Enjeux de l’application du taux réduit de TVA au livre numérique (Les)

Rapport du Contrôle général économique et financier (CGEfi) aux ministres de l’Economie, des Finances et de l’Industrie, du Budget, des Comptes publics et de la Réforme de l’Etat, de la Culture et de la Communication

Combining transcutaneous electrical nerve stimulation with therapeutic exercise to reduce pain in an elderly population: a pilot study

Purpose: Chronic pain is a highly prevalent and debilitating condition, and there is a pressing need to find safe, effective and affordable treatments to tackle this public health issue. This pilot study aimed to assess whether therapeutic exercises supplemented by transcutaneous electrical nerve stimulation induces a greater hypoalgesic effect than therapeutic exercises supplemented by sham transcutaneous electrical nerve stimulation, in an elderly population suffering from chronic pain. Materials and methods: Eighteen elderly participants suffering from chronic pain completed a therapeutic exercise program consisting of 45-min group sessions administered twice a week for 4 weeks. Half of the participants received real transcutaneous electrical nerve stimulation during the exercise sessions, while the others received sham transcutaneous electrical nerve stimulation. Participants completed pain questionnaires (McGill Pain Questionnaire, Brief Pain Inventory, Beck Depression Index) before and after the intervention, and recorded their pain levels on an 11-point numerical rating scale before and after each session (Clinical Trial.Gov ID: NCT02445677). Results and conclusion: Our results suggest that supplementing exercise sessions with transcutaneous electrical nerve stimulation does not improve the long-term outcomes of elderly patients suffering from chronic pain, but does induce short-term hypoalgesia during exercise sessions. Our study also offers valuable guidelines for the implementation of a future and adequately powered study looking at this research question

L’indice de biodiversité potentielle (IBP): un outil au service des forestiers

Les 11e rencontres de Forêt Méditerranéenne, Foresterranée’11 sur le thème “Usages, biodiversité et forêt méditerranéenne” ont eu lieu les 17 et 18 novembre 2011 dans les Bouches-du-Rhône, dans le magnifique cadre du Domaine départemental de l'Etang-des-Aulnes. Elles ont été suivies le 19 novembre d’une visite sur le terrain dans les Alpilles. Ces journées ont connu un vif succès puisqu'elles ont rassemblé 175 participants

The polychoric dual-component wealth index as an alternative to the DHS index: Addressing the urban bias.

BACKGROUND: The DHS wealth index?-?based on a statistical technique known as principal component analysis?-?is used extensively in mainstream surveys and epidemiological studies to assign individuals to wealth categories from information collected on common assets and household characteristics. Since its development in the late nineties, the index has established itself as a standard and, due to its ease of use, has led to a large and welcome increase in the analysis of inequalities. The index is, however, known to present some serious limitations, one being a bias towards patterns of urban wealth: the so-called "urban bias". METHODS: We use 10 data sets - 5 MICS (Multiple Indicator Cluster Survey), 4 DHS (Demographic and Health Survey) and one HBS (Household Budget Survey) - to demonstrate that urban bias continues to be a prominent and worrying feature of the wealth index, even after several methodological changes implemented in recent years to try to reduce it. We then propose and investigate an approach to improve the performance of the index and reduce the urban bias. This approach involves the use of ordinal rather than dummy variables, of a polychoric instead of a product-moment correlation matrix, and the use of two principal components rather than one. These approaches are used jointly to produce the polychoric dual-component wealth index (P2C). RESULTS: The P2C index enables a larger proportion of the variance of the asset variables to be accounted for, results in all assets contributing positively to the wealth score, exploits added analytical power from ordinal variables, and incorporates the extra dimension of wealth expressed by the second principal component. It results in a better representation of typically rural characteristics of wealth and leads to the identification of more plausible distributions of both the urban and rural populations across wealth quintiles, which are closer to expenditure quintiles than the standard DHS index. CONCLUSIONS: The P2C wealth index can be easily applied to mainstream surveys, such as the MICS and DHS, and to epidemiological studies; it yields more credible distributions of rural and urban subpopulations across wealth quintiles. It is proposed as an alternative to the DHS wealth index

Cross-cultural adaptation and validation of the voice handicap index in the Quebec french population (VHI-QF)

Background and Objectives: The Voice Handicap Index (VHI) is a widely recognized, selfadministered questionnaire, designed to evaluate patients’ perception of voice-related disability. It takes into consideration the physical, functional and emotional impacts of dysphonia. The VHI has been translated and validated in many languages, including European French. The purpose of our study is to translate, adapt and validate a new version of the VHI in Quebec French. Methods: The original VHI was translated into Quebec French (QF) by forward and backward translations by four professional translators, including a speech-language pathologist. The content validity of the resulting VHI-QF was examined in focus groups with six patients and seven speech-language pathologists. Another sample of 154 patients with voice disorders and 150 healthy controls allowed evaluation of the new questionnaire’s convergent and discriminant validity, and internal consistency. Satisfaction toward the questionnaire was also evaluated for all patients, as well Test-retest reliability and responsiveness for a sub-sample. Results: The VHI-QF showed a moderate correlation with dysphonia severity level, indicating adequate convergent validity. Both total and subscale scores also exhibited adequate ability to discriminate between patients and controls (discriminant validity), high internal consistency, and good test-retest reliability. The analysis of pre- and post-treatment VHI-QF scores revealed adequate responsiveness to voice treatment. Patients were overall satisfied with the questionnaire. Conclusion: The VHI-QF is a valid, reliable and clinically useful self-reported tool to evaluate the severity and change of voice disorders in Quebec French population. Therefore this questionnaire can be used in clinical and research contexts

Finite size effects near the onset of the oscillatory instability

A system of two complex Ginzburg - Landau equations is considered that applies at the onset of the oscillatory instability in spatial domains whose size is large (but finite) in one direction; the dependent variables are the slowly modulated complex amplitudes of two counterpropagating wavetrains. In order to obtain a well posed problem, four boundary conditions must be imposed at the boundaries. Two of them were already known, and the other two are first derived in this paper. In the generic case when the group velocity is of order unity, the resulting problem has terms that are not of the same order of magnitude. This fact allows us to consider two distinguished limits and to derive two associated (simpler) sub-models, that are briefly discussed. Our results predict quite a rich variety of complex dynamics that is due to both the modulational instability and finite size effects

Two Disk Components from a Gas Rich Disk-Disk Merger

We employ N-body, smoothed particle hydrodynamical simulations, including detailed treatment of chemical enrichment, to follow a gas-rich merger which results in a galaxy with disk morphology. We trace the kinematic, structural and chemical properties of stars formed before, during, and after the merger. We show that such a merger produces two exponential disk components, with the older, hotter component having a scale-length 20% larger than the later-forming, cold disk. Rapid star formation during the merger quickly enriches the protogalactic gas reservoir, resulting in high metallicities of the forming stars. These stars form from gas largely polluted by Type II supernovae, which form rapidly in the merger-induced starburst. After the merger, a thin disk forms from gas which has had time to be polluted by Type Ia supernovae. Abundance trends are plotted, and we examine the proposal that increased star formation during gas-rich mergers may explain the high alpha-to-iron abundance ratios which exist in the relatively high-metallicity thick disk component of the Milky Way.Comment: 10 pages, 1 color figure. Accepted for publication in Ap

Hierarchical Fragmentation and Jet-like Outflows in IRDC G28.34+0.06, a Growing Massive Protostar Cluster

We present Submillimeter Array (SMA) \lambda = 0.88mm observations of an infrared dark cloud (IRDC) G28.34+0.06. Located in the quiescent southern part of the G28.34 cloud, the region of interest is a massive ($>10^3$\,\msun) molecular clump P1 with a luminosity of $\sim 10^3$ \lsun, where our previous SMA observations at 1.3mm have revealed a string of five dust cores of 22-64 \msun\ along the 1 pc IR-dark filament. The cores are well aligned at a position angle of 48 degrees and regularly spaced at an average projected separation of 0.16 pc. The new high-resolution, high-sensitivity 0.88\,mm image further resolves the five cores into ten compact condensations of 1.4-10.6 \msun, with sizes a few thousands AU. The spatial structure at clump ($\sim 1$ pc) and core ($\sim 0.1$ pc) scales indicates a hierarchical fragmentation. While the clump fragmentation is consistent with a cylindrical collapse, the observed fragment masses are much larger than the expected thermal Jeans masses. All the cores are driving CO(3-2) outflows up to 38 km/s, majority of which are bipolar, jet-like outflows. The moderate luminosity of the P1 clump sets a limit on the mass of protostars of 3-7 \msun. Because of the large reservoir of dense molecular gas in the immediate medium and ongoing accretion as evident by the jet-like outflows, we speculate that P1 will grow and eventually form a massive star cluster. This study provides a first glimpse of massive, clustered star formation that currently undergoes through an intermediate-mass stage.Comment: 24 pages, 4 figures, 4 tables, accepted to Ap