5,971 research outputs found
Caractéristiques des ajustements de prix en France et dans la zone euro : quelques faits stylisés tirés des données individuelles de prix à la consommation.
fréquence de changement de prix, prix à la consommation, rigidité des prix.
Mise en suspension d'une poudre micronique par effet vortex
National audienceNew materials based on nanotechnology are reaching the market in a wide variety of consumer products. Since these nanostructured materials can be in powder form, a suspending powder system is essential for many purposes: For in vivo inhalation toxicological studies,for workers and consumers protection, for instrumental development widening aerosol measurement spectrum. Different powders suspending systems have been developed like the rotating drum or the single drop. They are used as a reference method to evaluate bulk materials dustiness. Usually cumbersome, these systems need a huge amount of powder (a few hundred grams) and require time-consuming cleaning processes which could be even more tedious when a nanostructured material and/or a toxic powder is used. The aim of this work is to evaluate the behavior of a powder suspending system by vortex effect. This system is very simple and requires a very small amount of powder (a few grams) in a tube [1,2]. It has been set up to study the dustiness under controlled and reproducible conditions. Different tests have been performed with a Al2O3 powder. They allowed not only to characterize the influence of shaking speed and powder mass, but also to measure the particle size and the number concentration as shown on the figures belowLa mise en suspension de poudres est un processus essentiel dans différents domaines : il permet d'étudier la physico-chimie de la phase " aérosol " d'une poudre donnée ; un tel système est indispensable pour mener des études toxicologiques par inhalation in vivo ; dans le domaine de la protection des personnes (travailleur, consommateur) et de l'environnement, il permet d'évaluer l'émissivité potentielle des poudres, et en conséquence d'adapter les mesures de protection ; un tel dispositif facilite également le développement instrumental, en donnant accès à un spectre large d'aérosols. Nous rapportons ici les résultats d'une étude consacrée à la mise en suspension par effet vortex. Ce système est particulièrement simple [2, 3] : il consiste en l'agitation d'une faible quantité de poudre, placée dans un tube à essai. Nos essais ont porté sur une poudre micronique d'alumine. L'aérosol obtenu a été caractérisé en nombre et taille à l'aide de systèmes CNC, SMPS, et APS. Des essais de sensibilité ont été menés en termes de quantité de produit, et de niveau d'agitation. Nous avons relevé une très bonne répétabilité des résultat
Evaluation de l'efficacité de prélèvement d'un précipitateur électrostatique
National audienceEasy-to-use particle sampling techniques leading to easy-to-analyze samples is a growing need for nanosafety. Electrostatic precipitation [Dickens 1999] commercialized by TSI (Nanometer Aerosol Sampler model 3089) could be an answer. However, more information is needed on the performance of this instruments. On the one hand, real time sampling efficiency of the NAS regarding voltage has been studied. On the other hand, the sampling efficiency for 80 nm polystyrene particles has been considered through both real time CPC measurements and TEM analysis: these methods lead to very different results, respectively 62-70% and < 0,1 %. These results are discussed regarding literatureConnaître la composition des particules constitue un enjeu grandissant dans le domaine des particules ultrafines. Il est essentiel de disposer de techniques de prélèvement simples, pouvant permettre une analyse différée, tout particulièrement par microscopie électronique. A ce titre, le prélèvement par précipitateur électrostatique semble être une technique prometteuse. La société TSI commercialise depuis quelques années un échantillonneur de ce type, le modèle 3089 NAS (Nanometer Aerosol Sampler). Le travail présenté ici a pour objectif d'étudier l'efficacité de prélèvement de cet appareil, dans le cas d'une mise en oeuvre en aval d'un analyseur de mobilité électrique. Pour ce faire, un aérosol monodispersé a été produit par atomisation et extraction par analyse de mobilité. L'efficacité de prélèvement a été considérée pour différents modes de fonctionnement. Il ressort de cette étude que si une efficacité notable de dépôt est relevée à l'échelle du NAS, ce dépôt ne se ferait que de manière minoritaire sur la grille de prélèvement. Ces résultats sont discutés au regard de références bibliographique
Duality and ontology
A ‘duality’ is a formal mapping between the spaces of solutions of two empirically equivalent theories. In recent times, dualities have been found to be pervasive in string theory and quantum field theory. Naïvely interpreted, duality-related theories appear to make very different ontological claims about the world—differing in e.g. space-time structure, fundamental ontology, and mereological structure. In light of this, duality-related theories raise questions familiar from discussions of underdetermination in the philosophy of science: in the presence of dual theories, what is one to say about the ontology of the world? In this paper, we undertake a comprehensive and non-technical survey of the landscape of possible ontological interpretations of duality-related theories. We provide a significantly enriched and clarified taxonomy of options—several of which are novel to the literature
Circadian clock parameter measurement: characterization of clock transcription factors using surface plasmon resonance
Analytic Metaphysics versus Naturalized Metaphysics: The Relevance of Applied Ontology
The relevance of analytic metaphysics has come under criticism: Ladyman & Ross, for instance, have suggested do discontinue the field. French & McKenzie have argued in defense of analytic metaphysics that it develops tools that could turn out to be useful for philosophy of physics. In this article, we show first that this heuristic defense of metaphysics can be extended to the scientific field of applied ontology, which uses constructs from analytic metaphysics. Second, we elaborate on a parallel by French & McKenzie between mathematics and metaphysics to show that the whole field of analytic metaphysics, being useful not only for philosophy but also for science, should continue to exist as a largely autonomous field
Estimation of Fiber Orientations Using Neighborhood Information
Data from diffusion magnetic resonance imaging (dMRI) can be used to
reconstruct fiber tracts, for example, in muscle and white matter. Estimation
of fiber orientations (FOs) is a crucial step in the reconstruction process and
these estimates can be corrupted by noise. In this paper, a new method called
Fiber Orientation Reconstruction using Neighborhood Information (FORNI) is
described and shown to reduce the effects of noise and improve FO estimation
performance by incorporating spatial consistency. FORNI uses a fixed tensor
basis to model the diffusion weighted signals, which has the advantage of
providing an explicit relationship between the basis vectors and the FOs. FO
spatial coherence is encouraged using weighted l1-norm regularization terms,
which contain the interaction of directional information between neighbor
voxels. Data fidelity is encouraged using a squared error between the observed
and reconstructed diffusion weighted signals. After appropriate weighting of
these competing objectives, the resulting objective function is minimized using
a block coordinate descent algorithm, and a straightforward parallelization
strategy is used to speed up processing. Experiments were performed on a
digital crossing phantom, ex vivo tongue dMRI data, and in vivo brain dMRI data
for both qualitative and quantitative evaluation. The results demonstrate that
FORNI improves the quality of FO estimation over other state of the art
algorithms.Comment: Journal paper accepted in Medical Image Analysis. 35 pages and 16
figure
Preoperative left ventricular ejection fraction and left atrium reverse remodeling after mitral regurgitation surgery
Background: Left atrium enlargement has been associated with cardiac events in patients with mitral regurgitation (MR). Left atrium reverse remodeling (LARR) occur after surgical correction of MR, but the preoperative predictors of this phenomenon are not well known. It is therefore important to identify preoperative predictors for postoperative LARR.Methods: We enrolled 62 patients with chronic severe MR (prolapse or flail leaflet) who underwent successful mitral valve surgery (repair or replacement); all with pre-and postoperative echocardiography. LARR was defined as a reduction in left atrium volume index (LAVI) of >= 25%. Stepwise multiple regression analysis was used to identify independent predictors of LARR.Results: LARR occurred in 46 patients (74.2%), with the mean LAVI decreasing from 85.5 mL/m(2) to 49.7 mL/m(2) (p = 25% with a sensitivity of 71.7% and a specificity of 56.3%.Conclusions: LARR occurs frequently after mitral valve surgery and is associated with preoperative LVEF higher than 63.5%.Inst Dante Pazzanese Cardiol, São Paulo, BrazilUniversidade Federal de São Paulo, Escola Paulista Med, São Paulo, BrazilDisciplina Cardiol, BR-04024002 São Paulo, BrazilUniversidade Federal de São Paulo, Escola Paulista Med, São Paulo, BrazilWeb of Scienc
Sparse classification with MRI based markers for neuromuscular disease categorization
International audienceIn this paper, we present a novel method for disease classification between two patient populations based on features extracted from Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) data. Anatomically meaningful features are extracted from structural data (T1- and T2-weighted MR images) and Diffusion Tensor Imaging (DTI) data, and used to train a new machine learning algorithm, the k-support SVM (ksup-SVM). The k-support regularized SVM has an inherent feature selection property, and thus it eliminates the requirement for a separate feature selection step. Our dataset consists of patients that suffer from facioscapulohumeral muscular dystrophy (FSH) and Myotonic muscular dystrophy type 1 (DM1) and our proposed method achieves a high performance. More specifically, it achieves a mean Area Under the Curve (AUC) of 0.7141 and mean accuracy 77% ± 0.013. Moreover, we provide a sparsity visualization of the features in order to indentify their discriminative value. The results suggest the potential of the combined use of MR markers to diagnose myopathies, and the general utility of the ksup-SVM. Source code is also available at https://gitorious.org/ksup-svm
Rational invariants of even ternary forms under the orthogonal group
In this article we determine a generating set of rational invariants of
minimal cardinality for the action of the orthogonal group on
the space of ternary forms of even degree . The
construction relies on two key ingredients: On one hand, the Slice Lemma allows
us to reduce the problem to dermining the invariants for the action on a
subspace of the finite subgroup of signed permutations. On the
other hand, our construction relies in a fundamental way on specific bases of
harmonic polynomials. These bases provide maps with prescribed
-equivariance properties. Our explicit construction of these
bases should be relevant well beyond the scope of this paper. The expression of
the -invariants can then be given in a compact form as the
composition of two equivariant maps. Instead of providing (cumbersome) explicit
expressions for the -invariants, we provide efficient algorithms
for their evaluation and rewriting. We also use the constructed
-invariants to determine the -orbit locus and
provide an algorithm for the inverse problem of finding an element in
with prescribed values for its invariants. These are
the computational issues relevant in brain imaging.Comment: v3 Changes: Reworked presentation of Neuroimaging application,
refinement of Definition 3.1. To appear in "Foundations of Computational
Mathematics
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