LEGAL ASPECTS OF THE INTERNET

This thesis will explain the legal aspects of the Internet so that users who wish to protect their rights and avoid liability can log on with a better understanding of the rules of the game. This work will be divided into two chapters. The first chapter will focus on existing legal regulation of the Internet to advise users on which law is relevant, and how to solve problems of conflicts of laws in the cyberworld. It will answer the question of whether cyberspace is, or not, a no laws land , and what kind of regulation would better fit the cyberworld. This first chapter will also warn users on their potential liability on the Internet, the liability of the final user, and of the provider. The second chapter will describe what is the legal utilization of the Internet by users and authors, to warn them, first of all, on where is the limit between normal use of a work and infringement of copyright, and second of all, on what kind of speech they are allowed to load. The Internet raises, indeed, many problems of copyright infringement, but also many questions relative to the principle of Freedom of Speech. After having answered all these questions, this work will conclude, that Governments should respect the initial goal of the Internet -a free flow of information-, and not try to muzzle it within adapted regulation. The users of the Internet are the best placed to organize a regulation that will best fit this new medium and great, medium of expression

Photon-involving Purification of Water and Air

The broad field of photon-involving purification of water and air has given rise to numerous papers, typically dispersed across many journals. Consequently, from time to time, there is a need for a book providing information concerning the different facets of this field in a handy way. In fact, the present book includes both detailed reviews and suitable examples of most of the diverse aspects of the current research. It thus covers processes using sunlight or ultraviolet lamps, chemical oxidants and/or photosensitive semiconductors. The fundamentals, the mechanisms, the materials, and the modeling aspects are all considered throughout the book various sections. The contributions have been written by well-known authors forming an group that guarantees the quality and interest of the book

Part-to-whole Registration of Histology and MRI using Shape Elements

Image registration between histology and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is a challenging task due to differences in structural content and contrast. Too thick and wide specimens cannot be processed all at once and must be cut into smaller pieces. This dramatically increases the complexity of the problem, since each piece should be individually and manually pre-aligned. To the best of our knowledge, no automatic method can reliably locate such piece of tissue within its respective whole in the MRI slice, and align it without any prior information. We propose here a novel automatic approach to the joint problem of multimodal registration between histology and MRI, when only a fraction of tissue is available from histology. The approach relies on the representation of images using their level lines so as to reach contrast invariance. Shape elements obtained via the extraction of bitangents are encoded in a projective-invariant manner, which permits the identification of common pieces of curves between two images. We evaluated the approach on human brain histology and compared resulting alignments against manually annotated ground truths. Considering the complexity of the brain folding patterns, preliminary results are promising and suggest the use of characteristic and meaningful shape elements for improved robustness and efficiency.Comment: Paper accepted at ICCV Workshop (Bio-Image Computing

A Multi-Path Approach to Histology Volume Reconstruction

This paper presents a method for correcting erratic pairwise registrations when reconstructing a volume from 2D histology slices. Due to complex and unpredictable alterations of the content of histology images, a pairwise rigid registration between two adjacent slices may fail systematically. Conversely, a neighbouring registration, which potentially involves one of these two slices, will work. This grounds our approach: using correct spatial correspondences established through neighbouring registrations to account for direct failures. We propose to search the best alignment of every couple of adjacent slices from a finite set of transformations that involve neighbouring slices in a transitive fashion. Using the proposed method, we obtained reconstructed volumes with increased coherence compared to the classical pairwise approach, both in synthetic and real data

Mycobacterium bovis Infection, Lyon, France

In a 5-year retrospective study, we used spoligotyping and mycobacterial interspersed repetitive units to type 13 strains of Mycobacterium bovis isolated from human sources. Despite the relatively high incidence of human tuberculosis caused by M. bovis (2%), these tools showed no clonal evolution and no relationships between the isolates

Inferences from the vertical distribution of Fe isotopic compositions on pedogenetic processes in soils

International audienceThe isotopic compositions of major elements in soils can help understand the mechanisms and processes that control the evolution of soils and the nature and dynamics of the soil constituents. In this study, we investigated the variations of the Fe concentrations and isotopic compositions combined with classical soil parameters, such as granulometry, pH, and C and N concentrations. We selected three soils submitted to different hydrodynamic functioning along a toposequence: a well-drained Cambisol and two hydromorphic soils, an Albeluvisol and a Gleysol. In the Cambisol, the isotopic variations were small indicating little redistribution of Fe which we attributed to centimetric-scale exchanges from the Si-bound to the weakly-bound iron pools and insignificant subsurface Fe export. In contrast, the hydromorphic soils showed an overall variation of 0.37‰for δ56Fe and an inverse correlation between the Fe isotopic compositions and the oxide-bound Fe concentrations. We suggest that, in the uppermost horizon, the mobilisation of oxide-bound Fe was due to the reducing conditions and predominantly involved the light Fe isotopes. Similarly, within the Bt horizon of the Albeluvisol, the fluctuations of the water table level induced changes in the redox conditions and thus Fe dissolution and transport of isotopically light Fe. The Fe isotopic composition profile in the B/C horizon of the Gleysol is dominated by the signature of the parental material. Overall, the variations of the underground water table combined with topography-driven water flow were suggested to be the main mechanisms of Fe translocation in these hydromorphic soils. Finally, the comparison between Fe isotope profiles in worldwide soils allows us to show that Fe isotopic variations can help discriminate between various mechanisms and scales of Fe transfer in soils and, accordingly, provide information on the evolution of soils, when used in combination with pedological, geochemical, geographical, and environmental characterisations

Export fluxes of calcite in the eastern equatorial Pacific from the Last Glacial Maximum to present

Author Posting. © American Geophysical Union, 2004. This article is posted here by permission of American Geophysical Union for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Paleoceanography 19 (2004): PA2018, doi:10.1029/2003PA000986.The eastern equatorial Pacific (EEP) is an important center of biological productivity, generating significant organic carbon and calcite fluxes to the deep ocean. We reconstructed paleocalcite flux for the past 30,000 years in four cores collected beneath the equatorial upwelling and the South Equatorial Current (SEC) by measuring ex230Th-normalized calcite accumulation rates corrected for dissolution with a newly developed proxy for “fraction of calcite preserved.” This method produced very similar results at the four sites and revealed that the export flux of calcite was 30–50% lower during the LGM compared to the Holocene. The internal consistency of these results supports our interpretation, which is also in agreement with emerging data indicating lower glacial productivity in the EEP, possibly as a result of lower nutrient supply from the southern ocean via the Equatorial Undercurrent. However, these findings contradict previous interpretations based on mass accumulation rates (MAR) of biogenic material in the sediment of the EEP, which have been taken as reflecting higher glacial productivity due to stronger wind-driven upwelling.This research was partly supported by NSF grant OCE-0095617 and funds from the Northern Illinois University Graduate School (Loubere); the NASA Michigan Space Grant Consortium Seed Grant for summer, 2001 for 230Th analyses at WHOI (Mekik); the French Ministere de l’Education Nationale, de la Recherche et de la Technologie, and a EURODOC grant from the Region Rhone-Alpes (Pichat)

Registration of histology and magnetic resonance imaging of the brain

Combining histology and non-invasive imaging has been attracting the attention of the medical imaging community for a long time, due to its potential to correlate macroscopic information with the underlying microscopic properties of tissues. Histology is an invasive procedure that disrupts the spatial arrangement of the tissue components but enables visualisation and characterisation at a cellular level. In contrast, macroscopic imaging allows non-invasive acquisition of volumetric information but does not provide any microscopic details. Through the establishment of spatial correspondences obtained via image registration, it is possible to compare micro- and macroscopic information and to recover the original histological arrangement in three dimensions. In this thesis, I present: (i) a survey of the literature relative to methods for histology reconstruction with and without the help of 3D medical imaging; (ii) a graph-theoretic method for histology volume reconstruction from sets of 2D sections, without external information; (iii) a method for multimodal 2D linear registration between histology and MRI based on partial matching of shape-informative boundaries