Vulnerability and public service delivery in China from 1985 to 1999

This research focused on the determinants of vulnerability, as measured by the variable of expenditure on food consumption, by the quality of public service delivery as measured by three education variables (amount of students per teacher in primary education, amount of students per teacher in secondary education and amount of students per teacher in higher education) and two health variables (amount of doctors per bed and the amount of beds per hospital). To measure the impact of public service delivery on vulnerability we will use OLS regression, Fixed Effect, Two Stage Least Square (TSLS) and TSLS with Fixed Effect. The instrumental of the TSLS regressions are a group of political decentralization and inequality variables. Lags of respective one and two years are introduced as an additional robustness test. The conclusion is threefold: (i) the quality of primary education has a negative impact on vulnerability, probably due to the selection bias of children from poor families being taken out of school; (ii) the quality of the education service in higher education has a positive impact on vulnerability; and (iii) quality of health care has, at most, only a partial positive effect on reducing vulnerability.

Interface between pest risk science and policy : the EPPO perspective

The European and Mediterranean Plant Protection Organisation (EPPO) is an intergovernmental organization responsible for cooperation in plant protection in the European and Mediterranean region. It provides global distribution maps of pests, and intends to identify the areas at risk from new and emerging pests, in the framework of Pest Risk Analyses. EPPO has developed a decision-support scheme for Pest Risk Analysis (DSS) and a computer program (CAPRA) to assist pest risk analysts in running the decisionsupport scheme. Dedicated rating guidance and a Climatic Suitability Risk Mapping Decision-Support Scheme have recently been developed to guide assessors in identifying the potential area of establishment of a pest. All these tools have been developed taking into account both pest risk science available and needs of policy makers. The use of these tools and of mapping software are undertaken within the framework of EPPO Pest Risk Analyses, as illustrated through the examples of Thaumatotibia leucotreta (Lepidoptera) and Apriona germari (Coleoptera)

Vulnerability and public service delivery in China from 1985 to 1999

This research focused on the determinants of vulnerability, as measured by the variable of expenditure on food consumption, by the quality of public service delivery as measured by three education variables (amount of students per teacher in primary education, amount of students per teacher in secondary education and amount of students per teacher in higher education) and two health variables (amount of doctors per bed and the amount of beds per hospital). To measure the impact of public service delivery on vulnerability we will use OLS regression, Fixed Effect, Two Stage Least Square (TSLS) and TSLS with Fixed Effect. The instrumental of the TSLS regressions are a group of political decentralization and inequality variables. Lags of respective one and two years are introduced as an additional robustness test. The conclusion is threefold: (i) the quality of primary education has a negative impact on vulnerability, probably due to the selection bias of children from poor families being taken out of school; (ii) the quality of the education service in higher education has a positive impact on vulnerability; and (iii) quality of health care has, at most, only a partial positive effect on reducing vulnerability

Liquid jet and droplet deformation induced by non-uniform acoustics radiation pressure distribution

International audienceThe present work focuses on non linear acoustic effects on an elliptic cylinder or an ellipsoid. These effects are encountered in acoustic levitation, ultrasonic standing wave atomization or two-phase flow combustion instabili-ties. Theoretical approaches mainly paid attention on the total radiation force, but a modeling of the distribution of acoustic radiation pressure around the object is needed to predict liquid object deformation. In the present study, a semi-analytical model is presented in order to compute the local radiation pressure as the only reason for liquid jet or droplet deformation. The method used here imposes an incident field to, a posteriori, compute the scattered field as a function of the object geometrical properties. A partial wave decomposition(PWD) model is developed to express incident and scattered fields by and immovable object with rigid boundary conditions. Radiation pressure is computed for progressive and standing wave fields. Validation of our method is done by comparing with the radiation force results from the literature. Results show that the larger the deformation, the higher the acoustic effects in a direction perpendicular to the acoustic wave axis. Introduction Non linear effects of acoustics are encountered in applications such as acoustic levitation, ultrasonic standing wave atomization or two-phase flow combustion instabilities occurring in rocket engines [1-4]. Most of the studies dealing with interaction of acoustics and spherical [5-9] or cylindrical [10-14] objects focused on the stationary radiation force. The main objective was there to determine the displacement of these objects. However, their deformation is also of a great interest in applications dealing with liquid objects. In studies on acoustically levitating droplets, some authors considered the radiation pressure distribution as the source of the stationnary deformation of the free surfaces [2, 15, 16]. They showed that spherical droplets became oblate when exposed to the radiation pressure. For cylindrical objects, it was experimentally proven that cylindrical liquid jets subjected to a low frequency standing wave were susceptible to be deformed into elliptic cylinders [17]. Thus, by relying on those results it appeared that knowing radiation pressure distribution around elliptic objects was necessary to correctly analyze the interaction between acoustics and deformed objects. Hasheminejad et al. [18, 19] developed an approach based on elliptic functions, namely Mathieu functions, to describe the acoustic scattered field. This is a powerful method, but limited in its applications due to the occurrence of Mathieu polynomials instability. Other authors considered a theoretical approach based on the expression of the incident and scattered waves by means of the formal cylindrical or spherical functions [17, 20-22]. All the studies cited above focused only on the modeling of the radiation force computed with the far field assumption avoiding the computation of radiation pressure distribution. To tackle the problem of object deformation induced by acoustics, it is needed to model the radiation pressure distribution. This is done here for elliptic cylinders and ellipsoids. The two-way coupling between incident acoustic harmonic plane waves and these objects is explored by computing the radiation pressure field and resulting radiation force. In the first section is presented the method used to compute the acoustic velocity potential field scattered by elliptic objects and the consequent computation of the radiation pressure and radiation force. Results showing the convergence of the method, its validation and the radiation pressure distribution are presented in the second section. Finally, the last section is dedicated to some conclusions

High amplitude/high frequency acoustic field effects on coaxial inkection

International audienc

The Arabidopsis thaliana cDNA sequencing projects 1This paper was presented at the 24th FEBS Meeting in Barcelona.1

AbstractNearly 30 000 Arabidopsis thaliana EST (Expressed Sequence Tags) have been produced by a French-American consortium. Despite redundancy, these sequences tag about half of the expected Arabidopsis genes. Approximately 40% of the non-redundant EST can be assigned a putative function by simple homology search. This programme allowed the identification of a large number of genes which would have been very difficult to isolate by other classical techniques. It considerably stimulated many areas of plant biology by the rapid discovery a large number of genes, by revealing multigene families and by allowing the analysis of differential expression of the different members. Finally this programme facilitated construction of physical maps of the chromosomes and opened the way for complete sequencing of the Arabidopsis genome and comparative mapping of the major plant crops.© 1997 Federation of European Biochemical Societie

A generic platform for the visualization of all monomer sequences in individual copolymer chains

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Les femmes et la politique

À l'occasion du cinquantième anniversaire de l'accession des Françaises aux droits politiques, l'Association Les femmes et la ville (présidente Yvonne Knibiehler, Université de Provence) et le Groupe interdisciplinaire d'études sur les femmes (présidente Eliane Gubin, Université libre de Bruxelles) ont pris l'initiative d'organiser conjointement des recherches consacrées aux rapports des femmes et de la politique. À Lyon Michèle Bacot et Marie-Claude Plantin (IEP), Mireille Meyer et Fr..

Construction d'une ontologie de descripteurs UCD en astronomie

Les descripteurs UCD (Unified Content Descriptors) permettent de décrire des données d'astronomie. Un processus de standardisation, qui est resté sur un plan purement syntaxique jusqu'à présent, s'est avéré nécessaire et aucune sémantique formelle n'a été associée aux descripteurs normalisés. Dans cet article, nous présentons une méthodologie pour construire une ontologie des UCD normalisés en OWL. Cette ontologie est ensuite exploitée pour l'attribution semi-automatique d'UCD des descriptions de propriétés d'objets célestes issues de catalogues d'astronomie. Cette procédure exploite une classification approchée et progressive s'appuyant sur des méta-donnes qui établissent des liens entre les éléments lexicaux employés dans les descriptions et les propriétés des objets représentant les UCD dans l'ontologie

Brittle fracture in heat-affected zones of girth welds of modern line pipe steel (X100)

International audienceGirth welds of modern line pipe steel, such as X100, issued from a pulsed automatic gas metal arc welding, were tested to check their performance in artic temperature conditions. It is shown that an impact specimen at -20 °C with a notch placed in the middle of the fusion line could break at low energy (<40 J). The brittle zone is located in the coarse-grained heat-affected zone of the weld. The reproduction of two heat-affected zones with a thermal-mechanical simulator, Gleeble 1500, allows to determine the mechanical behaviour of representative microstructures of the welded joint. Tension tests with or without notch and impact tests are performed between -196 °C and 20 °C. This experimental database is used to fit materials constitutive equations which are used in a finite element code to predict the fracture of the welded joint