Assessing the Potential of Intervening MgII Absorbers for Cosmology

In this thesis I present a method of using intervening MgII absorbers as a way toprobe the large scale structure (LSS) of the universe. In addition, I discuss the usesof intervening MgII absorbers as a tool for cosmology.Due to the large amounts of telescope time required to observe faint and distantgalaxies, it becomes increasingly difficult to map the LSS of the universe at highredshifts. With the intervening MgII method presented here it is possible, with anindependent method, to map the LSS of the universe and begin to understand theearly stages of formation and evolution of the LSS of the universe.I use six known examples of high redshift structures to assess whether interveningMgII absorbers can highlight the LSS. In five of the six target fields, there aredetections of dense regions of MgII absorbers which are believed to be in associationwith the target structures, while the sixth target remains less clear due to lowcompleteness. In one particular case, a long, thin, dense arc of absorbers is foundextending up to 1 Gpc atz∼0.8. A structure of such size could potentially challengethe standard model of cosmology. In addition, further similar structures may exist,awaiting to be detected with the MgII method presented here. For the final target, Iuse the MgII method to refine the redshift measurement of a known chain of galaxyclusters in association with a large quasar group.The aim of this thesis was to assess the potential of using intervening MgIIabsorbers as a tool for cosmology and LSS. The conclusion is this new method doesindeed have considerable potential for cosmological investigations

Does the visual attention span play a role in the morphological processing of orthographic stimuli?

Article first published online: October 22, 2018We investigated whether the link between visual attention (VA) span and reading is modulated by the presence of morphemes. Second and fourth grade children, with Basque as their first language, named morphologically complex and simple words and pseudowords, and performed a task measuring VA span. The influence of VA span skills on reading was modulated by the presence of morphemes in naming speed measures. In addition, fourth grade children with a larger VA span showed larger lexicality effects (pseudoword-word reading times) only for morphologically simple stimuli. Results are interpreted as support for the notion that both transparency and morphological complexity are important factors modulating the impact of VA span skills on reading.The authors acknowledge financial support from the Basque Government (PRE_2015_2_0049 to A. A.), the European Research Council (ERC-2011-ADG-295362 to M.C.), and the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (PSI20153653383 P to M.L., PSI20153673533R to M. C, and SEV-2015-490 awarded to the BCBL through the “Severo Ochoa Programme for Centres/ Units of Excellence in R&D”)

Des pères non-agresseurs face au dévoilement de l'agression sexuelle de leur enfant : impact psychologique et soutien paternel

Les agressions sexuelles envers les enfants sont un fléau social important. Elles portent atteinte à l’intégrité physique et psychologique des enfants qui en sont victimes, entraînant des conséquences délétères pour l’enfant et ses parents. Ces derniers sont d’ailleurs considérés comme des personnes clés dans le rétablissement des enfants. Toutefois, les connaissances scientifiques dans ce domaine ont été principalement acquises auprès des mères, reléguant ainsi le père à une place secondaire. Cette thèse a pour objectif général d’élargir notre compréhension du vécu et du rôle des pères ayant à faire face au dévoilement de l’agression sexuelle de leur enfant. La présente thèse est composée de deux articles empiriques. L’objectif du premier article est de décrire le vécu des pères non agresseurs ayant un ou plusieurs enfants victimes d’agression sexuelle extra ou intrafamiliale sous l’angle de leurs réactions émotionnelles, cognitives et comportementales à la suite du dévoilement de l’AS. Pour ce faire, 17 pères provenant soit du Centre d’Expertise Marie-Vincent de Montréal, soit du Centre d’Intervention en Abus Sexuels pour la Famille de Gatineau ou encore soit de la population générale et ayant un ou plusieurs enfants victimes d’agression sexuelle intra ou extra-familiale ont été rencontrés pour une entrevue individuelle semi-dirigée. Les résultats démontrent que les pères rencontrés dans le cadre de cette étude vivent un véritable choc psychologique, s’apparentant à un traumatisme secondaire, à l’annonce du dévoilement. Cette étude a également mis en lumière la mise en place d’un travail de deuil chez les pères qui sont confrontés à la perte de l’innocence de leur enfant. Les objectifs du deuxième article est de décrire les répercussions du dévoilement de l’agression sexuelle sur la façon dont les pères s’engagent auprès de leurs enfants et de dégager les dimensions du soutien paternel offert à l’enfant. L’analyse du discours de 17 pères ayant vécus le dévoilement d’une agression sexuelle par leur(s) enfant(s) suggèrent que le dévoilement peut être considéré comme un élément de rupture dans le lien à l’enfant nécessitant une adaptation à cette nouvelle réalité. Bien que l’ensemble pères rencontrés expriment leurs inquiétudes pour leur(s) enfant(s) et leur désir de le(s) soutenir, les résultats mettent en évidence les difficultés pour certains pères de s’engager auprès de leurs enfants en raison soit d’une détresse psychologique personnelle importante, soit d’une ambivalence à l’égard de l’enfant ou encore en raison d’une sensation d’inconfort ressentie lors des contacts physiques au cours des soins primaires à prodiguer ou des situations de jeu physique. Leurs propos témoignent également de leurs volontés et de leurs capacités à aider l’enfant à composer avec les conséquences de l’agression sexuelle subie. La mise à jour d’une nouvelle dimension spécifiquement paternelle soit la capacité d’ouvrir son enfant victime d’AS sur le monde extérieur et ainsi jouer un rôle dans le développement de sa confiance en soi apparait comme un résultat novateur de la présente thèse. Les implications cliniques concernant les résultats obtenus dans le cadre de cette thèse ainsi que les pistes de recherche sont finalement abordées.Child sexual abuse is a devastating social epidemic. It threatens the physical and psychological integrity of children who have experienced it, and brings about horrific repercussions for them and their parents. Yet, parents are considered to be key actors in the recovery of their children. Unfortunately, the current state of knowledge on parental support concerns almost exclusively mothers and not much is known in regards to the role played by fathers.. The principal objective of the present thesis is to further the current understanding of the role and realities experienced by fathers who dealt with the disclosure of their child’s sexual abuse. The present thesis is made up of two scientific articles. The objective of the first article was to describe the experiences of non-offending fathers whose children had been sexually abused either by someone related to them or not, in terms of their emotional, cognitive and behavioral reactions following disclosure. To accomplish this, 17 fathers whose children were the victims of extra or intrafamiliar sexual abuse were recruited at either the Centre d’Expertise Marie-Vincent in Montreal, the Centre d’Intervention en Abus Sexuels pour la Famille in the nearby region of Gatineau, or in the general population, and were asked to participate in a semi-structured interview. Results indicate that fathers in this study suffered from a noticeable psychological shock following disclosure that resembles indirect trauma. This study also brought into light the existence of a grieving process among fathers who were confronted to their child’s loss of innocence. The objectives of the second article were to describe the repercussions of disclosure on the ways fathers involve themselves with their children and to isolate the different forms of support offered by fathers to their sexually abused children. Qualitative content analyses from 17 fathers who dealt with the disclosure of sexual abuse on their children suggests that it could be interpreted as an element of ‘severance’ in the bond with the child, which requires adaptation to a new reality. Even though all of the interviewed fathers expressed their concerns for their children and their desire to help them, findings highlight the difficulties of some fathers to involve themselves with their children because of their own important psychological distress, their ambivalence toward the child or because of feelings of uneasiness that were stirred up while providing to the primary needs of the child or during physical play. Analyses shed some light on these father’s capacities to help their children deal with the consequences of sexual abuse. The acknowledgement of a new form of support specific to fathers, namely, the ability to open the child to his outside world and in doing so playing a role in the development of self-esteem, constitutes a ground-breaking finding of the present thesis

The Deployment of Young Readers´ Visual Attention across Orthographic Strings: The Influence of Stems and Suffixes

Published online: 27 Apr 2020The goal of the paper was to investigate whether morphological units – stems and suffixes – influence orthographic processing by modulating visual attention demands to the task. Orthographic processing was measured with a visual one-back task requiring letters to be detected within pseudowords not including stems/suffixes, or containing real stems or real suffixes. Fourth grade children (between 9.5 and 10.5 years old) who read in a transparent orthography of a morphologically rich and agglutinative language (Basque) were tested. The results showed that the presence of morphemes in the strings did not improve letter detection performance though it slightly modulated the distribution of visual attention, showing a bias toward the processing of central letters in the presence of a stem. We suggest that the presence of highly regular and recurrent structures prioritizes stem identification, which when achieved, reduces visual attention deployment across the remaining letters.The authors acknowledge financial support from the Basque Government (PRE_2015_2_0049 to A. A.), the European Research Council (ERC-2011-ADG-295362 to M.C.), the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (PSI20153653383P to M.L., PSI20153673533R to M. C, and SEV-2015-490 awarded to the BCBL through the “Severo Ochoa Program for Centers/Units of Excellence in R&D”). This research is also supported by the Basque Government through the BERC 2018-2021

Drummer Major James Spens: letters from a common soldier abroad, 1617-1632

PostprintPeer reviewe

Estimating landmarks on 2D images of beetle mandibles

Studying links between phenotype/genotype and agricultural practices is one of the main topics in agronomy research. Phenotypes can be characterized by informations like age, sex of animals/plants and more and more often with the help of image analysis of their morphology. From now, getting good quality of images for numerous individuals is easy but that leads to design automatic procedures to replace manual exploration of such amount of images. Several bottlenecks have been identified to analyze automatically images. One of them is segmentation of selected area and/or shapes, and another well-known one is setting automatically morphometric landmarks. Landmarks are points on the object which can be used to identify or to classify the objects. It exists a lot of methods to experiment landmarks setting, depending on the image contents. This work has been initiated by using the article of Palaniswamy et al. "Automatic identification of landmarks in digital images"[6]. They proposed a method based on calculus of a probabilistic Hough transform coupling to a template matching algorithm. They applied their method to the Drosophilia wings. In our study, we have gotten a set of 291 beetles . For each one 2D images of 5 different parts of their anatomy have been taken: mandibles left and right, head, pronotum and elytra. The first part of the project was to test how the Palaniswamy’s method could be used to analyze them. We have implemented all the required algorithms to compute positions of mandibles landmarks and compared the obtained results to landmarks which have been manually set by biologists. We will see that even positions automatically obtained are not fully precised, if we used centroid size to characterize mandibles, the size computed from automatic landmarks is closed to this one computed from the manual ones. Future works will focus on definition of a semi-landmarks procedure which would add some features as the measure of the curve between two landmarks

La conduite responsable en recherche en sciences humaines et sociales

Jusqu’à présent, les discussions au sein de la communauté universitaire et dans la littérature scientifique sur la conduite responsable en recherche (CRR), incluant l’intégrité scientifique et l’éthique de la recherche, ont principalement été menées par les chercheurs en sciences de la santé et en sciences fondamentales. Préoccupés, à juste titre, par des problèmes d’inconduite, leurs effets négatifs sur la rigueur scientifique et la confiance du public dans l’entreprise de la recherche, ces débats ont conduit à l’élaboration et à la mise en œuvre de lignes directrices nationales et de politiques institutionnelles. Ces lignes directrices visent entre autres à promouvoir la CRR, notamment dans le but de prévenir ces inconduites. Cependant, pour garantir la pertinence et une application appropriée de ces normes à tous les domaines universitaires, il est nécessaire que les sciences humaines et sociales (SHS) contribuent plus directement à ces discussions. Un tel engagement devrait permettre d’exprimer les particularités disciplinaires et méthodologiques des SHS, dont certaines peuvent être très différentes des sciences appliquées et fondamentales. Cela permettrait également de s’assurer que la littérature sur la CRR ainsi que les politiques et les directives qui en découlent soient à la fois fondées sur des principes universellement généralisables, mais aussi appliquées avec nuance afin de refléter la diversité des pratiques disciplinaires. Dans ce chapitre, nous explorons trois grands domaines dans lesquels les SHS pourraient contribuer à façonner les discussions dans la littérature sur la CRR, tout en informant les chercheurs en SHS des meilleures pratiques en matière de CRR : l’autorat/paternité, la collaboration et l’autorégulation

La prise de risque dans l'espace routier chez le préadolescent (implication de l'identité sexuée, la recherche de sensations, l'estime de soi, l'attachement aux parents et la supervision parentale)

La présente étude s interroge sur les rapports entre la prise de risque et différentes variables individuelles et sociales l identité sexuée, la recherche de sensations, l estime de soi, l attachement aux parents et la supervision parentale chez jeunes adolescents piétons âgés de 9 à 14 ans. Afin d obtenir les données, 948 participants scolarisés de la classe de CM1 à celle 3ème ont répondu à un questionnaire. Les résultats nous ont permis de confirmer que d une part les garçons prennent plus de risques que les filles et d autre part, que plus l enfant est âgé plus il prend des risques dans l espace routier. Les résultats confirment également l existence de liens entre l identité sexuée, la recherche de sensations, l attachement aux parents, la supervision parentale et la prise de risque piéton. Par contre, l estime de soi n est pas corrélée à la prise de risque piéton. Des analyses de régression linéaires nous ont permis de montrer que la recherche de sensations s explique par non seulement un besoin biologique ou physiologique de sensations mais aussi par un besoin de correspondre à des rôles sociaux, à la norme. La recherche de sensations c est en grande partie quelque chose qui vise à satisfaire un besoin identitaire, rôles de sociaux auxquels on est tenu d adhérer. Le modèle de Baron et Kenny (1986) nous a permis de vérifier que la supervision parentale agit bien comme variable médiatrice entre l attachement des parents et la prise de risque piéton. Ainsi nous proposons un modèle plus complexe du MIO (modèle interne opérant) de Greenberg (1987). En effet, la supervision fait partie de l attachement ; c'est-à-dire qu en plus des dimensions communication/confiance et aliénation, on ajoute la dimension de supervision. Le sentiment d être bien supervisé par les parents explique la mise en danger de soi en plus de l attachement confiant.In the present study, we investigate the relationships between risk-taking and different individual and social variables gender-role identity, sensations-seeking, self-esteem partial-attachment and parental-supervision in young adolescent pedestrians (9 to 14 years old). In order to obtain valuable data, 948 pupils from CM1 to 3rd had to answer a set of questions. The results have confirmed that, on the one hand, boys take more risks than girls, and on the other hand, the more the child is old, the more he takes risks in the road-space. The results confirm, also, the association of the variables gender-role identity, sensations-seeking, parental attachment and parental supervision with the pedestrian risk-taking. On the other hand, there is no relationship between self-esteem and pedestrian risk-taking. A series of multiple regression analyses have shown that sensations-seeking cannot be explained only by biological or physiological need of sensations, but also by the need to correspond with the social roles. The Baron and Kenny (1986) model allows to verify that the parental-supervision does act as a mediating variable between parental-attachment and pedestrian risk-taking. So, we propose a more complex model of the MIO (construct of working models ) of Greenberg (1987). Supervision is one of the dimensions of the attachment that is to say that, in addition to the communication/confidence and alienation dimensions, there is the supervision dimension. The feeling of being well-supervised by the parents, explains the self-endangering in addition to the confident-attachment.NANTERRE-PARIS10-Bib. élec. (920509901) / SudocSudocFranceF

DAPAR & ProStaR: software to perform statistical analyses in quantitative discovery proteomics.

UNLABELLED: DAPAR and ProStaR are software tools to perform the statistical analysis of label-free XIC-based quantitative discovery proteomics experiments. DAPAR contains procedures to filter, normalize, impute missing value, aggregate peptide intensities, perform null hypothesis significance tests and select the most likely differentially abundant proteins with a corresponding false discovery rate. ProStaR is a graphical user interface that allows friendly access to the DAPAR functionalities through a web browser. AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION: DAPAR and ProStaR are implemented in the R language and are available on the website of the Bioconductor project (http://www.bioconductor.org/). A complete tutorial and a toy dataset are accompanying the packages. CONTACT: [email protected], [email protected], [email protected] (ChloroTypes), ANR-10-INBS-08 (ProFI project, ‘Infrastructures Nationales en Biologie et Sante´’, ‘Investissements d’Avenir’), European Union FP7 program (Prime-XS Project, Contract no. 262067), Prospectom project (Mastodons 2012 CNRS Challenge), Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (Strategic Longer and Larger Grant ID: BB/L002817/1)This is the final version of the article. It first appeared from Oxford University Press via https://doi.org/10.1093/bioinformatics/btw58

France’s proposal for Guidelines about setting Maximum Residue Limits in honey

contribution to session I Regulatory issues Background: Honey is produced in an environment potentially polluted by different sources of contamination, so it is necessary to set Maximum Residue Limits (MRLs). These MRLs should be fixed as low as possible in relation to Good Agricultural Practices (GAPs). The guidance provided in this Draft Working Document gives advice on: • when and for what kind of active substance a MRL has to be set in honey • how to propose a temporary MRL for a given active substance • how to design, prepare and realise supervised residue trials when necessary Results: The proposed approach is based on using the available data before an active substance or product is registered, and is divided into several successive steps, represented in a global decision-making scheme. The MRL will be set depending on the results obtained at each different step. Besides, the applicants will have the choice between different methods to set a provisional MRL in preregistration. Conclusion: The initial proposal was a protocol on field residue trials proposed by Germany. The approach used in this guidance document proposes also other possibilities for fixing MRL without conducting systematically field trials. This proposition will be discussed at European level. Keywords: Regulation 396/2005, MRL, honey, plant protection produc