Une validation québécoise du Satisfaction with Life Domains Scale

La version québécoise de l'Échelle de satisfaction avec les domaines de la vie (ESDV), développée aux Etats-Unis auprès de la population générale et adaptée pour des personnes avec des problèmes sévères et persistants de santé mentale a été validée auprèsI d'un échantillon de 266 personnes de la population générale, et de 245 personnes avec des troubles mentaux sévères. Les analyses factorielles ont permis d'identifier quatre sous-échelles dans la population clinique et cinq dans la population générale. La consistance interne de l'échelle globale (alpha = 0,90) et des sous-échelles (alpha entre 0,60 et 0,84) s'est avérée excellente et la stabilité temporelle de l'instrument s'est avérée bonne (r = 0,73). De plus, des analyses de la variance et l'analyse discriminante permettent de constater que les sous-échelles ont un pouvoir discriminant élevé ; elles permettent de distinguer la population générale, les bénéficiaires d'aide sociale et les personnes psychotiques. Les résultats obtenus suggèrent que l'ESDV possède de très bonnes qualités psychométriques et constitue une mesure valide de qualité de vie subjective pour desI études descriptives ou évaluatives.This article presents the results of the Quebec validation of the Sa-tisfaction With Life Domains Scale. This scale was développée in theUnited States for the general population and adapted for severely men-tally ill individuals. Two hundred and sixty six individuals from the ge-neral population and 245 severely mentally ill persons participated inthis study. Factor anlysis allowed the identification of four sub-scalesfor the clinical population and five for the general population. The scale(alpha=0,90) and the sub-scales (alpha between 0,60 et 0,84) show ex-cellent internal consistencies and the test-retest reliability was good (r=0,73). Moreover, analysis of the variance and the discriminant analysisallow to acknowledge that the sub-scales have a high discriminatingpower; they allow to distinguish the general population from welfare re-cipient and people suffering from psychosis. The overall results suggestthat l'Échelle de satisfaction des domaines de vie have good psychome-tric properties and can be considered as a valid instrument for assessingsubjective quality of life in descriptive or evaluative studies

Issue Brief: Native American/First Amendment, Speech, Religion

This brief will explore the limitations of the first amendment in regards to the religious freedoms of Native Americans who wish to preserve their place of worship (i.e. their land) and their religious usage of hallucinogens

Coherent beam superposition of ten diode lasers with a Dammann grating

We demonstrate the use of a binary diffractive optical element in a very simple setup to convert the multilobed beam from a low fill factor array of coherent laser diodes into a quasi-Gaussian beam. The phase profile of the grating is determined with a phase retrieval algorithm. Experimentally, the conversion efficiency reaches more than 44%. We also establish that this setup can be used to make an effective measurement of the coherency of the laser array

Les temps du soi. Bénévolat, identité et éthique

À partir d’une recherche empirique dans trois régions, l’articulation entre l’éthique et l’identité est analysée, ainsi que la façon dont l’engagement bénévole travaille l’identité. Des récits d’engagement de bénévoles québécois, oeuvrant dans le secteur scolaire, religieux ou culturel, nous dégageons quatre formes de parcours et de rapport à l’engagement, dans lesquelles nous reconnaissons d’abord quatre dimensions de l’identité, puis quatre postures éthiques. D’une pratique particulière, nous sommes ainsi conduits à une analyse plus générale touchant l’articulation entre identité et éthique dans le Québec contemporain.Based on empirical research in three regions, the interactions between ethics and identity are analysed, as well as the way in which volunteer involvement interacts with identity. From accounts of their involvement by Québec volunteers working in the school, religious and cultural sectors, the authors identify four forms of patterns and relationships with such involvement, in which four dimensions of identity are first recognized, followed by four ethical positionings. Thus, starting from one specific area of activity, we are led into a more general analysis focusing on the interactions between identity and ethics in contemporary Québec

Issue Brief: Immigration Status and Office Holding

This issue brief addresses office holding's effects upon legislation passed in response to the various violations of United States immigration law. In addressing the issue of immigration and office holding, this issue brief will cover proposed legislation and existing systems meant to deal with the illegal aliens in the United States. This focus was chosen in particular as the main issue due to prevalence in llegal aliens and undocumented workers in recent years in United States

High-Performance Multi-Rail Support with the NewMadeleine Communication Library

International audienceThis paper focuses on message transfers across multiple heterogeneous high-performance networks in the NewMadeleine Communication Library. NewMadeleine features a modular design that allows the user to easily implement load-balancing strategies efficiently exploiting the underlying network but without being aware of the low-level interface. Several strategies are studied and preliminary results are given. They show that performance of network transfers can be improved by using carefully designed strategies that take into account NIC activity

Increased oxidative stress and severe arterial remodeling induced by permanent high-flow challenge in experimental pulmonary hypertension

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Involvement of inflammation in pulmonary hypertension (PH) has previously been demonstrated and recently, immune-modulating dendritic cells (DCs) infiltrating arterial lesions in patients suffering from idiopathic pulmonary arterial hypertension (IPAH) and in experimental monocrotaline-induced PH have been reported. Occurrence of perivascular inflammatory cells could be linked to local increase of oxidative stress (OS), as it has been shown for systemic atherosclerosis. The impact of OS on vascular remodeling in PH is still to be determined. We hypothesized, that augmented blood-flow could increase OS and might thereby contribute to DC/inflammatory cell-recruitment and smooth-muscle-cell-proliferation.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>We applied a monocrotaline-induced PH-model and combined it with permanent flow-challenge. Thirty Sprague-Dawley rats were assigned to following groups: control, monocrotaline-exposure (MCT), monocrotaline-exposure/pneumonectomy (MCT/PE).</p> <p>Results</p> <p>Hemodynamic exploration demonstrated most severe effects in MCT/PE, corresponding in histology to exuberant medial and adventitial remodeling of pulmonary muscular arteries, and intimal remodeling of smaller arterioles; lung-tissue PCR evidenced increased expression of DCs-specific fascin, CD68, proinflammatory cytokines (IL-6, RANTES, fractalkine) in MCT/PE and to a lesser extent in MCT. Major OS enzyme NOX-4 was maximal in MCT/PE. Antioxidative stress enzymes Mn-SOD and glutathion-peroxidase-1 were significantly elevated, while HO-1 showed maximal expression in MCT with significant decrease in MCT/PE. Catalase was decreased in MCT and MCT/PE. Expression of NOX-4, but also of MN-SOD in MCT/PE was mainly attributed to a highly increased number of interstitial and perivascular CXCR4/SDF1 pathway-recruited mast-cells. Stress markers malonedialdehyde and nitrotyrosine were produced in endothelial cells, medial smooth muscle and perivascular leucocytes of hypertensive vasculature. Immunolabeling for OX62, CD68 and actin revealed adventitial and medial DC- and monocyte-infiltration; in MCT/PE, medial smooth muscle cells were admixed with CD68⁺/vimentin⁺cells.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>Our experimental findings support a new concept of immunologic responses to increased OS in MCT/PE-induced PAH, possibly linking recruitment of dendritic cells and OS-producing mast-cells to characteristic vasculopathy.</p

Internal frequency conversion extreme ultraviolet interferometer using mutual coherence properties of two high-order-harmonic sources

International audienceWe report on an innovative two-dimensional imaging extreme ultraviolet (XUV) interferometer operating at 32 nm based on the mutual coherence of two laser high order harmonics (HOH) sources, separately generated in gas. We give the first evidence that the two mutually coherent HOH sources can be produced in two independent spatially separated gas jets, allowing for probing centimeter-sized objects. A magnification factor of 10 leads to a micron resolution associated with a subpicosecond temporal resolution. Single shot interferograms with a fringe visibility better than 30% are routinely produced. As a test of the XUV interferometer, we measure a maximum electronic density of 3×10^20 cm^−3 1.1 ns after the creation of a plasma on aluminum target

hwloc: a Generic Framework for Managing Hardware Affinities in HPC Applications

International audienceThe increasing numbers of cores, shared caches and memory nodes within machines introduces a complex hardware topology. High-performance computing applications now have to carefully adapt their placement and behavior according to the underlying hierarchy of hardware resources and their software affinities. We introduce the Hardware Locality (hwloc) software which gathers hardware information about processors, caches, memory nodes and more, and exposes it to applications and runtime systems in a abstracted and portable hierarchical manner. hwloc may significantly help performance by having runtime systems place their tasks or adapt their communication strategies depending on hardware affinities. We show that hwloc can already be used by popular high-performance OpenMP or MPI software. Indeed, scheduling OpenMP threads according to their affinities or placing MPI processes according to their communication patterns shows interesting performance improvement thanks to hwloc. An optimized MPI communication strategy may also be dynamically chosen according to the location of the communicating processes in the machine and its hardware characteristics

When The News Was Sung: Ballads as News Media in Early Modern Europe

News songs differ in crucial ways to the other news media of the early modern period like newsletters, newspapers, or diplomatic correspondence – they differ even from the prose broadsheets and pamphlets that they so closely resemble. As historians of news we need to ask different kinds of questions of these multi-media artifacts. For example, how does the presentation in a performative genre affect the dissemination and reception of information about events? What part do orality and aurality play in how the news was sold and received? Here the activities and social status of street singers play an important role. We must consider the production, format and distribution of these songs in order to understand their impact. We also need to pay attention to the conjunction between text and melody, and the ways in which this affected the presentation of a news event. On a broader scale, what kind of information can ballads provide about specific news events that other documents cannot or will not provide? Can they offer us a new medium by which to interpret historical events? And lastly, how should historians deal with these profoundly emotive texts? The combination of sensationalist language and affecting music meant that songs had the potential to provoke a more powerful response than any other contemporary news source, and this emotional potency can at times be challenging for a modern historian to decipher and explain. This article will attempt to answer some of these questions and suggest some of the skills we as historians need to develop in order to appreciate the full meaning of songs as the most popular of news media in early modern Europe