Access to multiliteracies: A critical ethnography

This paper reports the key findings of a critical ethnography, which documented the enactment of the multiliteracies pedagogy in an Australian elementary school classroom. The multiliteracies pedagogy of the New London Group is a response to the emergence of multimodal literacies in contemporary contexts of increased cultural and linguistic diversity. Giddens' structuration theory was applied to the analysis of systems relations. The key finding was that students, who were culturally and linguistically diverse, had differential access to multiliteracies. Existing degrees of access were reproduced among the student cohort, based on the learners' relation to the dominant culture. Specifically, students from Anglo-Australian, middle-class backgrounds had greater access to transformed designing than those who were culturally or socio-economically marginalized. These experiences were influenced by the agency of individuals who were both enabled and constrained by structures of power within the school and the wider educational and social systems

From centralized to decentralized approach for optimal Controller of Discrete Manufacturing Systems

International audienceThis paper deals with a comparison of centralized and decentralized approaches to obtain an optimal controller for discrete manufacturing systems. It is based on a modular modeling of the plant to avoid combinatory explosion found in centralized structure and a synthesis algorithm. From the local Plant Elements, local constraints are defined to build local supervisors. Local constraints restrict the system behavior within a desired specification. Global constraints are added to establish high level supervisors. The resulting automata are translated in a normalized language for implementation in a Programmable Logic Controller

Distributed modeling approach of discrete manufacturing systems by Parts of Plant

International audienceThe paper presents an original approach to model a discrete manufacturing system by Parts of Plant (PoP). This approach takes into account technical and technological specifications of each plant elements. The aim of this works is to realize a reliable simulation of discrete manufacturing systems in design stage before production stage. Models are distributed and established from the functional chain of a process. They take into account the distribution of information through each PoP with its sensors, pre-actuators and actuators. A PoP library is proposed with their corresponding model. An application example is used to illustrate the approach

Unconditional decentralized structure for the fault diagnosis of discrete event systems

International audienceThis paper proposes an unconditional decentralized structure to realize the fault diagnosis of Discrete Event Systems (DES), specially manufacturing systems with discrete sensors and actuators. This structure is composed on the use of a set of local diagnosers, each one of them is responsible of a specific part of the plant. These local diagnosers are based on a modular modelling of the plant in order to reduce the state explosion. Each local diagnoser uses event-based, state based and timed models to take a decision about fault's occurrences. These models are obtained using the information provided by the plant, the controller and the actuators reactivity. All local diagnosis decisions are then merged by a Boolean operator in order to obtain one global diagnosis decision. Finally, the diagnosers are polynomial-time in the cardinality of the state space of the system. This approach is illustrated using an example of manufacturing system

Discrete Event Model-Based Approach for Fault Detection and Isolation of Manufacturing Systems

International audienceThis paper presents a discrete event model-based approach for Fault Detection and Isolation of manufacturing systems. This approach considers a system as a set of independent plant elements. Each plant element is composed of a set of interrelated Parts of Plant (PoPs) modeled by a Moore automaton. Each PoP model is only aware of its local behavior. The degraded and faulty behaviors are added to each PoP model in order to obtain extended PoP ones. An extrapolation of Gaussian learning is realized to obtain acceptable temporal intervals between the time occurrences of correlated events. Finally based on the PoP extended models and the links between them, a fault candidates' tree is established for each plant element. This candidates' tree corresponds to a local on-line fault event occurrence observer, called diagnoser. Thus, the diagnosis decision is distributed on each plant element. An application example is used to illustrate the approach

Time-Based Estimator for Control Reconfiguration of Discrete Event Systems (DES)

International audienceIn this paper, we propose a Time-based estimator method to reconfigure manufacturing systems in case of sensor faults detection. The main idea is to replace the information lost by a timed one. In non-faulty behavior, each sensor is defined through two events: activation and deactivation. Our contribution is to define an estimator model of each event based on different clocks to maintain the same desired behavior of the system in a faulty mode (reconfigured)

Attention Training Toward and Away from Threat in Social Phobia: Effects on Subjective, Behavioral, and Physiological Measures of Anxiety

Social Phobics exhibit an attentional bias for threat in probe detection and probe discrimination paradigms. Attention training programs, whereby probes always replace nonthreat cues, reduce attentional bias for threat and self-reported anxiety. However, it remains unclear whether the therapeutic benefits of attention training result from people learning to disengage attention from threat cues or acquiring greater control over their attention by learning to deploy it flexibly. Moreover, researchers have seldom taken behavioral measures, and have never taken physiological measures of fear reduction. Investigating these questions, we found that training to disengage attention from threat is more effective than training to deploy it flexibly in social phobia. Indeed, the former condition reduced self-report, behavioral and physiological measures of anxiety.Psycholog

Probing smoking craving with a multidimensional approach: validation of the 12-item French-language version of the Questionnaire on Smoking Urges.

BACKGROUND: The current study examined the psychometric properties of the 12-item French-language version of the Questionnaire on Smoking Urges (QSU-12), a widely used multidimensional measure of cigarette craving. METHODS: Daily smokers (n=230) completed the QSU-12, the Fagerstrom Test for Nicotine Dependence, and items about addiction-related symptoms. Additional participants (n=40) completed the QSU-12 and the Fagerstrom Test for Nicotine Dependence and were assessed for expired carbon monoxide. RESULTS: Consistent with studies validating the English version of the scale, confirmatory factor analyses supported a two-factor solution in the French version of the scale. Good scale and subscales reliabilities were observed, and convergent validity was evidenced through relationships with dependence and addiction-related symptoms. CONCLUSION: The French-language version of the QSU-12 is an adequate instrument to assess the multidimensional construct of craving in both research and clinical practice

Correlates of social exclusion in social anxiety Disorder: An fMRI study

Cognitive models posit that social anxiety disorder (SAD) is maintained by biased informationprocessing vis-à-vis threat of social exclusion. However, uncertainty still abounds regarding the very nature of this sensitivity to social exclusion in SAD. Especially, brain alterations related to social exclusion have not been explored in SAD. Our primary purpose was thus to determine both the selfreport and neural correlates of social exclusion in this population. 23 patients with SAD and 23 matched nonanxious controls played a virtual game (“Cyberball”) during fMRI recording. Participants were frst included by other players, then excluded, and fnally re-included. At the behavioral level, patients with SAD exhibited signifcantly higher levels of social exclusion feelings than nonanxious controls. At the brain level, patients with SAD exhibited signifcantly higher activation within the left inferior frontal gyrus relative to nonanxious controls during the re-inclusion phase. Moreover, self-report of social exclusion correlates with the activity of this cluster among individuals qualifying for SAD diagnosis. Our pattern of fndings lends strong support to the notion that SAD may be better portrayed by a poor ability to recover following social exclusion than during social exclusion per se. These fndings value social neuroscience as an innovative procedure to gain new insight into the underlying mechanisms of SAD

Recollecting positive and negative autobiographical memories disrupts working memory.

The present article reports two experiments examining the impact of recollecting emotionally valenced autobiographical memories on subsequent working memory (WM) task performance. Experiment 1 found that negatively valenced recollection significantly disrupted performance on a supra-span spatial WM task. Experiment 2 replicated and extended these findings to a verbal WM task (digit recall), and found that both negative and positive autobiographical recollections had a detrimental effect on verbal WM. In addition, we observed that these disruptive effects were more apparent on early trials, immediately following autobiographical recollection. Overall, these findings show that both positive and negative affect can disrupt WM when the mood-eliciting context is based on autobiographical memories. Furthermore, these results indicate that the emotional disruption of WM can take place across different modalities of WM (verbal and visuo-spatial