Agronomical and environmental performances of organic farming in the Seine watershed, France

This work suggests that Soil Surface Balance is a robust indicator to compare the performances of organic agriculture with those of conventional agriculture, even strictly following the rules of rational and optimised application of fertilisers. The results of long term nitrogen budget calculation brought us to seriously reconsider the relevance of the need to increase crop yields, and more broadly to reconsider cropping patterns and production systems. In terms of policy levers for mitigating nitrogen contamination of water resources, only the shift to organic farming provides a possible way to reconcile agricultural production and water quality. Further, this view points out the need for specific measures to encourage more mixed farming approach to organic farming on a territorial basis, thus reversing a 50 years trend to regional specialization into either crop or livestock farming

Improving music genre classification using automatically induced harmony rules

We present a new genre classification framework using both low-level signal-based features and high-level harmony features. A state-of-the-art statistical genre classifier based on timbral features is extended using a first-order random forest containing for each genre rules derived from harmony or chord sequences. This random forest has been automatically induced, using the first-order logic induction algorithm TILDE, from a dataset, in which for each chord the degree and chord category are identified, and covering classical, jazz and pop genre classes. The audio descriptor-based genre classifier contains 206 features, covering spectral, temporal, energy, and pitch characteristics of the audio signal. The fusion of the harmony-based classifier with the extracted feature vectors is tested on three-genre subsets of the GTZAN and ISMIR04 datasets, which contain 300 and 448 recordings, respectively. Machine learning classifiers were tested using 5 × 5-fold cross-validation and feature selection. Results indicate that the proposed harmony-based rules combined with the timbral descriptor-based genre classification system lead to improved genre classification rates

Study of the seismic vulnerability of Catalonian Romanesque churches: church of the cathedral of La Seu d’Urgell and church of the Monastery of Vilabertran

The thesis consists of the study of the seismic vulnerability of two large Romanesque buildings located in Catalonia: church of Vilabertran Monastery and the Cathedral of La Seu d'Urgell. The study will be carried out through the application of the vulnerabiity index method, kinematic analysis and other approaches

What Difference do the Government Institutions of Haiti and the Government Institutions of the Dominican Republic Make for Tourism Growth?

This comparative case study examines the actions that the Haitian and Dominican governments, respectively, have taken to develop and sustain tourism within their borders. My premise is that governments, through state institutions and policies, can implement branding strategies that impact and change existing country image perceptions. Expanding on the determinants of tourism demand literature, I present a theoretical framework for how government institutions collaborate to create a favorable country brand by investing in the development of functional benefits {public safety and infrastructure quality}. The functional benefits are then supplied to the mass tourist market, who demands them in order to visit, lodge and spend money in the country. The findings of this study confirm that a causal relationship exists between a country’s level of stability and tourism arrivals and receipts, further establishing this study’s theory that high levels of investment in infrastructure quality and nation branding can positively influence country image perception to generate arrivals and receipts. Surprise outcomes regarding crime’s impact on arrivals and receipts present future opportunities to advance the literature

Logic-based Modelling of Musical Harmony for Automatic Characterisation and Classification

The copyright of this thesis rests with the author and no quotation from it or information derived from it may be published without the prior written consent of the authorMusic like other online media is undergoing an information explosion. Massive online music stores such as the iTunes Store1 or Amazon MP32, and their counterparts, the streaming platforms, such as Spotify3, Rdio4 and Deezer5, offer more than 30 million6 pieces of music to their customers, that is to say anybody with a smart phone. Indeed these ubiquitous devices offer vast storage capacities and cloud-based apps that can cater any music request. As Paul Lamere puts it7: “we can now have a virtually endless supply of music in our pocket. The ‘bottomless iPod’ will have as big an effect on how we listen to music as the original iPod had back in 2001. But with millions of songs to chose from, we will need help finding music that we want to hear [...]. We will need new tools that help us manage our listening experience.” Retrieval, organisation, recommendation, annotation and characterisation of musical data is precisely what the Music Information Retrieval (MIR) community has been working on for at least 15 years (Byrd and Crawford, 2002). It is clear from its historical roots in practical fields such as Information Retrieval, Information Systems, Digital Resources and Digital Libraries but also from the publications presented at the first International Symposium on Music Information Retrieval in 2000 that MIR has been aiming to build tools to help people to navigate, explore and make sense of music collections (Downie et al., 2009). That also includes analytical tools to suppor

La notion d'involution dans le Brouillon Project de Girard Desargues

Nous tentons dans cet article de proposer une th\`ese coh\'erente concernant la formation de la notion d'involution dans le Brouillon Project de Desargues. Pour cela, nous donnons une analyse d\'etaill\'ee des dix premi\`eres pages dudit Brouillon, comprenant les d\'eveloppements de cas particuliers qui aident \`a comprendre l'intention de Desargues. Nous mettons cette analyse en regard de la lecture qu'en fait Jean de Beaugrand et que l'on trouve dans les Advis Charitables. The purpose of this article is to propose a coherent thesis on how Girard Desargues arrived at the notion of involution in his Brouillon Project of 1639. To this purpose we give a detailed analysis of the ten first pages of the Brouillon, including developments of particular cases which help to understand the goal of Desargues, as well as to clarify the links between the notion of involution and that of harmonic division. We compare the conclusions of this analysis with the very critical reading Jean de Beaugrand made of the Brouillon Project in the Advis Charitables of 1640.Comment: 50 pages, in French, submitted article, 22 figure

Use of textile waste as an addition in the elaboration of an ecological concrete block

The textile industry has grown significantly in recent years, reaching a global fiber production of 53 million tons which 12 % are recycled; Construction sector has been using more and more recycled materials from different industrial sources, to apply them in their constructions and to reduce CO2 emissions and final energy consumption. The present study aims to study the behavior of concrete blocks of fć= 210 kg/cm2 adding polyester textile waste with 3 %, 6 %, 9 %, 12 % and 15 %; void content, compressive strength and thermal conductivity decrease, and water absorption, acoustic insulation and unit price increase by 3 %, 34 % and 16 % compared to conventional concrete block