200 research outputs found
Fuchsian convex bodies: basics of Brunn--Minkowski theory
The hyperbolic space \H^d can be defined as a pseudo-sphere in the
Minkowski space-time. In this paper, a Fuchsian group is a group of
linear isometries of the Minkowski space such that \H^d/\Gamma is a compact
manifold. We introduce Fuchsian convex bodies, which are closed convex sets in
Minkowski space, globally invariant for the action of a Fuchsian group. A
volume can be associated to each Fuchsian convex body, and, if the group is
fixed, Minkowski addition behaves well. Then Fuchsian convex bodies can be
studied in the same manner as convex bodies of Euclidean space in the classical
Brunn--Minkowski theory. For example, support functions can be defined, as
functions on a compact hyperbolic manifold instead of the sphere.
The main result is the convexity of the associated volume (it is log concave
in the classical setting). This implies analogs of Alexandrov--Fenchel and
Brunn--Minkowski inequalities. Here the inequalities are reversed
Notes on a paper of Mess
These notes are a companion to the article "Lorentz spacetimes of constant
curvature" by Geoffrey Mess, which was first written in 1990 but never
published. Mess' paper will appear together with these notes in a forthcoming
issue of Geometriae Dedicata.Comment: 26 page
From communities of Practice to Epistemic Communities: Health Mobilizations on the Internet
International audienceThis paper describes the emergence of new activist groups in the health sector, spinning off from internet discussion groups. In the first part, it shows how self-help discussion groups can be considered as communities of practice in which, partly thanks to the Internet media, collective learning activities result in the constitution of experiencial knowledge, the appropriation of exogenous sources of knowledge, including medical knoweldge and the articulation of these different sources of knowledge in some lay expertise. In the second part, it describes how activist groups might emerge from these discussion groups and develop specific modes of action drawing upon the forms of expertise constituted through the Internet groups. Activists groups together with self-help groups might form epistemic communities (Haas 1992), i.e. groups of experts engaged in a policy enterprise in which knowledge plays a major role : in the confrontation of health activists with professionals, the capacity to translate political claims into the langage of science appears as a condition to be (even) heard and be taken into consideration
Children with facial paralysis due to Moebius syndrome exhibit reduced autonomic modulation during emotion processing
Background: Facial mimicry is crucial in the recognition of others' emotional state. Thus, the observation of others' facial expressions activates the same neural representation of that affective state in the observer, along with related autonomic and somatic responses. What happens, therefore, when someone cannot mimic others' facial expressions? Methods: We investigated whether psychophysiological emotional responses to others' facial expressions were impaired in 13 children (9 years) with Moebius syndrome (MBS), an extremely rare neurological disorder (1/250,000 live births) characterized by congenital facial paralysis. We inspected autonomic responses and vagal regulation through facial cutaneous thermal variations and by the computation of respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA). These parameters provide measures of emotional arousal and show the autonomic adaptation to others' social cues. Physiological responses in children with MBS were recorded during dynamic facial expression observation and were compared to those of a control group (16 non-affected children, 9 years). Results: There were significant group effects on thermal patterns and RSA, with lower values in children with MBS. We also observed a mild deficit in emotion recognition in these patients. Conclusion: Results support "embodied" theory, whereby the congenital inability to produce facial expressions induces alterations in the processing of facial expression of emotions. Such alterations may constitute a risk for emotion dysregulation
Characteristics and outcome of patients with newly diagnosed advanced or metastatic lung cancer admitted to intensive care units (ICUs)
BACKGROUND: Although patients with advanced or metastatic lung cancer have poor prognosis, admission to the ICU for management of life-threatening complications has increased over the years. Patients with newly diagnosed lung cancer appear as good candidates for ICU admission, but more robust information to assist decisions is lacking. The aim of our study was to evaluate the prognosis of newly diagnosed unresectable lung cancer patients. METHODS: A retrospective multicentric study analyzed the outcome of patients admitted to the ICU with a newly diagnosed lung cancer (diagnosis within the month) between 2010 and 2013. RESULTS: Out of the 100 patients, 30 had small cell lung cancer (SCLC) and 70 had non-small cell lung cancer. (Thirty patients had already been treated with oncologic treatments.) Mechanical ventilation (MV) was performed for 81 patients. Seventeen patients received emergency chemotherapy during their ICU stay. ICU, hospital, 3- and 6-month mortality were, respectively, 47, 60, 67 and 71%. Hospital mortality was 60% when invasive MV was used alone, 71% when MV and vasopressors were needed and 83% when MV, vasopressors and hemodialysis were required. In multivariate analysis, hospital mortality was associated with metastatic disease (OR 4.22 [1.4-12.4]; p = 0.008), need for invasive MV (OR 4.20 [1.11-16.2]; p = 0.030), while chemotherapy in ICU was associated with survival (OR 0.23, [0.07-0.81]; p = 0.020). CONCLUSION: This study shows that ICU management can be appropriate for selected newly diagnosed patients with advanced lung cancer, and chemotherapy might improve outcome for patients with SCLC admitted for cancer-related complications. Nevertheless, tumors' characteristics, numbers and types of organ dysfunction should be taken into account in the decisional process before admitting these patients in ICU.Peer reviewe
Instant preheating mechanism and UHECR
Top-down models assume that the still unexplained Ultra High Energy Cosmic
Rays (UHECR's) are the decay products of superheavy particles. Such particles
may have been produced by one of the post-inflationary reheating mechanisms and
may account for a fraction of the cold dark matter. In this paper, we assess
the phenomenological applicability of the simplest instant preheating framework
not to describe a reheating process, but as a mechanism to generate relic
supermassive particles as possible sources of UHECR's. We use cosmic ray flux
and cold dark matter observational data to constrain the parameters of the
model.Comment: 7 pages, 2 figures, submitted to PR
Ultra-High Energy Neutrino Fluxes and Their Constraints
Applying our recently developed propagation code we review extragalactic
neutrino fluxes above 10^{14} eV in various scenarios and how they are
constrained by current data. We specifically identify scenarios in which the
cosmogenic neutrino flux, produced by pion production of ultra high energy
cosmic rays outside their sources, is considerably higher than the
"Waxman-Bahcall bound". This is easy to achieve for sources with hard injection
spectra and luminosities that were higher in the past. Such fluxes would
significantly increase the chances to detect ultra-high energy neutrinos with
experiments currently under construction or in the proposal stage.Comment: 11 pages, 15 figures, version published in Phys.Rev.
Anosov representations: Domains of discontinuity and applications
The notion of Anosov representations has been introduced by Labourie in his
study of the Hitchin component for SL(n,R). Subsequently, Anosov
representations have been studied mainly for surface groups, in particular in
the context of higher Teichmueller spaces, and for lattices in SO(1,n). In this
article we extend the notion of Anosov representations to representations of
arbitrary word hyperbolic groups and start the systematic study of their
geometric properties. In particular, given an Anosov representation of
into G we explicitly construct open subsets of compact G-spaces, on which
acts properly discontinuously and with compact quotient.
As a consequence we show that higher Teichmueller spaces parametrize locally
homogeneous geometric structures on compact manifolds. We also obtain
applications regarding (non-standard) compact Clifford-Klein forms and
compactifications of locally symmetric spaces of infinite volume.Comment: 63 pages, accepted for publication in Inventiones Mathematica
An approach to locating delayed activities in software processes
Activity is now playing a vital role in software processes. To ensure the high-level efficiency of software processes, a key point is to locate those activities that own bigger resource occupation probabilities with respect to average execution time, called delayed activities, and then improve them. To this end, we firstly propose an approach to locating delayed activities in software processes. Furthermore, we present a case study, which exhibits the high-level efficiency of the approach, to concretely illustrate this new solution. Some beneficial analysis and reasonable modification are developed in the end
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