Some families of increasing planar maps

Stack-triangulations appear as natural objects when one wants to define some increasing families of triangulations by successive additions of faces. We investigate the asymptotic behavior of rooted stack-triangulations with $2n$ faces under two different distributions. We show that the uniform distribution on this set of maps converges, for a topology of local convergence, to a distribution on the set of infinite maps. In the other hand, we show that rescaled by $n^{1/2}$, they converge for the Gromov-Hausdorff topology on metric spaces to the continuum random tree introduced by Aldous. Under a distribution induced by a natural random construction, the distance between random points rescaled by $(6/11)\log n$ converge to 1 in probability. We obtain similar asymptotic results for a family of increasing quadrangulations

Japan's New Trade Policy:Good or Bad for ASEAN?

Because Japan is a primary investor and trading partner of all the troubled economies, in the midst of the crisis, Japan was called in to help the crisis-stricken countries by opening its market to cheaper imports from South East Asia. The article analyses the opening to trade of the Japanese economy with the help of a gravity equation on panel data using a Hausman-Taylor estimator. We show that there is no certainty that such a role, that is the opening of Japan, will have positive effects for the ASEAN countries, although no detrimental effects are expected. In the worst case scenario, this move and its impact on ASEAN countries would have neutral effect. This new Japanese policy, if applicable, appears to be not enough to (1) help ASEAN countries emerge from the financial crisis and (2) enable Japan to play the role it could and/or should in the region. Although many look at this solution – Japan opening its national market -- as the only one, on the contrary, Japanese help has been different and has proved to be very crucial to the ASEAN countries in need. In fact, the case of Malaysia is a good example of how Japan can help to foster the economy. Their experience shows that, next to trade ties, a greater emphasis can be put on a technical and/or other type of co-operation. Within this framework, Japan has helped Malaysia to recover faster from the crisis, without the former having to open wider its market to the latter. However, Japan is also driven by its own interests. Thus, if it wants to play a leading role in furthering ASEAN integration, especially in economic aspects, it will have to consider, soon or later, opening up its market to appear more reliable to its neighbours.Asian crisis – Hausman-Taylor – FDI, Gravity equation, Japan – ASEAN – Malaysia

Precision and accuracy of fish length measurements obtained with two visual underwater methods

During the VITAL cruise in the Bay of Biscay in summer 2002, two devices for measuring the length of swimming fish were tested: 1) a mechanical crown that emitted a pair of parallel laser beams and that was mounted on the main camera and 2) an underwater auto-focus video camera. The precision and accuracy of these devices were compared and the various sources of measurement errors were estimated by repeatedly measuring fixed and mobile objects and live fish. It was found that fish mobility is the main source of error for these devices because they require that the objects to be measured are perpendicular to the field of vision. The best performance was obtained with the laser method where a video-replay of laser spots (projected on fish bodies) carrying real-time size information was used. The auto-focus system performed poorly because of a delay in obtaining focus and because of some technical problems

Worst-case Optimal Query Answering for Greedy Sets of Existential Rules and Their Subclasses

The need for an ontological layer on top of data, associated with advanced reasoning mechanisms able to exploit the semantics encoded in ontologies, has been acknowledged both in the database and knowledge representation communities. We focus in this paper on the ontological query answering problem, which consists of querying data while taking ontological knowledge into account. More specifically, we establish complexities of the conjunctive query entailment problem for classes of existential rules (also called tuple-generating dependencies, Datalog+/- rules, or forall-exists-rules. Our contribution is twofold. First, we introduce the class of greedy bounded-treewidth sets (gbts) of rules, which covers guarded rules, and their most well-known generalizations. We provide a generic algorithm for query entailment under gbts, which is worst-case optimal for combined complexity with or without bounded predicate arity, as well as for data complexity and query complexity. Secondly, we classify several gbts classes, whose complexity was unknown, with respect to combined complexity (with both unbounded and bounded predicate arity) and data complexity to obtain a comprehensive picture of the complexity of existential rule fragments that are based on diverse guardedness notions. Upper bounds are provided by showing that the proposed algorithm is optimal for all of them

Revisiting Chase Termination for Existential Rules and their Extension to Nonmonotonic Negation

Existential rules have been proposed for representing ontological knowledge, specifically in the context of Ontology- Based Data Access. Entailment with existential rules is undecidable. We focus in this paper on conditions that ensure the termination of a breadth-first forward chaining algorithm known as the chase. Several variants of the chase have been proposed. In the first part of this paper, we propose a new tool that allows to extend existing acyclicity conditions ensuring chase termination, while keeping good complexity properties. In the second part, we study the extension to existential rules with nonmonotonic negation under stable model semantics, discuss the relevancy of the chase variants for these rules and further extend acyclicity results obtained in the positive case.Comment: This paper appears in the Proceedings of the 15th International Workshop on Non-Monotonic Reasoning (NMR 2014

Why and how should the patient perform a correct home blood pressure measurement?

Home blood pressure (BP) measurement is a medical prescription. The interpretation of the results must be left to the physician. This method is complementary to the classical office BP measurement and the 24 hour ambulatory blood pressure measurement. It must be proposed to some selected patients on the basis of their capacity of learning and understanding the place of the technique for the diagnosis and the treatment compliance. It allows a more active contribution of the patient to the management of her chronic disease and, this, may improve the prevention of cardiovascular complication. A normal blood pressure during self BP measurement is equal or lower to 135/85 mmHg or even lower in high cardiovascular risk patients. This new technique, already largely used by patients, needs adequate education and good advice for buying a validated device.L’automesure de la pression artérielle est un acte médical. Sa prescription et l’interprétation de ses données sont à réaliser par le médecin. Ce pré-requis étant dit, cette technique, complémentaire de la mesure au cabinet de consultation et de celle ambulatoire de la pression artérielle, apporte, chez les sujets sélectionnés, des informations pour la confirmation d’un diagnostic d’hypertension artérielle et pour l’appréciation de la qualité de son traitement. Elle permet de responsabiliser le patient dans sa prise en charge d’un problème souvent asymptomatique jusqu’à sa révélation lors d’une complication. La pression artérielle normale est, en automesure, inférieure à 135/85 mmHg, voire plus basse chez le patient à haut risque cardiovasculaire. Cette technique, fréquemment utilisée de nos jours par le patient, mérite qu’une éducation correcte de ce dernier soit faite après lui avoir conseillé d’acheter un appareil validé.Peer reviewe

Detection of minority variants within bovine respiratory syncytial virus populations using oligonucleotide-based microarrays

Microarray technology, originally developed for highly parallel examination of gene expression is regarded as a potential tool in prognosis and diagnosis. With respect to a discrimination analysis, difference as small as one nucleotide base can be distinguished using oligonucleotide-basedmicroarrays. However, this degree of specificity is dependent on several parameters, including the size of the oligoprobes and the sequence context of the probes (e.g. local melting temperature), hybridization conditions and to some extent the chemistry of the glass slides onto which the probes are deposited. Using bovine respiratory syncytial virus (BRSV) as a model study, an oligonucleotide-based microarray approach was developed to measure the relative abundance of a particular single nucleotide variant within mixed BRSV populations. Using this technology, we show that it is possible to discriminate at a rate of 1%, minority variants in a BRSV population

Collective animal manure management simulation and environmental impact assessment

This contribution deals with simulation modelling to help manage agricultural production systems. It describes the use of a Systems Dynamics complex model to simulating the functioning of pig slurry collective spreading plans in Brittany (Northwestern France), where intensive livestock farming has a well-known harmful environmental impact, namely on groundwater and coastal waters. The simulated plan involves 11 pig farms (encompassing both livestock and crops) located in a zone with excess slurry and 11 land owners located at about 40 km from the former. Individual pig farmers use part of their slurry to fertilise their own crops while they are regularly collected by collectively managed trucks to export their excess slurry to be applied on the remote crop farms. The model dynamically simulates the slurry stock evolutions at the pig farms and the spreading fluxes on crops, both at the pig farms and the remote crop farms. It simulates also several indicators likely to assess the environmental impact of this spreading organization's functioning: gas emissions (ammonia, methane) at slurry storage and application, time/distance spent in slurry transportation and application, excess Nitrogen with potential water pollution risk. It shows also the interaction between the individual farm and the collective organization levels. (Texte intégral