Assessing debris-flow hazard focusing on statistical morpho-fluvial susceptibility models and magnitude-frequency relationships. Application to the central-eastern Pyrenees

Occurrence of debris flows has received little attention in the Pyrenees, probably due to the small risk faced by most of the debris-flow prone sites in this mountain range. Nevertheless, the event of Biescas, which occurred in august 1996 and causing 87 casualties, demonstrates the existence of high-risk spots in the region and justifies the elaboration of the debris-flow hazard assessment presented in this thesis. Five debris flows, which occurred in 2008, are selected; and site-specific descriptions and analysis, regarding geology and morphology, were performed. The results are compared with worldwide data and some conclusions on hazard assessment are presented. The preliminary analysis of some major Eastern Pyrenean debris flows represents the background for this thesis. The necessity of possessing an inventory of past occurrences is of crucial importance when assessing debris-flow hazard. Criteria of reconnaissance were thought to be visible from aerial viewing. 691 tracks through which debris flows are thought to have travelled have been revealed. Based on debris-flow inventories and using a geographical information system, the debris-flow hazard assessment presented in this thesis takes into account fluvio-morphologic parameters, gathered for every 1st-order catchment as well as every 2nd-order catchment. Mountainous headwaters are a common subject in geomorphological studies. Often investigated at local scale, the geomorphological context in which headwaters evolve has been poorly reported in the Central-Eastern Pyrenees or worldwide. A series of parameters obtained for Central-Eastern Pyrenean headwaters catchments consisting of 3005 1st- and 655 2nd-order catchments are presented. Acquired from a digital elevation model, these catchments have been digitalised, identified and attributed a value for each parameter. Previously reported parameters¿ ranges agree with those presented in this study. For the first time, the ranges of values give details about the Central-Eastern Pyrenees headwater catchments. Data mining techniques are used on the morphometric parameters, to calculate and test three different models. The first model is a logistic regression. The other two are classification trees, which are rather novel susceptibility models associated with debris flows. Results related to the training dataset show that the optimized model¿s performance lies within existing reported range although closer to the lowest end (near 70%). When the models are applied to the test set, the logistic regression seems to offer the best prediction, as training and test set results are very similar in terms of performance. Trees are better at extracting laws from a training set, but validation through a test set gives poorer results for a prediction at regional scale. The determination of magnitude of a historic event can be done by distinguishing its deposits. However this is not a trivial task in debris fans that accumulate deposits, corresponding to consecutive debris flows, especially if only a conventional geomorphological analysis is carried out. The event deposits can be mapped and, subsequently, trees damaged by the flows sampled for dating events. A magnitude-frequency relationship was prepared for El Rebaixader site, at local scale, and is compared to that of the Tordó creek. Moreover, a debris-flow inventory was created in the "Aigüestortes i Estany de Sant Maurici" National Park in the Central Pyrenees, Spain, and this regional magnitude-frequency relationship is compared to that of Rebaixader. Both curves include a strong rollover effect at about 2000 m2, and events larger than this magnitude can be represented by a power law, with an exponent between -1.5 and -1.9. This thesis is a first step toward the assessment of debris-flow hazard in the Central-Eastern Pyrenees. Although a lot of information is provided, more work is still to be done, in order to fully capture debris-flow importance in landscape evolution

Applying Deep Bidirectional LSTM and Mixture Density Network for Basketball Trajectory Prediction

Data analytics helps basketball teams to create tactics. However, manual data collection and analytics are costly and ineffective. Therefore, we applied a deep bidirectional long short-term memory (BLSTM) and mixture density network (MDN) approach. This model is not only capable of predicting a basketball trajectory based on real data, but it also can generate new trajectory samples. It is an excellent application to help coaches and players decide when and where to shoot. Its structure is particularly suitable for dealing with time series problems. BLSTM receives forward and backward information at the same time, while stacking multiple BLSTMs further increases the learning ability of the model. Combined with BLSTMs, MDN is used to generate a multi-modal distribution of outputs. Thus, the proposed model can, in principle, represent arbitrary conditional probability distributions of output variables. We tested our model with two experiments on three-pointer datasets from NBA SportVu data. In the hit-or-miss classification experiment, the proposed model outperformed other models in terms of the convergence speed and accuracy. In the trajectory generation experiment, eight model-generated trajectories at a given time closely matched real trajectories

Analyse de l’inadéquation offre-demande en ressources humaines vétérinaires dans les structures d’exercice : enquête auprès des vétérinaires praticiens

La profession vétérinaire rencontre depuis plusieurs années des difficultés de recrutement, avec un déficit chronique de candidats. Une enquête a été réalisée auprès des vétérinaires ayant émis des offres d’emploi en 2016 et 2017 sur la plateforme VetoJob afin d’en comprendre les raisons. Les résultats montrent que 63% des répondants ne sont pas parvenus à recruter de collaborateur. L’application d’une procédure de recrutement standardisée n’est effective que pour 5,4% des praticiens, le non-respect de certaines étapes du processus conduisant à un déficit de candidats. Différents critères sont à l’origine d’une inadéquation entre les profils des candidats et les attentes des recruteurs. L’étude de l’attractivité a permis de mettre en évidence des profils « ruraux » et « urbains », et l’impact des facteurs géographiques sur leur recrutement. Des recommandations sont émises à destination des praticiens soulignant l’importance de la mise en place d’une méthode de recrutement standardisée

Estudio de las interacciones de las estelas de los aerogeneradores en un parque eólico

Un aerogenerador extrae la energía cinética del viento con el fin de convertirla en energía eléctrica. Esta extracción de la energía conlleva la creación de una estela por detrás del aerogenerador. Un déficit de velocidad aparece entre el anverso y el reverso del aerogenerador. Los aerogeneradores se organizan en parques eólicos con el fin de extraer la máxima cantidad de energía posible de una zona con unas condiciones propicias para ello. El objetivo de nuestro proyecto es estudiar las interacciones entre las estelas de los aerogeneradores en un parque eólico. En concreto, el parque que llevaremos a estudio es uno situado al sur de Francia. Pertenece a la empresa EDF (Electricidad de Francia) y son ellos quienes han encargado un ensayo en túnel de viento al instituto PRISME cuyas oficinas se encuentran anejas a la Universidad Politécnica de Orleans. Estos ensayos nos permitirán cuantificar los efectos de la interacción entre las estelas de los aerogeneradores. La siguiente foto nos muestra el parque eólico estudiado. EDF ha pedido que el estudio se realice sobre un viento proveniente de una dirección concreta, oeste-suroeste, que es aquella que deja a los tres primeros aerogeneradores alineados y en la que se presenta una mayor interacción entre las estelas de los aerogeneradores.Ingeniería Industria

Metacrisis, not civil war: examining France’s unrest in June/July 2023

In this commentary, I examine the urban riots that took place in France at the end of June and early July 2023 to assess the levels of violence and the response of the French government. I argue that the unrest did not represent the brink of a civil war, as wrongly claimed by dark journalistic assessments and dominant right-wing political discourses, but pertained to a more profound condition of metacrisis (a state where a crisis enters a crisis of its own and a dangerous situation of social strife ensues). Tracing recent discourses and imaginaries of civil war in France and discussing political theorist Albena Azmanova’s notion of metacrisis in relation to Thucydides’s notion of stasis (social strife), I further reflect on how the banlieues (the marginalised suburbs from where the riots originated) crystallise France’s metacrisis, that is, how crisis in the banlieues became a crisis of its own and was already a multi-crisis grounded in France’s (post)colonial heritage, deindustrialisation strategy, and problematic policing politics, and how it echoes other pleas for decent politics and social justice in France

Effect of dimensions on embodied environmental impact of buildings

Designers are faced with many options on material and technical solutions during the design phase of the building. Different studies proposing solutions and guidelines are presented in the literature. They help to guide the building project toward low CO2-eq solutions. Despite all these studies, the influence of building dimensions on embodied environmental impacts hasn’t been treated. The dimensions are the first parameters to be defined in the early design phase and can have significant influence in building’s impacts. In this study, we aim to introduce the relationship between the dimensions of the building and their influence in its embodied environmental impacts. Here we limit our study in the case of buildings with structure in cementitious materials, to derive some general principles for design. To do so first, we have assessed the environmental impacts of a single room by progressing its span. Secondly, the impacts have been assessed by multiplying the room in length, width and then in height, by transforming it into a building. Thirdly, we addressed the problem of defining optimal dimensions of a building and construction from an environmental point of view. Finally, the environmental impacts of two different structures, reinforced concrete beam-columns and shear-walls have been compared. According to the type of construction considered, earthquake forces and dimensions in plan and height the study identified the progression of the environmental impacts and the definition of optimal dimensions of the buildings. A good definition of dimensions can reduce significantly the embodied impacts of the buildings. However, further work is necessary for better identifying the optimal dimensions of building by adding to this work the impacts of operation phase