Retail market prices of fonio reveal the demand for quality characteristics in Bamako, Mali.

African consumers' expectations concerning quality of food products are great. In spite of constrained budgets, we showed that market retailed prices revealed quality preferences of the consumers and not only production costs. In very poor countries like Mali, food innovation is limited by the very low purchasing power of the population. However, technological food product or process innovations are possible and sometimes valuable. Demand driven innovation may lead to open new markets, opportunities for small and medium scale enterprises and to improve consumers' welfare. Based on this assumption, technical research was done to provide new food products. In this paper, using both sensory test and a hedonic price approach, we estimated consumer demand for different characteristics of fonio, a West African cereal, and showed that poor consumers do have quality requirements and actually pay for it. We showed that the shadow or hedonic price paid for quality characteristics is small but significant. A comparison of sensory test and market study showed a convergence between what people say they prefer and what they really pay for. Results were consistent and showed directions for technological improvement of the product and its production process. The Partial Least Square method was used to estimate hedonic prices of the different modalities of fonio quality traits.Demand and Price Analysis,

Hypothermia outcome prediction after extracorporeal life support for hypothermic cardiac arrest patients : The HOPE score

Aims: Currently, the decision to initiate extracorporeal life support for patients who suffer cardiac arrest due to accidental hypothermia is essentially based on serum potassium level. Our goal was to build a prediction score in order to determine the probability of survival following rewarming of hypothermic arrested patients based on several covariates available at admission. Methods: We included consecutive hypothermic arrested patients who underwent rewarming with extracorporeal life support. The sample comprised 237 patients identified through the literature from 18 studies, and 49 additional patients obtained from hospital data collection. We considered nine potential predictors of survival: age; sex; core temperature; serum potassium level; mechanism of hypothermia; cardiac rhythm at admission; witnessed cardiac arrest, rewarming method and cardiopulmonary resuscitation duration prior to the initiation of extracorporeal life support. The primary outcome parameter was survival to hospital discharge. Results: Overall, 106 of the 286 included patients survived (37%; 95% CI: 32-43%), most (84%) with a good neurological outcome. The final score included the following variables: age, sex, core temperature at admission, serum potassium level, mechanism of cooling, and cardiopulmonary resuscitation duration. The corresponding area under the receiver operating characteristic curve was 0.895 (95% CI: 0.859-0.931) compared to 0.774 (95% CI: 0.720-0.828) when based on serum potassium level alone. Conclusions: In this large retrospective study we found that our score was superior to dichotomous triage based on serum potassium level in assessing which hypothermic patients in cardiac arrest would benefit from extracorporeal life support. External validation of our findings is required.Peer reviewe

The retail market prices of fonio reveal the demand for quality characteristics in Bamako, Mali.

African consumers' expectations concerning quality of food products are great. In spite ofconstrained budgets, we showed that market retailed prices revealed quality preferences of theconsumers and not only production costs. In very poor countries like Mali, food innovation islimited by the very low purchasing power of the population. However, technological food productor process innovations are possible and sometimes valuable. Demand driven innovation may lead toopen new markets, opportunities for small and medium scale enterprises and to improve consumers'welfare. Based on this assumption, technical research was done to provide new food products. Inthis paper, using both sensory test and a hedonic price approach, we estimated consumer demandfor different characteristics of fonio, a West African cereal, and showed that poor consumers dohave quality requirements and actually pay for it. We showed that the shadow or hedonic price paidfor quality characteristics is small but significant. A comparison of sensory test and market studyshowed a convergence between what people say they prefer and what they really pay for. Resultswere consistent and showed directions for technological improvement of the product and itsproduction process. The Partial Least Square method was used to estimate hedonic prices of thedifferent modalities of fonio quality traits. This method was interesting since it solved the OrdinaryLeast Square method's colinearity problems

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe

Comparaison des processus de régionalisation : revue analytique de la littérature

Blancher Nicolas, Mainguy Claire. Comparaison des processus de régionalisation : revue analytique de la littérature. In: Tiers-Monde, tome 39, n°155, 1998. La régionalisation comparée en Afrique sub-saharienne et en Asie de l'est, sous la direction de Philippe Hugon. pp. 505-528

China

China''s increasing integration with the global economy has contributed to sustained growth in international trade. Its exports have become more diversified, and greater penetration of industrial country markets has been accompanied by a surge in China''s imports from all regions-especially Asia, where China plays an increasingly central role in regional specialization. Tariff reforms have been implemented in China since the 1980s; and, with its recent WTO accession, China has committed itself to additional reforms that are farreaching and challenging. Sustained implementation of these commitments would further deepen China''s international integration and generate benefits for most partner countries.World Trade Organization;export growth, world trade, international trade, clothing exports, tariff reductions, export markets, export subsidies, world exports, export performance, export shares, trading partners, export market, intellectual property rights, intellectual property, vertical specialization, trade reforms, trade liberalization, tariff rate, developing country exports, trade in services, bilateral trade, tariff barriers, domestic prices, trading system, regional trade, global trading, import quotas, trade deficit, trade surplus, trade classification, partner countries, pattern of trade, export diversification, world economy, export base, global trade, total exports, non-tariff barriers, global export, export controls, agricultural export subsidies, share of exports, export growth rate, trade patterns, export market share, average tariff rate, export expansion, export prospects, exporters, investor confidence, global trade analysis, average tariff, trade-related investment, safeguard actions, trade regime, import penetration, trade relations, global export base, world export market, export growth rates, trade-related investment measures, agricultural subsidies, economic integration, nontariff barriers, dispute settlement, import barriers, domestic price, re-export, most-favored-nation, dispute settlement procedures, labor-intensive exports, round agreement, agricultural export, competitive pressure, trade pattern, increased exports, tariff changes, diversification of exports, domestic reforms, expanding trade, competitive position, trade partners, trading partner, annual export growth, multinational companies, transition period, trade volumes, intensive exports, tariff reforms, political economy, increasing specialization, re-exports, international integration, increasing integration, increased trade, exporters of capital, increasing trade, trade arrangements, industry trade, intermediate products, trade flow, world export market share, footwear exports, domestic consumption, agricultural commodities, customs authorities, import tariff, domestic production, national treatment, export values, terms of trade, multilateral context, imported goods, export market shares, adjustment process, price liberalization, import tariffs, domestic firms

Use of Cumulative Poisson Probability Distribution as an Estimator of the Recombination Rate in an Expanding Population: Example of the Macaca fascicularis Major Histocompatibility Complex

International audienceWe describe a method to estimate the rate of recombination per generation from the genotypes of a large individual sample of an expanding population, for which the founding event is dated. The approach is illustrated with an application to estimating the major histocompatibility complex (MHC) recombination rate in the Mauritian macaque population. We genotyped 750 macaques by means of 17 microsatellites across the MHC region and reconstructed the seven most frequent haplotypes assumed to represent the founding haplotypes (H rec(0)) as well as the 31% recombinant haplotypes (H rec(h)) resulting from a variable number " h " of recombinations between the founding haplotypes. The relative frequencies of the various classes of haplotypes (H rec(0) and H rec(h)) follow a Poisson distribution. By using a maximum likelihood method, we calculated the mean of the Poisson distribution that best fits the data. By dividing this mean by the number of generations (502100) from the date of the population founding, we deduced that rate of recombination in the MHC is approximately 0.004 to 0.008 in the Mauritian macaque population. When the founding date of the population is precisely known, our method presents a useful alternative to the co-alescent method

Enseignements des crues récentes de l’Oder en matière de gestion de la crise, de la post-crise et de la reconstruction

Par son ampleur, la crue de l’Oder de juillet 1997 constitue un événement rare et une source d’informations précieuses sur le fonctionnement en situation de l’ensemble des moyens de protection et de lutte contre les inondations dans un pays européen. Elle a mis en évidence la fragilité du système de communication entre tous les acteurs impliqués dans la problématique de gestion de crise : sécurité civile, armée, météorologues, hydrologues, sans parler de la communication entre les autorités chargées de la lutte contre les inondations et la population. Dans cet article, nous présentons les principaux enseignements d’une étude de retour d’expérience des différentes phases de la gestion de cette catastrophe que nous avons réalisée en Pologne dans un but d’anticipation de situations similaires susceptibles de se produire dans le bassin de la Loire en cas de crue exceptionnelle