Corporate Social Responsibility and the Firm as a Person

Company responsibility has been defined under several concepts: Corporate Social Responsibility; Corporate Social Responsiveness, Corporate Social Performance etc. Nevertheless, a number of fundamental questions concerning responsibility remain unanswered. This article examines several of these questions. This responsibility is linked to the notion of a person. It is therefore necessary to define the company as a person. In fact, responsibility corresponds, before everything else, to a structure of intentions. It is hence necessary to define this structure

Collapse/subsidence : role and influence of overburden in Lorraine iron mines case

International audienceThis paper presents several large-scale numerical modellings of valley and tray situations with the presence or not of vertical fractures. Through these modellings, we firstly attempt to evaluate an influence zone, in terms of stress variations induced by the creation of the valley. Next we study more particularly the behaviour of a stiff overburden, according to situations, with the aim to estimate if a valley and/or the presence of subvertical fractures influence the overburden massivity.Ce papier présente plusieurs modélisations à grande échelle d'une situation de vallée et de plateau en présence ou non d'une fracturation verticale. A travers ces modélisations, nous tentons d'évaluer une zone d'influence, en termes de variations de contraintes induites par la création de la vallée. Puis nous étudions plus particulièrement le comportement d'une couverture raide, en fonction des situations, dans l'objectif d'estimer si une vallée et/ou une fracturation subverticale influencent la massivité du recouvremen

MPEG Reconfigurable Video Coding: From specification to a reconfigurable implementation

International audienceThis paper demonstrates that it is possible to produce automatic, reconfigurable, and portable implementations of multimedia decoders onto platforms with the help of the MPEG Reconfigurable Video Coding (RVC) standard. MPEG RVC is a new formalism standardized by the MPEGconsortium used to specify multimedia decoders. It produces visual representations of decoder reference software, with the help of graphs that connect several coding tools from MPEG standards. The approach developed in this paper draws on Dataflow Process Networks to produce a Minimal and Canonical Representation (MCR) of \MPEG\ \RVC\ specifications. The \MCR\ makes it possible to form automatic and reconfigurable implementations of decoders which can match any actual platforms. The contribution is demonstrated on one case study where a generic decoder needs to process a multimedia content with the help of the \RVC\ specification of the decoder required to process it. The overall approach is tested on two decoders from MPEG, namely MPEG-4 part 2 Simple Profile and MPEG-4 part 10 Constrained Baseline Profile. The results validate the following benefits on the \MCR\ of decoders: compact representation, low overhead induced by its compilation, reconfiguration and multi-core abilities

Characterization of oxidative stress in Leishmaniasis-infected or LPS-stimulated macrophages using electrochemical impedance spectroscopy

The physiological changes caused by external stimuli can be employed as parameters to study pathogen infection in cells and the effect of drugs. Among analytical methods, impedance is potentially useful to give insight into cellular behavior by studying morphological changes, alterations in the physiological state, production of charged or redox species without interfering with in vitro cellular metabolism and labeling. The present work describes the use of electrochemical impedances spectroscopy to simply monitor by modeling impedance plots (Nyquist diagram) in appropriate equivalent circuit, the changes affecting murine macrophage cell line (RAW 264.7) in response to parasite infection by Leishmania amazonensis or to lipopolysaccharide (LPS) treatment. These results demonstrate the ability of electrochemical impedance spectroscopy to discriminate between two opposite cell responses associated to two different stimuli, one caused by the internalization of a parasite, and the other by activation by a bacterium component. Indeed, the study has allowed the characterization, from an electrical point of view, of the extra-cellular NO radical produced endogenously and in great quantities by the inducible form of NO-synthase in the case of LPS-stimulatedmacrophages. This production was not observed in the case of Leishmania-infectedmacrophages for which to survive and multiply, the parasite itself possesses mechanisms which may interfere with NO production. In this latest case, only the intracellular production of ROS was observed. To confirm these interpretations confocal microscopy analysis using the ROS (reactive oxygen species) fluorescent probe 2′,7′-dichlorodihydrofluorescein diacetate and electron paramagnetic resonance experiments using Fe(DETC)2 as NO radical spin trap were carried out

Un nouveau dispositif d'accompagnement pédagogique individualisé pour les formateurs TIC en Région wallonne de Belgique

peer reviewedLe LabSET de l’Université de Liège, coordinateur du Plan Mobilisateur TIC en Région Wallonne, propose aux formateurs TIC un accompagnement pédagogique ayant pour objectif de les sensibiliser à une pratique réflexive au bénéfice de la qualité des formations. Nous présentons ici les référents théoriques qui ont permis d’élaborer et de réguler l’accompagnement ; nous décrivons également le dispositif opérationnel, les outils ainsi que les critères et indicateurs qui soutiendront l’évaluation du niveau de réflexivité atteint par les formateurs.The Telematic Teaching and Learning Laboratory (LabSET) of the University of Liège coordinates the Plan to Mobilize Information and Communication Technologies (PMICT) in the Walloon Region of Belgium. In its capacity as coordinator, the LabSET initiated individualized mentoring to help the instructors in charge of the PMICT training sessions develop self-reflection for the benefit of quality training practice. In this article, we present the theoretical foundations of the mentoring process. We also describe the process, the appended resources and the indicators that should enable us to evaluate the level of reflexivity reached by the instructors at the end of it.PMTI

De l'usage des bases de données INA par le chercheur

Les bases de données ouvrent à deux types de documentation, primaires et secondaires. Ce second type est le plus souvent utilisé par les chercheurs pour leurs recherches bibliographiques, pour sortir des articles ou des ouvrages, pour faire un état des travaux ou confronter leurs recherches à celles d'autrui. Les bases de données de l'INA relèvent elles du second type, elles leur donnent accès, non à des travaux, mais à des informations brutes, à des fiches sur des émissions de radio et de télévision. Elles sont l'équivalent d'un répertoire ou d'un catalogue d'archives spécialisées, mais, dans l'ensemble, beaucoup plus riche d'informations qu'un simple catalogue

Electrochemical impedance spectroscopy to study physiological changes affecting the red blood cell after invasion by malaria parasites

The malaria parasite, Plasmodium falciparum, invades human erythrocytes and induces dramatic changes in the host cell. The idea of this work was to use RBC modified electrode to perform electrochemical impedance spectroscopy (EIS) with the aim of monitoring physiological changes affecting the erythrocyte after invasion by the malaria parasite. Impedance cell-based devices are potentially useful to give insight into cellular behavior and to detect morphological changes. The modelling of impedance plots (Nyquist diagram) in equivalent circuit taking into account the presence of the cellular layer, allowed us pointing out specific events associated with the development of the parasite such as (i) strong changes in the host cell cytoplasm illustrated by changes in the film capacity, (ii) perturbation of the ionic composition of the host cell illustrated by changes in the film resistance, (iii) releasing of reducer (lactic acid or heme) and an enhanced oxygen consumption characterized by changes in the charge transfer resistance and in the Warburg coefficient characteristic of the redox species diffusion. These results show that the RBC-based device may help to analyze strategic events in the malaria parasite development constituting a new tool in antimalarial research

Regards croisés de chercheurs praticiens sur le dispositif de formation hybride FORSE : comment les enseignants transforment-ils leur modèle pédagogique en intervenant en ligne?

International audienceIn this contribution we draw on the confrontation of viewpoints of three university teachers involved in the LMS FORSE (Université Lyon 2). Their experiences as managers, designers, teachers or tutors question especially why and how research can inspire and guide professional practice. By showing how their educational model and practices are based on the instrumentation of a tool/training, they translate the whole dynamic that fosters the development of their lesson. They point out a number of invariants essential for the design and facilitation of their educational scenarios as well as questions over their twofold experiences of researchers and teachers.Cet article s'appuie sur la confrontation des points de vue de trois enseignants universitaires intervenant dans le dispositif FORSE (Université Lyon 2). Le témoignage de leurs expériences, en tant que responsables, concepteurs, enseignants ou tuteurs, soulève tout spécialement la question de savoir en quoi et comment les travaux de recherche peuvent inspirer et guider les pratiques professionnelles. En montrant comment leurs pratiques reposent sur l'instrumentation et l'appropriation d'un outil/d'une formation, ces enseignants-chercheurs traduisent toute la dynamique qui favorise l'évolution de leurs scénarios pédagogiques. Ils pointent un certain nombre d'invariants qui ponctuent la conception et l'animation pédagogique de leurs scénarios ainsi que les questions posées au fil de leurs expériences croisées de chercheurs et d'enseignants

LLVM-based and scalable MPEG-RVC decoder

WOSInternational audienceMPEG reconfigurable video coding (RVC) is a new platform-independent specification methodology chosen by the MPEG community for describing coding standards. This methodology aims at producing abstract decoder models (ADMs) of MPEG decoders as programs described in a dataflow language namely "RVC-CAL Actor Language" (RVC-CAL). RVC-CAL naturally expresses potential parallelism between tasks of an application, which makes an ADM description suitable for implementation to a wide variety of platforms, from uniprocessor systems to FPGAs. MPEG RVC eases the development process of decoders by building decoders at a library-component level instead of using monolithic algorithms, and by providing a library of coding tools standardized in MPEG. This paper presents new mechanisms based on the low level virtual machine that allow the conception of a decoder able to dynamically instantiate several RVC decoder descriptions. This decoder, unlike static decoders generated by RVC tools, keeps de facto the features of an RVC description namely portability, scalability and reconfigurability