EXPLAINING INTERNATIONAL DIFFERENCES IN GENETICALLY MODIFIED FOOD LABELING REGULATIONS

Replaced with revised version of paper 07/13/04.Food Consumption/Nutrition/Food Safety,

Immersive clinical simulation in undergraduate health care interprofessional education : knowledge and perceptions

Background: Interprofessional simulation at the undergraduate level has been tested but is still very scarcely used due to curriculum and logistical issues. Over a 3-year period we have conducted extracurricular immersive simulation sessions for multiprofessional groups of final year healthcare students. Methods: Following ethical approval, a series of scenarios requiring various combinations of healthcare professionals' inputs were designed for students attending the simulation sessions on offer. Another team of faculty were involved in the creation of a questionnaire to test students on discipline specific knowledge and about their perception of multidisciplinary working. Students recruited to the study were semi-randomly selected to either a control or experimental group which determined whether they completed the knowledge questionnaire prior to or after simulation exposure. Results: Participants were 237 students from Adult/Children/Learning Disability/Mental Health Nursing, Paramedic, Radiography, Physiotherapy, and Pharmacy. Questionnaire data analysis showed that experimental group students reported a higher perceived level of knowledge of other professions and were more confident about working as part of a multidisciplinary team than control group students (P<0.05). Although positive for both groups, experimental group students expressed greater appreciation for pre-qualification interprofessional learning opportunities. The experimental group outscored the control group by 3.23 percentage points on the discipline knowledge questionnaire (p<0.05). Conclusions: The study shows that even limited interprofessional simulation exposure enabled students to acquire knowledge of other professions and develop a better appreciation of interprofessional learning. Discussions during the debriefings highlighted the fact that interprofessional training is important and valued by students, especially if it is well contextualized and facilitated through the exposure to realistic scenarios.Peer reviewedSubmitted Versio

Flexible Phase Dynamics for Bio-Plausible Contrastive Learning

Many learning algorithms used as normative models in neuroscience or as candidate approaches for learning on neuromorphic chips learn by contrasting one set of network states with another. These Contrastive Learning (CL) algorithms are traditionally implemented with rigid, temporally non-local, and periodic learning dynamics that could limit the range of physical systems capable of harnessing CL. In this study, we build on recent work exploring how CL might be implemented by biological or neurmorphic systems and show that this form of learning can be made temporally local, and can still function even if many of the dynamical requirements of standard training procedures are relaxed. Thanks to a set of general theorems corroborated by numerical experiments across several CL models, our results provide theoretical foundations for the study and development of CL methods for biological and neuromorphic neural networks.Comment: 23 pages, 4 figures. Paper accepted to ICML and update includes changes made based on reviewer feedbac

Shear-thickening in presence of adhesive contact forces: the singularity of cornstarch

A number of dense particle suspensions experience a dramatic increase in viscosity with the shear stress, up to a solid-like response. This shear-thickening process is understood as a frictionless/frictional transition between particles that repel each other. Here, we show that the emblematic shear-thickening fluid, cornstarch, does not fit into this framework. Using an original pressure sensor array, we map the normal stresses in the flow. We evidence in cornstarch a unique, stable stress wave which does not appear in a purely repulsive system (calcium carbonate). At high solid fraction and small gap, the stress signal shows a rolling aggregate, which presence is explained by adhesive contacts (associated with a hysteresis in the force profile) between two particles. Our findings offer a new perspective on the shear-thickening process of cornstarch, which is deeply connected to adhesion. As a result, experiments on cornstarch may not be generalized to other shear-thickening fluids.Comment: 8 pages, 5 figure

Dans la boule de cristal. La question irakienne dans le prisme du débat politique russe

A travers une analyse du débat qui s’est tenu a la Douma en mars 2003 à la suite du début de l’opération américaine en Irak, nous nous proposons d’analyser le processus de “nationalisation” de la question irakienne, c’est-à-dire la manière dont le discours politique russe fait sens au niveau interne de cette question internationale, notamment en la constituant comme exemplaire. L’analyse de cette “exemplarisation” permettra de mettre à jour les points d’ancrage de la question irakienne dans l’imaginaire politique russe. En effet, les constructions de sens autour de la question irakienne, renvoient non seulement à un positionnement politique, mais aussi à un imaginaire politique qui en est la matrice

A novel method for estimating myocardial strain: assessment of deformation tracking against reference magnetic resonance methods in healthy volunteers

We developed a novel method for tracking myocardial deformation using cardiac magnetic resonance (CMR) cine imaging. We hypothesised that circumferential strain using deformation-tracking has comparable diagnostic performance to a validated method (Displacement Encoding with Stimulated Echoes- DENSE) and potentially diagnostically superior to an established cine-strain method (feature-tracking). 81 healthy adults (44.6 ± 17.7 years old, 47% male), without any history of cardiovascular disease, underwent CMR at 1.5T including cine, DENSE, and late gadolinium enhancement in subjects &gt;45 years. Acquisitions were divided into 6 segments, and global and segmental peak circumferential strain were derived and analysed by age and sex. Peak circumferential strain differed between the 3 groups (DENSE: -19.4 ± 4.8 %; deformation-tracking: -16.8 ± 2.4 %; feature-tracking: -28.7 ± 4.8%) (ANOVA with Tukey post-hoc, F-value 279.93, p&lt;0.01). DENSE and deformation-tracking had better reproducibility than feature-tracking. Intra-class correlation co-efficient was &gt;0.90. Larger magnitudes of strain were detected in women using deformation-tracking and DENSE, but not feature-tracking. Compared with a reference method (DENSE), deformation-tracking using cine imaging has similar diagnostic performance for circumferential strain assessment in healthy individuals. Deformation-tracking could potentially obviate the need for bespoke strain sequences, reducing scanning time and is more reproducible than feature-tracking

Convective Heat Transfer in a Pneumatic Hybrid Engine

International audienceSeveral previous studies have proven that pneumatic hybridization of an internal combustion engine is a technically viable and cost-efficient alternative to electric hybridization. Because the heat transfer process remains a first order factor while the engine operates in a motored or pneumatic mode without combustion, an accurate instantaneous heat transfer model is required in order to predict the in-cylinder pressure. This study shows that the original Woschni model is not suitable for describing the shape of the measured instantaneous heat flux versus crank angle while the engine operates in a motored pneumatic mode, because of the extinction of tumble motion near Top Dead Center (TDC). A modified form of the Woschni model is therefore proposed here that better describes the instantaneous heat flux during compression and expansion strokes, applicable to pneumatic and motored with fuel cut-off modes. First, the new constant parameter model is identified from experimental measurements performed in various motored mode conditions. Next, the pneumatic supercharged mode without combustion (ignition not performed) is investigated with the new model using the same identification values as for the motored mode. This study shows that the modified model remains fully applicable to the supercharged mode, despite of a certainly modified in-cylinder aerodynamic structure created by the opening of the charging valve under a high pressure rati

Optimal Predictive Eco-Driving Cycles for Conventional, Electric, and Hybrid Electric Cars

International audienceIn this paper, the computation of eco-driving cycles for electric, conventional and hybrid vehicles using receding horizon and optimal control is studied. The problem is formulated as consecutive-optimization problems aiming at minimizing the vehicle energy consumption under traffic and speed constraints. The impact of the look-ahead distance and the optimization frequency on the optimal speed computation is studied to find a trade-off between the optimality and the computation time of the algorithm. For the three architectures considered, simulation results show that in urban driving conditions, a look-ahead distance of 300m to 500m leads to a sub-optimality less than 1% in the energy consumption compared to the global solution. For highway driving conditions, a look-ahead distance of 1km to 1.5km leads to a sub-optimality less than 2% compared to the global solution