Participatory Plant Breeding for Organic Farming in France, the cauliflower experience at the PAIS

The availability of organic seeds is a great problem for organic farmers. The private sector of plant breeding meets difficulties to answer to the organic farming (OF) demand, characterized by small quantities and a great diversity of criteria and by breeding methods which respect the natural species characteristics (see IFOAM Draft Standard on organic seeds and plant breeding). So, the organic sector is organizing breeding and seed production by itself In France, since 2001, a Brittany regional organic umbrella (IBB, Inter Bio Bretagne), and some researchers from the national institute for agronomical research (INRA) have initiated a breeding program for organic production and a participatory plant breeding (PPB) program for organic cabbages and cauliflowers in Brittany, from the evaluation of genetic resources of several European gene Banks. In the PPB, the farmers are taking in charge breeding and seed production of open pollinated varieties. Several types were kept and bred, depending on the way of production and commercialization for each farmer. In the northern Brittany, farmers have not forgotten the traditional production of cauliflower seeds. PAIS, the agrobiological experimental station of IBB on the organic site of an agricultural school (Suscinio, Morlaix), is the meeting point for all the involved actors (farmers, traders, trainers, researchers…). There, the farmers and traders can find technical and scientific information, and they can share their experiences from the plant selection to seed production. Today, other French PPB initiatives involve several species and organic farmers groups, to promote biodiversity and a best adaptation to a local production: durum wheat in the Mediterranean area, bread wheat with the “paysan-boulangers”, maize and sunflower in the South-West of the country, tomato in the South-East, radishes, parsnip and summer cauliflower, in Pays de Loire. From these experiences, the PPB for organic farming consists in the constitution of the organic farmers group with the creation of exchange space for researchers and others organic actors, the definition of the priority in matters of crops, the discovering and selection of genetic resources in the farmers fields, the exchange of experiences and genetic resources through formal and informal, regional, national or international, farmer and organic professional meetings (accompanied by researchers and often enlarged to gardeners and trainers). The seed distribution has been depending on the French legislative evolution. By nature, the varieties issued from PPB could not fill the DUS (Distinction, Uniformity, Stability) characteristics for registration. And mainly, by ethics, the organic way of development should enhance the ancestral link between the plant and the farmers, link which needs exchanges to allow the evolution of the crops and the conservation of a living biodiversity

On the complexity of heterogeneous multidimensional quantitative games

In this paper, we study two-player zero-sum turn-based games played on a finite multidimensional weighted graph. In recent papers all dimensions use the same measure, whereas here we allow to combine different measures. Such heterogeneous multidimensional quantitative games provide a general and natural model for the study of reactive system synthesis. We focus on classical measures like the Inf, Sup, LimInf, and LimSup of the weights seen along the play, as well as on the window mean-payoff (WMP) measure. This new measure is a natural strengthening of the mean-payoff measure. We allow objectives defined as Boolean combinations of heterogeneous constraints. While multidimensional games with Boolean combinations of mean-payoff constraints are undecidable, we show that the problem becomes EXPTIME-complete for DNF/CNF Boolean combinations of heterogeneous measures taken among {WMP, Inf, Sup, LimInf, LimSup} and that exponential memory strategies are sufficient for both players to win. We provide a detailed study of the complexity and the memory requirements when the Boolean combination of the measures is replaced by an intersection. EXPTIME-completeness and exponential memory strategies still hold for the intersection of measures in {WMP, Inf, Sup, LimInf, LimSup}, and we get PSPACE-completeness when WMP measure is no longer considered. To avoid EXPTIME-or PSPACE-hardness, we impose at most one occurrence of WMP measure and fix the number of Sup measures, and we propose several refinements (on the number of occurrences of the other measures) for which we get polynomial algorithms and lower memory requirements. For all the considered classes of games, we also study parameterized complexity

Symblicit algorithms for optimal strategy synthesis in monotonic Markov decision processes

When treating Markov decision processes (MDPs) with large state spaces, using explicit representations quickly becomes unfeasible. Lately, Wimmer et al. have proposed a so-called symblicit algorithm for the synthesis of optimal strategies in MDPs, in the quantitative setting of expected mean-payoff. This algorithm, based on the strategy iteration algorithm of Howard and Veinott, efficiently combines symbolic and explicit data structures, and uses binary decision diagrams as symbolic representation. The aim of this paper is to show that the new data structure of pseudo-antichains (an extension of antichains) provides another interesting alternative, especially for the class of monotonic MDPs. We design efficient pseudo-antichain based symblicit algorithms (with open source implementations) for two quantitative settings: the expected mean-payoff and the stochastic shortest path. For two practical applications coming from automated planning and LTL synthesis, we report promising experimental results w.r.t. both the run time and the memory consumption.Comment: In Proceedings SYNT 2014, arXiv:1407.493

Quantifying and containing the curse of high resolution coronal imaging

Future missions such as Solar Orbiter (SO), InterHelioprobe, or Solar Probe aim at approaching the Sun closer than ever before, with on board some high resolution imagers (HRI) having a subsecond cadence and a pixel area of about $(80km)^2$ at the Sun during perihelion. In order to guarantee their scientific success, it is necessary to evaluate if the photon counts available at these resolution and cadence will provide a sufficient signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). We perform a first step in this direction by analyzing and characterizing the spatial intermittency of Quiet Sun images thanks to a multifractal analysis. We identify the parameters that specify the scale-invariance behavior. This identification allows next to select a family of multifractal processes, namely the Compound Poisson Cascades, that can synthesize artificial images having some of the scale-invariance properties observed on the recorded images. The prevalence of self-similarity in Quiet Sun coronal images makes it relevant to study the ratio between the SNR present at SoHO/EIT images and in coarsened images. SoHO/EIT images thus play the role of 'high resolution' images, whereas the 'low-resolution' coarsened images are rebinned so as to simulate a smaller angular resolution and/or a larger distance to the Sun. For a fixed difference in angular resolution and in Spacecraft-Sun distance, we determine the proportion of pixels having a SNR preserved at high resolution given a particular increase in effective area. If scale-invariance continues to prevail at smaller scales, the conclusion reached with SoHO/EIT images can be transposed to the situation where the resolution is increased from SoHO/EIT to SO/HRI resolution at perihelion.Comment: 25 pages, 1 table, 7 figure

La porcelaine de Chine à Byzance et dans l'Orient chrétien : une absence remarquable

International audienceIn spite of the striking success of celadon and porcelains of China, in the Middle East, between the 9th and the 15th century, vast regions of the oriental Mediterranean sea do not seem to have sacrificed to this fashion. By wondering about the degree of penetration of these products in the Christian East, we notice the Chinese productions never reached the Byzantine Empire, Cyprus and the Frankish settlements of the Eastern Mediterranean. We shall wonder what are the causes of this visible disaffection.Malgré le vif succès remporté, au Moyen-Orient, entre le IXe et le XVe siècle, par les céladons et les porcelaines de Chine, il est de vastes régions de Méditerranée orientale qui ne semblent pas avoir sacrifié à cette mode. En s'interrogeant sur le degré de pénétration de ces produits dans l'Orient chrétien, on constate les productions chinoises n'ont atteint ni les territoires de l'Empire byzantin, ni l'île de Chypre ni les places franques du Levant. L'Orient chrétien est resté imperméable à la vaisselle de Chine et on se demandera quelles sont les causes de cette apparente désaffection

La vaisselle de table à Byzance : un artisanat et un marché peu perméables aux influences extérieures

L'article publié est accessible en ligne sur le site de l'éditeur et peut être imprimé dans sa totalité.L'auteur s'interroge sur les liens éventuels qui existaient entre Byzance, l'Occident chrétien et le monde musulman dans le domaine de l'artisanat potier d'une part et dans celui du commerce de la vaisselle de table d'autre part. Les potiers exerçant à Byzance ont peu emprunté à leurs collègues étrangers que ce soit dans le domaine technique, stylistique ou iconographique. Cet artisanat est resté très hermétique aux procédés de fabrication et de décoration de la vaisselle de terre qui étaient pourtant très variés en Orient. Aux côtés des modestes fabrications locales, des productions plus sophistiquées ont été commercialisées dans l'Empire byzantin, elles répondaient peut-être à la demande des étrangers installés à Byzance – en particulier les Seldjoukides et les Francs

Céramiques importées à Byzance : une quasi-absence

While some Byzantine pottery productions of the 12th and 13th centuries were widely traded in western and eastern Mediterranean, few foreign ceramics were discovered in the Byzantine Empire during Comnenian and Palaeologan periods. An inventory of the discoveries excavated in Thracia, in Asia Minor - except in territories crossed under Seldjuk dominion - and in Greece, including regions controlled by Franks, show that the pottery coming from Islamic countries, dated to the 12th-13th centuries, are rare and mainly attested in Constantinople. While the Italian productions and the earthenware made in Valencia, dated to the 13th-14th centuries, more plentiful, appear essentially in Greece on sites occupied by Latins.Alors que quelques productions byzantines des XIIe-XIIIe siècles ont été commercialisées en Occident et en Orient, assez peu de céramiques étrangères ont été retrouvées dans l'Empire byzantin aux époques comnènes et paléologues. Un inventaire des découvertes faites en Thrace, en Asie Mineure — excepté dans les territoires passés sous domination seldjoukide — et en Grèce, y compris dans les régions momentanément contrôlées par les Francs, montre que la vaisselle fine originaire d'Orient, datée des XIIe-XIIIe siècles, est rare. Elle est principalement attestée à Constantinople alors que les productions italiennes et les faïences ibéro-islamiques, des XIIIe-XIVe siècles, plus abondantes, apparaissent essentiellement en Grèce sur les sites occupés par les Latins