Ensuring Success for the EU Regulation on Gas Supply Security

We welcome the European Commission's proposal for a Regulation on the security of gas supply which, it is hoped, will be agreed at the Energy Council in May. The Regulation aims to help member states improve their gas security policies as ECFR argued the EU should do in a Policy Brief published before the gas crisis of January 20091. However, there remain some problems with the proposed Regulation, in particular the mechanism through which member states will be required to devise and implement gas security policies. This note aims to outline how these problems can be resolved.Environment

Evaluation of a direct PCR method and the Qiagen Investigator 24plex GO! Kit for typing blood, saliva and touch DNA on multiple substrates

In forensic DNA typing, omitting the DNA extraction procedure and adding the sample directly to the polymerase chain reaction (direct PCR) mixture has several advantages. Without extraction and purification, there is less of a risk of sample loss, sample mix up, or contamination. This study tested the feasibility of direct PCR using the Qiagen® Investigator® 24plex GO! Kit, a megaplex kit that amplifies 22 polymorphic STR markers and the Amelogenin sex determination alleles. Test samples included blood, saliva and skin cells on porous substrates, specifically denim, white cotton, polyester fabric, and paper tissue. Glass slides were used to represent non-porous surfaces. Body fluids like blood and saliva were collected using the following: Scotch™ double-sided tape, Zots™ dots, Sellotape® and two different FLOQSwabs™ from Copan© (microFLOQ® and a nylon FLOQSwab™). The results show that utilization of Sellotape® as a sample collection method was the most successful in generating a profile. This collection yields fast PCR-STR results and is non-destructive, so that the remaining sample can be re-tested if necessary. For touch samples, collection employed a double swab technique using the nylon FLOQSwab™ from Copan, a single Fitzco CEP swab, as well as a cutting method for the fabric substrates. The use of swabs had better success than cutting, probably due to the swab covering a larger surface area, thereby collecting a larger quantity of sample. Touch samples on glass were problematic. This sample type showed some PCR inhibition for samples collected with the FLOQSwab™ and had the lowest overall success rate

Field statistics in linear viscoelastic composites and polycrystals.

International audienceThe aim of this study is to estimate the effective response, as well as the statistics of the fields (average and fluctuations per phase) in linear viscoelastic heterogeneous materials. To this effect, a variational method based on a rate variational principle (RVP) has recently been introduced by the authors in which, at each time step, the stress or strain fields are approximated by those of a linear thermoelastic comparison composite. In the present study, a different derivation of this estimate is proposed, based on a simple approximation of the stress field along the time steps. The present study also explores the accuracy of the RVP model by comparing its predictions with reference results, either in closed form (for specific two-phase particulate composites) or obtained by full-field simulations (FFT method) for 2D polycrystals. A differential equation for the second moment of the stress field in the individual phases of two-phase particulate composites is given for the first time. These comparisons show that the RVP model delivers a very accurate estimate of the effective behavior as well as of the statistics of the local fields in two-phase particulate composites. For polycrystalline materials subjected to monotonic loading, the effective behavior and the statistics of the local fields are well predicted. The agreement is less accurate for cycling loadings

On the Draft Regulation on Gas Supply Security

We fully support the Commission’s goal of ensuring that all Member States devise and implement appropriate gas supply security policies. The draft Regulation contains many valuable provisions and certainly goes in the right direction. Though this note focuses on what we think is wrong with the text we have received, it is meant to be constructive advice to help the Commission achieve its goals. We have three main points and recommendations: There are two conflicting approaches in the draft Regulation: (1) a supply security rule that all member states have to comply with irrespective of their national situation (ensuring gas supplies to ‘protected customers’ for 60 days in N-1 situation); (2) ‘national preventive action plans’ based on an assessment of the risks faced by each member state. We think that the Commission should abandon the ‘N-1 for 60 days’ rule; it should mandate independently carried out and peer-reviewed national risk assessments, on the basis of which the Commission would negotiate legally binding national gas security action plans. The notion of ‘ensuring gas supplies to protected customers’ is flawed. The Commission should abandon it in favour of ‘meeting contracted final energy demand in case of gas supply disruption’. The formula for calculating the ‘N-1’ indicator is flawed. If the Commission wants to retain this tool (which we advise it not to do) the formula should be revised.

Critical Thinking, Decision Making and Mindfullness

Everyone in an organization have experienced the act of choosing. While some members may have to choose something very minuscule, other team members have to choose options that can be beneficial or detrimental towards the organization, depending on their position, rank or title. For example, education is an organization that constantly must choose options that will advance students’ achievement. From having to choose the type of students that are placed into certain classrooms, to deciding whether the organization will use certain resources for students to use to gain success, the possibilities are endless. This process of choosing is entitled decision-making, and it serves as one of the primary factors that drives any organization to its plateau or its breaking point. This module of the handbook emphasizes how decision-making is not an easy task but with the proper training and evaluations, one will learn how to effectively make better decisions that will elevate all aspects of the organization. This module will enlighten any members of an organization on an array of topics as it pertains to decision making. There are steps that needs to be extracted before, during and after the decision-making process and this handbook will guide you on the do’s and don’ts of decision making. If you’ve ever had a question or just needed clarity on decision making, then this chapter should respond to all of your needs. This should serve as your go-to guide in formulating and executing decisions. Whether you are part of a committee of the organization, or take on a leadership role, this module is aimed to attract all members of the organization to become a better and avid decision maker

L'habitat informel à Delhi. Panorama historique et implications politiques.

L'étude du cas de la capitale indienne permet de mesurer l'étendue du problème que pose la prévalence de l'habitat informel dans les villes d'Asie du sud. L'analyse historique de l'évolution de la structure urbaine de Delhi depuis l'indépendance illustre le rôle des politiques de développement urbain, de planification et de résorption de l'habitat informel dans le cheminement jusqu'à une structure actuelle où l'informalité joue encore un rôle prépondérant et nullement décroissant. Elle constitue un obstacle essentiel à l'accès aux services urbains de base non seulement des plus pauvres, mais aussi d'autres fractions de la population.habitat, habitat informel, structure urbaine, développement urbain

Exploring wear at the nanoscale with circular mode atomic force microscopy

The development of atomic force microscopy (AFM) has allowed wear mechanisms to be investigated at the nanometer scale by means of a single asperity contact generated by an AFM tip and an interacting surface. However, the low wear rate at the nanoscale and the thermal drift require fastidious quantitative measurements of the wear volume for determining wear laws. In this paper, we describe a new, effective, experimental methodology based on circular mode AFM, which generates high frequency, circular displacements of the contact. Under such conditions, the wear rate is significant and the drift of the piezoelectric actuator is limited. As a result, well-defined wear tracks are generated and an accurate computation of the wear volume is possible. Finally, we describe the advantages of this method and we report a relevant application example addressing a Cu/Al2O3 nanocomposite material used in industrial applications

Constraining Representations Yields Models That Know What They Don't Know

A well-known failure mode of neural networks is that they may confidently return erroneous predictions. Such unsafe behaviour is particularly frequent when the use case slightly differs from the training context, and/or in the presence of an adversary. This work presents a novel direction to address these issues in a broad, general manner: imposing class-aware constraints on a model's internal activation patterns. Specifically, we assign to each class a unique, fixed, randomly-generated binary vector - hereafter called class code - and train the model so that its cross-depths activation patterns predict the appropriate class code according to the input sample's class. The resulting predictors are dubbed Total Activation Classifiers (TAC), and TACs may either be trained from scratch, or used with negligible cost as a thin add-on on top of a frozen, pre-trained neural network. The distance between a TAC's activation pattern and the closest valid code acts as an additional confidence score, besides the default unTAC'ed prediction head's. In the add-on case, the original neural network's inference head is completely unaffected (so its accuracy remains the same) but we now have the option to use TAC's own confidence and prediction when determining which course of action to take in an hypothetical production workflow. In particular, we show that TAC strictly improves the value derived from models allowed to reject/defer. We provide further empirical evidence that TAC works well on multiple types of architectures and data modalities and that it is at least as good as state-of-the-art alternative confidence scores derived from existing models.Comment: CR version published at ICLR 202