane to binding specificity. Our data provide biophysical insights into the recognition of the potent and broadly neutralizing MPER epitope on HIV virions, and as such is of importance for the design of therapeutic interventions

Vers un cadrage théorique interdisciplinaire portant sur la co-construction

Les territoires font face à des défis socioéconomiques pressants (développement économique durable, lutte à la pauvreté et l’exclusion, transition énergétique, etc.) qui requièrent le savoir et le savoir-faire des intervenants de la sphère privée, publique et communautaire. En cohérence avec le principe de l’économie plurielle (Klein et al., 2010), on constate, à l’échelle locale, que seuls les milieux qui parviennent à mobiliser les acteurs issus de l’économie marchande et non marchande sont ceux capables de s’adapter, d’innover et de se transformer au nom de l’intérêt général (Lévesque, 2011). À cet égard, la notion de co-construction s’avère porteuse pour que les acteurs s’accordent sur une définition de la réalité (une représentation, une décision, un projet, un diagnostic) et sur les façons de faire pour agir sur la situation observée (Foudriat, 2016). Dans une perspective de développement local, ce principe s’arrime parfaitement aux fondements mêmes de cette approche, car un projet de développement dit « local » s’appuie d’abord et avant tout sur l’implication citoyenne, la concertation entre les acteurs et l’appropriation des projets par et pour les milieux (Levy, 2012). Toutefois, à la lumière des travaux disponibles sur le sujet, un constat s’impose : si la notion de co-construction est largement promue dans certaines disciplines plus sociales (ex. : travail social), il s’avère qu’elle ne s’impose pas d’elle-même dans d’autres secteurs comme la sociologie organisationnelle ou le management (Foudriat, 2016), peut-être parce que sa compréhension porte parfois à confusion avec d’autres concepts semblables et menace ainsi son opérationnalisation. Il convient alors de s’interroger sur certains aspects, notamment : 1) comment la littérature des domaines du développement local en travail social et de la gestion de projet aborde-t-elle la notion de co-construction et son opérationnalisation ? 2) Quelles sont les similarités ou les distinctions dans la manière d’appréhender cette notion dans ces deux champs disciplinaires ? Et, 3) Comment est-il possible de proposer un cadre théorique qui mise sur les forces de ces deux disciplines tout en faisant l’objet d’un consensus au sein de ses experts ? C’est à ces différentes questions que nous avions essayer de répondre avec une approche méthodologique précise

Molecular Recognition of the Native HIV-1 MPER Revealed by STED Microscopy of Single Virions

Antibodies against the Membrane-Proximal External Region (MPER) of the Env gp41 subunit neutralize HIV-1 with exceptional breadth and potency. Due to the lack of knowledge on the MPER native structure and accessibility, different and exclusive models have been proposed for the molecular mechanism of MPER recognition by broadly neutralizing antibodies. Here, accessibility of antibodies to the native Env MPER on single virions has been addressed through STED microscopy. STED imaging of fluorescently labeled Fabs reveals a common pattern of native Env recognition for HIV-1 antibodies targeting MPER or the surface subunit gp120. In the case of anti-MPER antibodies, the process evolves with extra contribution of interactions with the viral lipid membrane to binding specificity. Our data provide biophysical insights into the recognition of the potent and broadly neutralizing MPER epitope on HIV virions, and as such is of importance for the design of therapeutic interventions.This study was supported by the Spanish MINECO (BIO2015-64421-R (MINECO/ FEDER UE) to J.L.N.) and the Basque Government (IT838-13 to J.L.N.). P.C., E.R., and S. I. received pre-doctoral fellowships from the Basque Government. P.C. would like to acknowledge the European Biophysical Societies’ Association (EBSA) for receiving an EBSA Bursary for a working visit to a laboratory in an EBSA country. J.C., D.W., and C. E. greatly acknowledge support by the MRC (grant number MC_UU_12010/unit programs G0902418 and MC_UU_12025), the Wellcome Trust (grant 104924/14/Z/14 and Strategic Award 091911 (Micron)), MRC/BBSRC/EPSRC (grant MR/K01577X/1), BBSRC (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (Research unit 1905 “Structure and function of the peroxisomal translocon”)), the Wolfson Foundation (for initial funding of the Wolfson Imaging Centre Oxford), the EPA Cephalosporin Fund and the John Fell Fund. T.S. is a recipient of a Canada Graduate Scholarship Master’s Award and a Vanier Canada Graduate Scholarship from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research. This work was supported by operating grant NIH-150414 (J.-P.J.) from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research. This research was undertaken, in part, thanks to funding from the Canada Research Chairs program (J.-P.J.). We acknowledge valuable technical assistance from Miguel García-Porra

Early experiences of implementing personal health budgets.

The aim of this report is identify the challenges faced by project teams in implementing budgets and also any strategies and approaches that worked well. One of the overall aims of the evaluation is to provide lessons for successful implementation of personal health budgets in other areas should the policy be taken forward. This report provides early analysis in this regard. Over the period April to June 2010, interviews were conducted with personal health budget project leads in the 20 in‐depth sites. The interviews were semi‐structured, allowing project leads to discuss their implementation processes and other relevant issues. Each interview lasted approximately 1.5 hours. Interviews were transcribed and coded in accordance with the areas covered in the topic guide