Maggay\u27s Global kingdom, global people: Living faithfully in a multicultural world

Ce numéro de Trivium est consacré à un aspect de la réflexion de l’un des plus grands représentants de la pensée sociale en France, Emile Durkheim (1858-1917). Aussi bien en dehors qu’au dedans des cercles de spécialistes, on attribue communément à Durkheim la fondation de la sociologie comme discipline scientifique autonome ; on l’évoque comme l’un des « pères fondateurs », et aussi comme l’un des plus éminents représentants, de cette branche des sciences sociales. Qu’il existe un rapport ét..

Fractal Fluctuations in Human Walking: Comparison between Auditory and Visually Guided Stepping

In human locomotion, sensorimotor synchronization of gait consists of the coordination of stepping with rhythmic auditory cues (auditory cueing, AC). AC changes the long-range correlations among consecutive strides (fractal dynamics) into anti-correlations. Visual cueing (VC) is the alignment of step lengths with marks on the floor. The effects of VC on the fluctuation structure of walking have not been investigated. Therefore, the objective was to compare the effects of AC and VC on the fluctuation pattern of basic spatiotemporal gait parameters. Thirty-six healthy individuals walked 3 x 500 strides on an instrumented treadmill with augmented reality capabilities. The conditions were no cueing (NC), AC, and VC. AC included an isochronous metronome. In VC, projected stepping stones were synchronized with the treadmill speed. Detrended fluctuation analysis assessed the correlation structure. The coefficient of variation (CV) was also assessed. The results showed that AC and VC similarly induced a strong anti-correlated pattern in the gait parameters. The CVs were similar between the NC and AC conditions but substantially higher in the VC condition. AC and VC probably mobilize similar motor control pathways and can be used alternatively in gait rehabilitation. However, the increased gait variability induced by VC should be considered.Comment: Article accepted for publication in the Annals of Biomedical Engineering. Revised in February 2016: final author's versio

Overview of LHCb

An overview of LHCb experiment is given, focusing on detector, trigger and expected physics performances. LHCb is a second generation b physics experiment design to do precise measurements of CP violation in B meson system and to study b hadron rare decays.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figures, prepared for the Proceedings of the XXXXth Rencontres de Moriond conference, QCD and High Energy Hadronic Interactions, March 12-19 2005, La Thuile, Ital

Using Bayes formula to estimate rates of rare events in transition path sampling simulations

Transition path sampling is a method for estimating the rates of rare events in molecular systems based on the gradual transformation of a path distribution containing a small fraction of reactive trajectories into a biased distribution in which these rare trajectories have become frequent. Then, a multistate reweighting scheme is implemented to postprocess data collected from the staged simulations. Herein, we show how Bayes formula allows to directly construct a biased sample containing an enhanced fraction of reactive trajectories and to concomitantly estimate the transition rate from this sample. The approach can remediate the convergence issues encountered in free energy perturbation or umbrella sampling simulations when the transformed distribution insufficiently overlaps with the reference distribution.Comment: 11 pages, 8 figure

Boys Lag Behind: How Teachers' Gender Biases Affect Student Achievement

I use a combination of blind and non-blind test scores to show that middle school teachers favor girls when they grade. This favoritism, estimated in the form of individual teacher effects, has long-term consequences: as measured by their national evaluations three years later, male students make less progress than their female counterparts. Gender-biased grading accounts for 21 percent of boys falling behind girls in math during middle school. On the other hand, girls who benefit from gender bias in math are more likely to select a science track in high school