Miscellanea Herpetologica Gabonica V & VI

We report the first observations of the orange morph and new locality records for Atherissquamigera (Viperidae) in Gabon, and new Gabonese locality records, ecological data orunpublished museum material for Pelusios castaneus and P. chapini (Pelomedusidae),Kinixys erosa (Testudinidae), Trionyx triunguis (Trionychidae), Crocodylus niloticus,Mecistops cataphractus and Osteolaemus tetraspis (Crocodylidae), Agama agama and A.lebretoni (Agamidae), Chamaeleo dilepis, C. oweni and Rhampholeon spectrum(Chamaeleonidae), Hemidactylus echinus and H. mabouia (Gekkonidae), Gerrhosaurusnigrolineatus (Gerrhosauridae), Trachylepis maculilabris and T. p. polytropis (Scincidae),Varanus ornatus (Varanidae), Crotaphopeltis hotamboeia, Dipsadoboa underwoodi,Hapsidophrys smaragdinus, Philothamnus carinatus and P. heterodermus, Rhamnophisaethiopissa, Thrasops flavigularis (Colubridae), Pseudohaje goldii (Elapidae), Aparallactusmodestus, Atractaspis boulengeri, Buhoma depressiceps, Hormonotus modestus,Psammophis cf. phillipsii (Lamprophiidae), Python sebae (Pythonidae), Indotyphlopsbraminus (Typhlopidae), Bitis nasicornis and Causus lichtensteinii (Viperidae). We add onespecies each to Estuaire, Haut-Ogooué and Ogooué-Ivindo provinces’ reptile lists. Twosnake species are added to Ivindo National Park, bringing the total number of reptile speciesrecorded from the park to 64, i.e., half of the species currently recorded from Gabon. Wedocument predation cases of Pycnonotus barbatus (Aves: Pycnonotidae) on Hemidactylusmabouia, Philothamnus heterodermus on Arthroleptis variabilis (Amphibia: Arthroleptidae),Hormonotus modestus on Hemidactylus mabouia, Psammophis cf. phillipsii onGerrhosaurus nigrolineatus, Causus lichtensteinii on Sclerophrys sp. (Amphibia:Bufonidae) and feeding of Varanus ornatus on spaghetti

Astrophysics with the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna

Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) will be a transformative experiment for gravitational wave astronomy as it will offer unique opportunities to address many key astrophysical questions in a completely novel way. The synergy with ground-based and other space-based instruments in the electromagnetic domain, by enabling multi-messenger observations, will add further to the discovery potential of LISA. The next decade is crucial to prepare the astrophysical community for LISA's first observations. This review outlines the extensive landscape of astrophysical theory, numerical simulations, and astronomical observations that are instrumental for modeling and interpreting the upcoming LISA datastream. To this aim, the current knowledge in three main source classes for LISA is reviewed: ultra-compact stellar-mass binaries, massive black hole binaries, and extreme or intermediate mass ratio inspirals. The relevant astrophysical processes and the established modeling techniques are summarized. Likewise, open issues and gaps in our understanding of these sources are highlighted, along with an indication of how LISA could help make progress in the different areas. New research avenues that LISA itself, or its joint exploitation with studies in the electromagnetic domain, will enable, are also illustrated. Improvements in modeling and analysis approaches, such as the combination of numerical simulations and modern data science techniques, are discussed. This review is intended to be a starting point for using LISA as a new discovery tool for understanding our Universe

The graph structure in the web - analyzed on different aggregation levels

Knowledge about the general graph structure of theWorldWideWeb is important for understanding the social mechanisms that govern its growth, for designing ranking methods, for devising better crawling algorithms, and for creating accurate models of its structure. In this paper, we analyze a large web graph. The graph was extracted from a large publicly accessible web crawl that was gathered by the Common Crawl Foundation in 2012. The graph covers over 3:5 billion web pages and 128:7 billion hyperlinks. We analyze and compare, among other features, degree distributions, connectivity, average distances, and the structure of weakly/strongly connected components. We conduct our analysis on three different levels of aggregation: page, host, and pay-level domain (PLD) (one “dot level” above public suffixes). Our analysis shows that, as evidenced by previous research (Serrano et al., 2007), some of the features previously observed by Broder et al., 2000 are very dependent on artifacts of the crawling process, whereas other appear to be more structural. We confirm the existence of a giant strongly connected component; we however find, as observed by other researchers (Donato et al., 2005; Boldi et al., 2002; Baeza-Yates and Poblete, 2003), very different proportions of nodes that can reach or that can be reached from the giant component, suggesting that the “bow-tie structure” as described by Broder et al. is strongly dependent on the crawling process, and to the best of our current knowledge is not a structural property of the Web. More importantly, statistical testing and visual inspection of size-rank plots show that the distributions of indegree, outdegree and sizes of strongly connected components of the page and host graph are not power laws, contrarily to what was previously reported for much smaller crawls, although they might be heavy tailed. If we aggregate at pay-level domain, however, a power law emerges. We also provide for the first time accurate measurement of distance-based features, using recently introduced algorithms that scale to the size of our crawl (Boldi and Vigna, 2013)

Graph Structure in the Web - Revisited

Knowledge about the general graph structure of the World Wide Web is important for understanding the social mechanisms that govern its growth, for designing ranking methods, for devising better crawling algorithms, and for creating accurate models of its structure. In this paper, we describe and analyse a large, publicly accessible crawl of the web that was gathered by the Common Crawl Foundation in 2012 and that contains over 3.5 billion web pages and 128.7 billion links. This crawl makes it possible to observe the evolution of the underlying structure of the World Wide Web within the last 10 years: we analyse and compare, among other features, degree distributions, connectivity, average distances, and the structure of weakly/strongly connected components. Our analysis shows that, as evidenced by previous research, some of the features previously observed by Broder et al. are very dependent on artefacts of the crawling process, whereas other appear to be more structural. We confirm the existence of a giant strongly connected component; we however find, as observed by other researchers, very different proportions of nodes that can reach or that can be reached from the giant component, suggesting that the "bow-tie structure" is strongly dependent on the crawling process, and to the best of our current knowledge is not a structural property of the web. More importantly, statistical testing and visual inspection of size-rank plots show that the distributions of indegree, outdegree and sizes of strongly connected components are not power laws, contrarily to what was previously reported for much smaller crawls, although they might be heavy-tailed. We also provide for the first time accurate measurement of distance-based features, using recently introduced algorithms that scale to the size of our crawl

Miscellanea Herpetologica Gabonica XVII

We present new Gabonese locality records, ecological or morphological data for Pelusios castaneus (Pelomedusidae), Kinixys erosa (Testudinidae), Osteolaemus tetraspis (Crocodylidae), Agama agama (Agamidae), Monopeltis galeata (Amphisbaenidae), Feylinia currori, Trachylepis polytropis (Scincidae), Varanus ornatus (Varanidae), Philothamnus hughesi, Rhamnophis batesii, Toxicodryas adamantea and T. blandingii (Colubridae), Dendroaspis jamesoni jamesoni (Elapidae), Bothrophthalmus brunneus, Limaformosa guirali and L. savorgnani (Lamprophiidae), Atheris squamigera and Bitis nasicornis (Viperidae). One snake species each is newly recorded from Pongara National Park and Nyanga Province, and two each from Batéké Plateau National Park and Haut-Ogooué Province. We refer all records of Toxicodryas pulverulenta from Gabon to T. adamantea. We discuss the use of camera traps for monitoring reptiles in Gabon based on the results of extensive camera trap surveys. We provide geographic coordinates for selected localities mentioned in MHG III–VI

IF MEMS Filters for Mobile Communication

For the past few years, the mobile phone market has been facing fast growth. However, the first generations of mobile telecommunications were based on several different standards over the world, and even at the time major operators negotiate for the third generation licenses, it seems UMTS, CDMA2000 and TD-SCDMA cannot achieve one single standard. A great challenge would be to develop flexible, re-configurable mobile phone handsets that could switch from one standard to another. To do so, MEMS technology is expected as a promising solution to provide tiny, low-consumption tunable components. Moreover, enhancing MEMS technologies to be compatible with IC processing, a novel architecture can be used for a MEMS-based transceiver that could reach the ultimate goal of a fully-integrated single-chip system. Indeed, it has been recently demonstrated that every off-chip, bulky, and expensive passive component present in a typical superheterodyne transceiver front-end could be advantageously replaced by an RF-MEMS counterpart. For example, micro-mechanical resonators could avoid the use of ceramic, SAW, and quartz off-chip resonators to allow low-loss filtering, mixing and carrier generation. But that kind of micro-scale resonators requires high quality factor and temperature stability to achieve highly selective filtering and low phase-noise frequency references. So, to demonstrate this ability, resonators and filters with center frequency up to 300 MHz were designed, and for their fabrication, two processes have been undertaken: an epitaxial thick-film polysilicon industrial technology and a thin-film polysilicon-based technology made compatible with a CMOS-SOI technology

Concurrence des passés

Longtemps, la nation a été le lieu par excellence d'un usage intensif de l'histoire. Elle apparaît aujourd'hui comme une échelle parmi d'autres, souvent moins investie que le local ou le régional et fragilisée par l'émergence de niveaux supranationaux. Cette nouvelle configuration bouleverse l'économie des usages de l'histoire. Il en résulte notamment une concurrence des passés tandis qu'un nouveau type d'historicité se développe dans lequel « rendre présent » voire « sortir du temps » l'emportent sur l'esquisse d'un devenir commun et où le patrimonial prend le pas sur l'historique. La situation des historiens professionnels s'en trouve modifiée. Elle est affectée tant par la démultiplication des producteurs d'histoire que par la concurrence des associations à vocation mémorielle ou patrimoniale. Fondé sur une série d'études topiques, l'ouvrage analyse comment s'opère la confrontation des mémoires et des histoires qui singularise la scène contemporaine et les enjeux historiographiques et civiques qui en découlent.Les textes réunis dans le présent volume constituent une partie des communications présentées à l'occasion du colloque « Les usages politiques du passé dans la France contemporaine des années 1970 à nos jours ». Ce colloque se proposait de formaliser et de discuter la spécificité du rapport social contemporain au temps historique et, notamment, l'hypothèse d'un changement de régime d'historicité qui octroierait une place prépondérante au présent et un nouveau rôle au passé du fait de l'effacement des « horizons d'attente » forts qui structuraient la perception de l'histoire depuis la rupture moderne et, surtout, la seconde moitié du XVIIIe siècle. Il entendait s'interroger sur la valeur heuristique d'une étude des usages politiques de l'Histoire pour l'histoire politique française de ces trois dernières décennies, sur les usages du politique par l'historien et les usages de l'historien par le politique. Cette initiative était organisée par le Centre d'histoire sociale du XXe siècle (Paris I), UMR 8058, et l'équipe Pouvoirs, Savoirs, Sociétés (Paris VIII), EA 1571, en partenariat avec Telemme, UMR 6570 CNRS-Université de Provence, sous la responsabilité scientifique de Claire Andrieu, Christian-Marc Bosséno, Maryline Crivello, Nicolas Offenstadt, Patrick Garcia, Marie-Claire Lavabre et Danielle Tartakowsky. Elle s'est déroulée les 25 et 26 septembre 2003, salle Courbertin, à Paris. Les présidences de séance ont été assurées par Antoine Prost, Jean-Louis Robert, Pierre Rosanvallon et Henri Rousso. Antoine Prost et Jay Winter ont présenté les conclusions. Qu'ils en soient tous vivement remerciés. Les apports du colloque sont édités sous la forme de deux volumes distincts selon une logique à la fois thématique et spatiale. Le premier : Politiques du passé, publié sous la direction de Claire Andrieu, Marie-Claire Lavabre et Danielle Tartakowsky privilégie l'échelle et les acteurs nationaux*. Il est introduit par un texte de Marie-Claire Lavabre qui resitue les travaux du colloque dans le champ des réflexions et travaux qui lui préexistaient et vaut donc pour l'un et l'autre volume. Le second : Concurrence des passés, publié sous celle de Maryline Crivello, Patrick Garcia et Nicolas Offenstadt étudie l'émergence de nouvelles échelles parfois concurrentes du national et les questions posées à l'historiographie. Ce dernier volume contient, en outre, un compte-rendu analytique des débats qui se sont déroulés lors des séances. Ces deux volumes, édités par les Publications de l'Université de Provence ont bénéficié d'une aide à l'édition de la Mairie de Paris, du conseil scientifique de l'Université Paris VIII et de l'Équipe d'accueil 1571 (Paris VIII). Que chacun d'entre eux trouvent ici l'expression de notre gratitude