The Choice of Ignorance: The Debate on Ethnic and Racial Statistics in France

A researcher or a journalist trying to compare the situation of ethnic and racial minorities in the United States and in France immediately confronts a crippling obstacle. The concept of ‘ethnic and racial minority’ as such is not used in France. This is not simply a matter of vocabulary –something the French typically like to argue about; the problem rather lies in the very incomparability of populations that one is talking about. Many of the categories that do exist in political discourse and public debate can of course be found in statistics. But there are no data describing the situation of minorities in France that could be compared with those produced in the United States. This state of affairs in French statistics – gathering has been the subject of major criticism for some 20 years now; it has gotten to the point that it has triggered a controversy of rare violence between those that would like to see statistics take into account the diversity of the population and those who denounce the danger that such statistics might pose of ethnicizing or racializing society. The media focus on the contentiousness of this debate has been such as to sometimes lose sight of the very existence of discrimination and the flaws of the Republican model that are at the root of the controversy in the first place

Comparison of fMRI motion correction software tools

Motion correction of fMRI data is a widely used step prior to data analysis. In this study, a comparison of the motion correction tools provided by several leading fMRI analysis software packages was performed, including AFNI, AIR, BrainVoyager, FSL, and SPM2. Comparisons were performed using data from typical human studies as well as phantom data. The identical reconstruction, preprocessing, and analysis steps were used on every data set, except that motion correction was performed using various configurations from each software package. Each package was studied using default parameters, as well as parameters optimized for speed and accuracy. Forty subjects performed a Go/No-go task (an event-related design that investigates inhibitory motor response) and an N-back task (a block-design paradigm investigating working memory). The human data were analyzed by extracting a set of general linear model (GLM)-derived activation results and comparing the effect of motion correction o

One-Step Ultrafiltration Process for Separation and Purification of a Keratinolytic Protease Produced with Feather Meal

A purification technique to obtain keratinolytic proteases produced by Bacillus sp. P45 in a medium containing chicken feather meal as substrate is presented. The experiments were carried out in a dead-end ultrafiltration unit, and the influence of the membrane cutoff, pH of enzymatic extract, and operating pressure on the purification of keratinase were studied. The one-step ultrafiltration process with the membrane molecular mass cutoff of 10 kDa at pH 8.0 and operating pressure of 0.147 MPa showed an enzyme recovery of 87.8% and a 4.1-fold purification factor. It is showed that ultrafiltration could be potentially used in the purification of keratinases