Effects of burying and removing dead leaves from the ground on the development of scab epidemics in an apple organic orchard.

Ascospores produced on scabbed leaves in the leaf litter constitute the primary inoculum causing scab infections in apple orchards during the year. The trial, carried out in a commercial organic orchard, permitted to evaluate the effects of the removal of dead leaves located on the inter-row supplemented by the ploughing in of the leaves left on the row, on the development of scab epidemics. From the first recorded contamination to harvest time, lesions on leaves and fruits were counted to determine reduction in disease incidence and severity, compared with the untreated plots. Disease severity as a function of the distance from the untreated plot was also observed, to evaluate the spore dispersal gradient within the orchard. The results show that the ploughing in and the removal of the litter reduced disease incidence by 62% on leaves, and by almost 82% on fruits to harvest. Moreover, measurements of the dispersal gradient show that the spores do not disperse, or little, beyond 20m of the untreated zone

A model for atomic and molecular interstellar gas: The Meudon PDR code

We present the revised ``Meudon'' model of Photon Dominated Region (PDR code), presently available on the web under the Gnu Public Licence at: http://aristote.obspm.fr/MIS. General organisation of the code is described down to a level that should allow most observers to use it as an interpretation tool with minimal help from our part. Two grids of models, one for low excitation diffuse clouds and one for dense highly illuminated clouds, are discussed, and some new results on PDR modelisation highlighted.Comment: accepted in ApJ sup

Atomic fountains and optical clocks at SYRTE: status and perspectives

In this article, we report on the work done with the LNE-SYRTE atomic clock ensemble during the last 10 years. We cover progress made in atomic fountains and in their application to timekeeping. We also cover the development of optical lattice clocks based on strontium and on mercury. We report on tests of fundamental physical laws made with these highly accurate atomic clocks. We also report on work relevant to a future possible redefinition of the SI second

Fokker-Planck type equations with Sobolev diffusion coefficients and BV drift coefficients

In this paper we give an affirmative answer to an open question mentioned in [Le Bris and Lions, Comm. Partial Differential Equations 33 (2008), 1272--1317], that is, we prove the well-posedness of the Fokker-Planck type equations with Sobolev diffusion coefficients and BV drift coefficients.Comment: 11 pages. The proof has been modifie

The VIMOS-VLT Deep Survey: Dependence of galaxy clustering on stellar mass

We have investigated the dependence of galaxy clustering on their stellar mass at z~1, using the data from the VIMOS-VLT Deep Survey (VVDS). We have measured the projected two-point correlation function of galaxies, wp(rp) for a set of stellar mass selected samples at an effective redshift =0.85. We have control and quantify all effects on galaxy clustering due to the incompleteness of our low mass samples. We find that more massive galaxies are more clustered. When compared to similar results at z~0.1 in the SDSS, we observed no evolution of the projected correlation function for massive galaxies. These objects present a stronger linear bias at z~1 with respect to low mass galaxies. As expected, massive objects at high redshift are found in the highest pics of the dark matter density field.Comment: 4 pages, 2 figures, 43rd Rencontres de Moriond - March 15-22, 2008 - La Thuile (Val d'Aosta, Italy

TarTar: A Timed Automata Repair Tool

We present TarTar, an automatic repair analysis tool that, given a timed diagnostic trace (TDT) obtained during the model checking of a timed automaton model, suggests possible syntactic repairs of the analyzed model. The suggested repairs include modified values for clock bounds in location invariants and transition guards, adding or removing clock resets, etc. The proposed repairs are guaranteed to eliminate executability of the given TDT, while preserving the overall functional behavior of the system. We give insights into the design and architecture of TarTar, and show that it can successfully repair 69% of the seeded errors in system models taken from a diverse suite of case studies.Comment: 15 pages, 7 figure