L’aventure des films sonores teintés et virés aux États-Unis

Il est courant de penser que l’usage du teintage et du virage s’arrêtent avec le passage au sonore, à la fin des années 1920 et que les stocks de films teintés dans la masse, tel le Sonochrome commercialisé par Eastman Kodak, furent rarement utilisés et des échecs commerciaux. Bien au contraire, l’usage du teintage et du virage non seulement se poursuivirent avec l’arrivée du son mais continuèrent aussi d’être utilisés jusque dans les années 1950 et au-delà. Cet article examine l’usage de la couleur artificielle dans les films sonores de l’industrie filmique nord-américaine.It is an accepted belief that the use of tinting and toning of motions pictures came to an end with the introduction of the optical soundtrack in the late 1920’s. That pre-tinted film stocks, such as Eastman Kodak’s Sonochrome, were little used and were a commercial failures. There is evidence to the contrary, tinting and toning did not stop with the coming of sound but continued to be used well into the 1950’s and beyond. This article will examine the use of artificial colour in talking pictures by the American film industry

Effect of neutral current interactions on high energy muon and electron neutrino propagation through the Earth

High energy electron and muon neutrino propagation through the Earth has been performed using the Monte Carlo technique. We focused our attention on the effect of neutral current deep inelastic interactions compared to that of charged current ones. We have found that NCs do not produce any significant effect with respect to the case in which only CCs are considered. Therefore we conclude that NC interactions can be neglected without considerable loss of accuracy. When computing upward-going neutrino fluxes a simple formula describing the transmission probability, that depends on the neutrino direction and energy and the CC cross section, can be used to account for the Earth shadowing effect.Comment: 9 pages, 4 figures, uses elsart.cls, elsart.sty, elsart12.sty, submitted to Astroparticle Physycs. The version 3 has been significantly changed in the frame of preparation for publication in Astroparticle Physics: new plot and references added, several misprinting have been fixe

Sexual Harassment in the Physician-Patient Interaction: Analysis of Charges Against Doctors in the State of São Paulo

OBJECTIVE: This research intends to discuss sexual harassment within the doctor-patient relationship based on four parameters: doctor's characteristics, accuser's characteristics, accusation characteristics, and the evaluation by the Medicine Council of São Paulo. METHOD: It is a descriptive, quantitative approach using a retrospective documental analysis. Studied subjects were doctors who were allegedly engaged in sexual harassment. This analysis considered all accusations made from January 2000 to December 2005 (n=150). RESULTS: For this type of sexual abuse, there was a prevalence of male professionals (96.6%) who committed abuse against female patients (90.3%) during adulthood (77.7%). The mean age of the accused was 46.87 years, ranging from 30-76 years, concentrated between 46-75 years. The intrinsic difficulty of understanding sexual harassment by a professional constrained ethical evaluation of the cases, with 24.1% of the cases being considered proceeding charges by the professional council. When the cases were recognized as proceeding, they were either filed (88.2%) or were considered to be ethical infringement (11.8%) becoming Professional Ethical Process (PEP). In the majority of proceeding cases (87%), there was a Police Occurrence Report enclosed. DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION: The incidence of sexual abuse by professionals was independent of education, as the accused professionals came from a large variety of medical colleges, without significant differences related to institution. The predominance of accusations against older professionals may occur due to the frail personality structure that allows professional acting out. Objective evidence is very important in ethical evaluations compared to psychological and subjective evidence

Preclinical Tests for Cerebral Stroke

Stroke is the second single highest cause of death in Europe. The low reliability of animal models in replicating the human disease is one of the most serious problems in the field of medical and pharmaceutical research about stroke. The standard models for the study of ischemic stroke are often poorly predictive as they simulate only partially the human disease. This work aims at investigating animal models with diseases typically associated with the onset of stroke in human patients. We have designed and realised a knowledge base for collecting, elaborating, and extracting analytical results of genomic, proteomic, biochemical, morphological investigations from animal models of cerebral stroke. Data analysis techniques are tailored to make the data available for processing and correlation, in order to increase the predictive value of the preclinical data, to perform biosimulation studies, and to support both academic and industrial research in the area of cerebral stroke therapy. A first statistical analysis of the retrieved information leads to the validation of our animal models and suggests a predictive and translational value for parameters related to a specific model. In particular, concerning gene expression data, we have applied a data analysis pipeline that initially takes into account an initial set of 64,000 genes and brings down the focus on a few tens of them

Normalized compression distance to measure cortico-muscular synchronization

The neuronal functional connectivity is a complex and non-stationary phenomenon creating dynamic networks synchronization determining the brain states and needed to produce tasks. Here, as a measure that quantifies the synchronization between the neuronal electrical activity of two brain regions, we used the normalized compression distance (NCD), which is the length of the compressed file constituted by the concatenated two signals, normalized by the length of the two compressed files including each single signal. To test the NCD sensitivity to physiological properties, we used NCD to measure the cortico-muscular synchronization, a well-known mechanism to control movements, in 15 healthy volunteers during a weak handgrip. Independently of NCD compressor (Huffman or Lempel Ziv), we found out that the resulting measure is sensitive to the dominant-non dominant asymmetry when novelty management is required (p = 0.011; p = 0.007, respectively) and depends on the level of novelty when moving the nondominant hand (p = 0.012; p = 0.024). Showing lower synchronization levels for less dexterous networks, NCD seems to be a measure able to enrich the estimate of functional two-node connectivity within the neuronal networks that control the body

Neuroanatomical Correlates of Semantic Features of Narrative Speech in Semantic and Logopenic Variants of Primary Progressive Aphasia

The semantic variant of a primary progressive aphasia (svPPA) is characterized by progressive disruption of semantic knowledge. This study aimed to compare the semantic features of words produced during a narrative speech in svPPA and the logopenic variant of PPA (lvPPA) and to explore their neuroanatomical correlates. Six patients with svPPA and sixteen with lvPPA underwent narrative speech tasks. For all the content words, a semantic depth index (SDI) was determined based on the taxonomic structure of a large lexical database. Study participants underwent an MRI examination. Cortical thickness measures were extracted according to the Desikan atlas. Correlations were computed between SDI and the thickness of cortical regions. Mean SDI was lower for svPPA than for lvPPA. Correlation analyses showed a positive association between the SDI and the cortical thickness of the bilateral temporal pole, parahippocampal and entorhinal cortices, and left middle and superior temporal cortices. Disruption of semantic knowledge observed in svPPA leads to the production of generic terms in narrative speech, and the SDI may be useful for quantifying the level of semantic impairment. The measure was associated with the cortical thickness of brain regions associated with semantic memory

MYC-containing amplicons in acute myeloid leukemia: genomic structures, evolution, and transcriptional consequences.

Double minutes (dmin), homogeneously staining regions, and ring chromosomes are vehicles of gene amplification in cancer. The underlying mechanism leading to their formation as well as their structure and function in acute myeloid leukemia (AML) remain mysterious. We combined a range of high-resolution genomic methods to investigate the architecture and expression pattern of amplicons involving chromosome band 8q24 in 23 cases of AML (AML-amp). This revealed that different MYC-dmin architectures can coexist within the same leukemic cell population, indicating a step-wise evolution rather than a single event origin, such as through chromothripsis. This was supported also by the analysis of the chromothripsis criteria, that poorly matched the model in our samples. Furthermore, we found that dmin could evolve toward ring chromosomes stabilized by neocentromeres. Surprisingly, amplified genes (mainly PVT1) frequently participated in fusion transcripts lacking a corresponding DNA template. We also detected a significant overexpression of the circular RNA of PVT1 (circPVT1) in AML-amp cases versus AML with a normal karyotype. Our results show that 8q24 amplicons in AML are surprisingly plastic DNA structures with an unexpected association to novel fusion transcripts and circular RNAs