Variability of serum markers of erythropoiesis during 6 days of racing in highly trained cyclists

The athlete biological passport for the fight against doping is currently based on longitudinal monitoring for abnormal changes in cellular blood parameters. Serum parameters related to altered erythropoiesis could be considered for inclusion in the passport. The aim of this study was to quantify the changes in such parameters in athletes during a period of intense exercise. 12 highly trained cyclists tapered for 3 days before 6 days of simulated intense stage racing. Morning and afternoon blood samples were taken on most days and analysed for total protein, albumin, soluble transferrin receptor and ferritin concentrations. Plasma volume was determined via total haemoglobin mass measured by carbon-monoxide rebreathing. Percent changes in means from baseline and percent standard errors of measurement (analytical error plus intra-athlete variation) on each measurement occasion were estimated with mixed linear modelling of log-transformed measures. Means of all variables changed substantially in the days following the onset of racing, ranging from −13% (haemoglobin concentration) to +27% (ferritin). After the second day, errors of measurement were generally twice those at baseline. Plasma variables were affected by heavy exercise, either because of changes in plasma volume (total protein, albumin, haemoglobin), acute phase/inflammatory reactions (ferritin) or both (soluble transferrin receptor). These effects need to be taken into consideration when integrating a plasma parameter into the biological passport model for athletes

Learning Stereo from Single Images

Supervised deep networks are among the best methods for finding correspondences in stereo image pairs. Like all supervised approaches, these networks require ground truth data during training. However, collecting large quantities of accurate dense correspondence data is very challenging. We propose that it is unnecessary to have such a high reliance on ground truth depths or even corresponding stereo pairs. Inspired by recent progress in monocular depth estimation, we generate plausible disparity maps from single images. In turn, we use those flawed disparity maps in a carefully designed pipeline to generate stereo training pairs. Training in this manner makes it possible to convert any collection of single RGB images into stereo training data. This results in a significant reduction in human effort, with no need to collect real depths or to hand-design synthetic data. We can consequently train a stereo matching network from scratch on datasets like COCO, which were previously hard to exploit for stereo. Through extensive experiments we show that our approach outperforms stereo networks trained with standard synthetic datasets, when evaluated on KITTI, ETH3D, and Middlebury.Comment: Accepted as an oral presentation at ECCV 202

A novel 3D imaging system for strawberry phenotyping

Accurate and quantitative phenotypic data in plant breeding programmes is vital in breeding to assess the performance of genotypes and to make selections. Traditional strawberry phenotyping relies on the human eye to assess most external fruit quality attributes, which is time-consuming and subjective. 3D imaging is a promising high-throughput technique that allows multiple external fruit quality attributes to be measured simultaneously. A low cost multi-view stereo (MVS) imaging system was developed, which captured data from 360° around a target strawberry fruit. A 3D point cloud of the sample was derived and analysed with custom-developed software to estimate berry height, length, width, volume, calyx size, colour and achene number. Analysis of these traits in 100 fruits showed good concordance with manual assessment methods. This study demonstrates the feasibility of an MVS based 3D imaging system for the rapid and quantitative phenotyping of seven agronomically important external strawberry traits. With further improvement, this method could be applied in strawberry breeding programmes as a cost effective phenotyping technique

European Competition Policy in International Markets

International audienceChanges in the institutional, technological and economic environment raise new challenges to the European competition policy. In this context, it is timely for European authorities to appraise the external dimension of the European competition policy as well as its articulation with current internal reforms. Globalisation can increase the costs of monitoring and seriously reduce the ability of European authorities to tackle cross-border anti-competitive conducts. In addition, conflicts are exacerbated by industrial policy motivations. As it is unlikely that the sole application of the territoriality and extraterritoriality principles to competition rules could yield an optimal international competition system, globalisation calls for higher levels and types of cooperation. Given that bilateral cooperation and especially the implementation of comity principles could be of no value when laws or interests are sources of international conflicts, three main paths could be therefore encouraged: The continuous harmonization of rules through the joint action of OECD and ICN; the higher cooperation in the confidential information exchange; the establishment of global anti-trust institutions. Although WTO is legitimate in judging questions related market access and entry barriers, it is less equipped to assess international hard core cartels or M&A reviews. As a substitute for WTO, a multilevel system, like the EU system, could be promoted. For political and pragmatic reasons, it could be composed in a first step of a hard core of countries like the EU, Japan and the U.S. It could be associated with the creation of an international Court of Justice for competition. In addition to these external reforms, some internal reforms could be required. Competition authorities have to develop further competition advocacy to give a higher priority to competition issues in other EU policies and national regulation. A parallel and complementary reform could consist in making the European competition agency independent from State Members' interference