Effect of random disorder and spin frustration on the reentrant spin glass phase and ferromagnetic phase in stage-2 Cu_{0.93}Co_{0.07}Cl_{2} graphite intercalation compound near the multicritical point

Stage-2 Cu$_{0.93}$Co$_{0.07}$Cl$_{2}$ graphite intercalation compound magnetically behaves like a reentrant ferromagnet near the multicritical point ($c_{MCP} \approx 0.96$). It undergoes two magnetic phase transitions at $T_{RSG}$ ($= 6.64 \pm 0.05$ K) and $T_{c}$ ($= 8.62 \pm 0.05$ K). The static and dynamic nature of the ferromagnetic and reentrant spin glass phase has been studied using DC and AC magnetic susceptibility. Characteristic memory phenomena of the DC susceptibility are observed at $T_{RSG}$ and $T_{c}$. The nonlinear AC susceptibility $\chi_{3}^{\prime}$ has a positive local maximum at $T_{RSG}$, and a negative local minimum at $T_{c}$. The relaxation time $\tau$ between $T_{RSG}$ and $T_{c}$ shows a critical slowing down: $\tau$ with $x = 13.1 \pm 0.4$ and $\tau_{0}^{*} = (2.5 \pm 0.5) \times 10^{-13}$ sec. The influence of the random disorder on the critical behavior above $T_{c}$ is clearly observed: $\alpha = -0.66$, $\beta = 0.63$, and $\gamma = 1.40$. The exponent of $\alpha$ is far from that of 3D Heisenberg model.Comment: 15 pages, 16 figures, submitted to Phys. Rev.

The NEUMA Project: towards Cooperative On-line Music Score Libraries

Περιέχει το πλήρες κείμενοThe NEUMA project (http://neuma.irpmf-cnrs.fr) aims at designing and evaluating an open cooperative system for musician communities, enabling new search and analysis tools for symbolic musical content sharing and dissemination. The project is organized around the French CNRS laboratory of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France which provides sample collections, user requirements and expert validation. The paper presents the project goals, its achitecture and current state of development. We illustrate our approach with an on-line publication of monodic collections centered on XVIIe century French liturgic chants

Accommodating Ontologies to Biological Reality—Top-Level Categories of Cumulative-Constitutively Organized Material Entities

BACKGROUND: The Basic Formal Ontology (BFO) is a top-level formal foundational ontology for the biomedical domain. It has been developed with the purpose to serve as an ontologically consistent template for top-level categories of application oriented and domain reference ontologies within the Open Biological and Biomedical Ontologies Foundry (OBO). BFO is important for enabling OBO ontologies to facilitate in reliably communicating and managing data and metadata within and across biomedical databases. Following its intended single inheritance policy, BFO's three top-level categories of material entity (i.e. ‘object’, ‘fiat object part’, ‘object aggregate’) must be exhaustive and mutually disjoint. We have shown elsewhere that for accommodating all types of constitutively organized material entities, BFO must be extended by additional categories of material entity. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS: Unfortunately, most biomedical material entities are cumulative-constitutively organized. We show that even the extended BFO does not exhaustively cover cumulative-constitutively organized material entities. We provide examples from biology and everyday life that demonstrate the necessity for ‘portion of matter’ as another material building block. This implies the necessity for further extending BFO by ‘portion of matter’ as well as three additional categories that possess portions of matter as aggregate components. These extensions are necessary if the basic assumption that all parts that share the same granularity level exhaustively sum to the whole should also apply to cumulative-constitutively organized material entities. By suggesting a notion of granular representation we provide a way to maintain the single inheritance principle when dealing with cumulative-constitutively organized material entities. CONCLUSIONS/SIGNIFICANCE: We suggest to extend BFO to incorporate additional categories of material entity and to rearrange its top-level material entity taxonomy. With these additions and the notion of granular representation, BFO would exhaustively cover all top-level types of material entities that application oriented ontologies may use as templates, while still maintaining the single inheritance principle

Surface display of an anti-DEC-205 single chain Fv fragment in Lactobacillus plantarum increases internalization and plasmid transfer to dendritic cells in vitro and in vivo

BACKGROUND: Lactic acid bacteria (LAB) are promising vehicles for delivery of a variety of medicinal compounds, including antigens and cytokines. It has also been established that LAB are able to deliver cDNA to host cells. To increase the efficiency of LAB-driven DNA delivery we have constructed Lactobacillus plantarum strains targeting DEC-205, which is a receptor located at the surface of dendritic cells (DCs). The purpose was to increase uptake of bacterial cells, which could lead to improved cDNA delivery to immune cells. RESULTS: Anti-DEC-205 antibody (aDec) was displayed at the surface of L. plantarum using three different anchoring strategies: (1) covalent anchoring of aDec to the cell membrane (Lipobox domain, Lip); (2) covalent anchoring to the cell wall (LPXTG domain, CWA); (3) non-covalent anchoring to the cell wall (LysM domain, LysM). aDec was successfully expressed in all three strains, but surface location of the antibody could only be demonstrated for the two strains with cell wall anchors (CWA and LysM). Co-incubation of the engineered strains and DCs showed increased uptake when anchoring aDec using the CWA or LysM anchors. In a competition assay, free anti-DEC abolished the increased uptake, showing that the internalization is due to specific interactions between the DEC-205 receptor and aDec. To test plasmid transfer, a plasmid for expression of GFP under control of an eukaryotic promoter was transformed into the aDec expressing strains and GFP expression in DCs was indeed increased when using the strains producing cell-wall anchored aDec. Plasmid transfer to DCs in the gastro intestinal tract was also detected using a mouse model. Surprisingly, in mice the highest expression of GFP was observed for the strain in which aDec was coupled to the cell membrane. CONCLUSION: The results show that surface expression of aDec leads to increased internalization of L. plantarum and plasmid transfer in DCs and that efficiency depends on the type of anchor used. Interestingly, in vitro data indicates that cell wall anchoring is more effective, whereas in vivo data seem to indicate that anchoring to the cell membrane is preferable. It is likely that the more embedded localization of aDec in the latter case is favorable when cells are exposed to the harsh conditions of the gastro-intestinal tract

Live Coding, Live Notation, Live Performance

This paper/demonstration explores relationships between code, notation including representation, visualisation and performance. Performative aspects of live coding activities are increasingly being investigated as the live coding movement continues to grow and develop. Although live instrumental performance is sometimes included as an accompaniment to live coding, it is often not a fully integrated part of the performance, relying on improvisation and/or basic indicative forms of notation with varying levels of sophistication and universality. Technologies are developing which enable the use of fully explicit music notations as well as more graphic ones, allowing more fully integrated systems of code in and as performance which can also include notations of arbitrary complexity. This itself allows the full skills of instrumental musicians to be utilised and synchronised in the process. This presentation/demonstration presents work and performances already undertaken with these technologies, including technologies for body sensing and data acquisition in the translation of the movements of dancers and musicians into synchronously performable notation, integrated by live and prepared coding. The author together with clarinetist Ian Mitchell present a short live performance utilising these techniques, discuss methods for the dissemination and interpretation of live generated notations and investigate how they take advantage of instrumental musicians’ training-related neuroplasticity skills

Spatio-structural granularity of biological material entities

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>With the continuously increasing demands on knowledge- and data-management that databases have to meet, ontologies and the theories of granularity they use become more and more important. Unfortunately, currently used theories and schemes of granularity unnecessarily limit the performance of ontologies due to two shortcomings: (i) they do not allow the integration of multiple granularity perspectives into one granularity framework; (ii) they are not applicable to cumulative-constitutively organized material entities, which cover most of the biomedical material entities.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>The above mentioned shortcomings are responsible for the major inconsistencies in currently used spatio-structural granularity schemes. By using the Basic Formal Ontology (BFO) as a top-level ontology and Keet's general theory of granularity, a granularity framework is presented that is applicable to cumulative-constitutively organized material entities. It provides a scheme for granulating complex material entities into their constitutive and regional parts by integrating various compositional and spatial granularity perspectives. Within a scale dependent resolution perspective, it even allows distinguishing different types of representations of the same material entity. Within other scale dependent perspectives, which are based on specific types of measurements (e.g. weight, volume, etc.), the possibility of organizing instances of material entities independent of their parthood relations and only according to increasing measures is provided as well. All granularity perspectives are connected to one another through overcrossing granularity levels, together forming an integrated whole that uses the <it>compositional object perspective </it>as an integrating backbone. This granularity framework allows to consistently assign structural granularity values to all different types of material entities.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>The here presented framework provides a spatio-structural granularity framework for all domain reference ontologies that model cumulative-constitutively organized material entities. With its multi-perspectives approach it allows querying an ontology stored in a database at one's own desired different levels of detail: The contents of a database can be organized according to diverse granularity perspectives, which in their turn provide different <it>views </it>on its content (i.e. data, knowledge), each organized into different levels of detail.</p

Utilisation des dispositifs à transfert de charges en traitement analogique du signal

Les dispositifs à transfert de charges (DTC) sont des dispositifs analogiques. Qu'ils soient analysés sous forme de ligne à retards ou de registre à décalage, ils constituent une mémoire analogique où sont stockés autant d'échantillons d'un signal, qu'ils comportent d'étages. Leur comportement est à caractériser autant par les concepts classiques analogiques : niveaux de signal et de bruit, distortion, bande passante ; que ceux caractéristiques des mémoires : durée de mémorisation et fréquence de sortie. La technologie de leur réalisation est entièrement compatible avec celle des circuits à transistors MOS. Les circuits que nous présentons, associent DTC et circuits périphériques analogiques. Les résultats obtenus sur cette génération de circuits peuvent se résumé à : . dynamique 60dB . distortion 1/100 . fréquence de transfert maximale 200KHz . bande passante 20KHz . impédance de sortie 10 KΩ. Ces circuits sont des véhicules de test, tant en ce qui concerne le fonctionnement analogique du UTC que de son association avec une circuiterie analogique MOS. A partir de ces résultats préliminaires, nous commençons l'analyse de l'impact de ces concepts de fonctionnement, sur ce que serait le calcul d'une transformée de Fourier, d'un produit de convolution, d'une fonction de corrélation au moyen de dispositifs entièrement intégrés mettant en oeuvre DTC et circuits périphériques à transistors MOS

Presentation of the CETAMA working group 21

International audienceCETAMA network is organized in 13 thematic working groups. The working group number 21 is dedicated to Electron Probe Micro Analysis (EPMA). Its main mission is to listen to participant needs about EPMA practical issues and to propose tools in order to improve the quality of measurement and analysis results

DIAMEX-SANEX process development studies

International audienceThis paper describes the way adopted to develop DIAMEX-SANEX process. The organic phase contains two extractants : DMDOHEMA extracting actinides(III) from a high nitric acid medium, and the a cationic exchanger for the extraction at lower acidity. Two concepts are studied : in the first one, extractants mixture is used in the whole process, whereas the second route includes a extractant separation step. In that case, only DMDOHEMA is exposed to high-level raffinate and Mo, Zr extraction could be inhibited. In that case, di-alkyl phosphoric acids with 6 carbon atom on branched chains were the more convenient for actinides and extractant separations. They are lipophilic towards aqueous solutions with pH lower than 4, in order to maintained lanthanides in organic phase. They are moreover soluble in basic aqueous solution, so we could recover a organic phase with only DMDOHEMA and TPH. The route without extractant separation used the well known di-(2-ethyl hexyl) phosphoric acid. The main difficulty in that case, is the management of fission products as molybdenum and zirconium, in order to prevent their stripping with actinides(III) and to back extract them before organic phase recycling. The main goal of theses studies is to carry out experiments useful to elaborate a flowsheet for a genuine hot test on a long duration in 2004