With the growing use of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor medications (SSRIs) for the treatment of depression during the perinatal period, questions have been raised about the longterm impact of these medications on development. We aimed to investigate how developmental SSRI exposure may alter affect-related behaviors and associated molecular processes in offspring using a rodent model of maternal stress and depression. For this purpose, prenatally stressed or non-stressed male offspring were exposed to fluoxetine (5 mg/kg/day) or vehicle, via lactation, until weaning. Primary results show that postnatal fluoxetine exposure differentially altered anxiety-like behavior by increasing anxiety in non-stressed offspring and decreasing anxiety in prenatally stressed offspring. In the hippocampus, developmental fluoxetine exposure decreased BDNF IV and TrkB mRNA expression. Prenatal stress alone also decreased escape behaviors and decreased hippocampal BDNF IV mRNA expression. These data provide important evidence for the long-term programming effects of early-life exposure to SSRIs on brain and behavior.
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Home » Posts filed under Sciences de l'ingénieur
samedi 9 juillet 2016
[hal-01305478] Prenatal stress and early-life exposure to fluoxetine have enduring effects on anxiety and hippocampal BDNF gene expression in adult male offspring
[hal-01341197] Hole propagation in the Kitaev-Heisenberg model: From quasiparticles in quantum Néel states to non-Fermi liquid in the Kitaev phase
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[hal-01319873] Zwitterionic [4]helicene: a water-soluble and reversible pH-triggered ECD/CPL chiroptical switch in the UV and red spectral regions
The chiroptical switching properties of a readily accessible and water-soluble diaza [4]helicene are disclosed. This zwitterionic dye displays pH-dependent absorption and emission properties and this enables a reversible turn on/off of electronic circular dichroism at 300 nm and of circularly polarized luminescence in the red region upon protonation/deprotonation
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[hal-01343314] Bounded combinatorics and uniform models for hyperbolic 3-manifolds
Bounded-type 3-manifolds arise as combinatorially bounded gluings of irreducible 3-manifolds chosen from a finite list. We prove effective hyperbolization and effective rigidity for a broad class of 3-manifolds of bounded type and large gluing heights. Specifically, we show the existence and uniqueness of hyperbolic metrics on 3-manifolds of bounded type and large heights, and prove existence of a bilipschitz diffeomorphism to a combinatorial model described explicitly in terms of the list of irreducible manifolds, the topology of the identification, and the combinatorics of the gluing maps.
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[hal-01059991] On a Fuzzy Algebra for Querying Graph Databases
This paper proposes a notion of fuzzy graph database and describes a fuzzy query algebra that makes it possible to handle such database, which may be fuzzy or not, in a flexible way. The algebra, based on fuzzy set theory and the concept of a fuzzy graph, is composed of a set of operators that can be used to express preference queries on fuzzy graph databases. The preferences concern i) the content of the vertices of the graph and ii) the structure of the graph. In a similar way as relational algebra constitutes the basis of SQL, the fuzzy algebra proposed here underlies a user-oriented query language and an associated tool implementing this language that are also presented in the paper.
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[hal-01093013] Evaluation and Improvement of a Transition Business Process: A Case Study guided by a Semantic Quality-based Approach
A transition in an outsourced IT project is devoted to the transfer of the project from an outgoing project team to an incoming one. It is a complex, risky and challenging building block of importance, identified as being a critical factor in the success of an outsourced project. Ensuring the good quality of a transition is then fundamental. We present here our experience on quality evaluation and improvement of a real transition in a public institution.
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[hal-01140195] Expression and Efficient Processing of Fuzzy Queries in a Graph Database Context
Graph databases have aroused a large interest in the last years thanks to their large scope of potential applications (e.g. social networks, biomedical networks, data stemming from the web). In a similar way as what has already been proposed in relational databases, defining a language allowing a flexible querying of graph databases may greatly improve usability of data. This paper focuses on the notion of fuzzy graph database and describes a fuzzy query language that makes it possible to handle such database, which may be fuzzy or not, in a flexible way. This language, called FUDGE, can be used to express preference queries on fuzzy graph databases. The preferences concern i) the content of the vertices of the graph and ii) the structure of the graph. The FUDGE language is implemented in a system, called SUGAR, that we present in this article. We also discuss implementation issues of the FUDGE language in SUGAR.
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[hal-01341574] Optical properties of Ag- and AgI-doped Ge-Ga-Te far-infrared chalcogenide glasses
Te-based glasses are ideal material for life detection and infrared-sensing applications because of their excellent far-infrared properties. In this study, the influence of Ag- and AgI- doped Te-based glasses were discussed. Thermal and optical properties of the prepared glasses were evaluated using X-ray diffraction, differential scanning calorimetry, and Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy. Results show that these glass samples have good amorphous state and thermal stability. However, Ge-Ga-Te-Ag and Ge-Ga-Te-AgI glass systems exhibit completely different in optical properties. With an increase of Ag content, the absorption cut-off edge of Ge-Ga-Te-Ag glass system has a red shift. On the contrary, a blue shift appears in Ge-Ga-Te-AgI glass system with an increase of AgI content. Moreover, the transmittance of Ge-Ga-Te-Ag glass system deteriorates while that of Ge-Ga-Te-AgI glass system ameliorates. All glass samples have wide infrared transmission windows and the far-infrared cut-off wavelengths of these glasses are beyond 25 μm. The main absorption peaks of these glasses are eliminated through a purifying method. © 2016 Elsevier B.V.
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[hal-01313738] Selecting cost effective and policy-relevant biological indicators for European monitoring of soil biodiversity and ecosystem function
Soils provide many ecosystem services that are ultimately dependent on the local diversity and belowground abundance of organisms. Soil biodiversity is affected negatively by many threats and there is a perceived policy requirement for the effective biological monitoring of soils at the European level. The aim of this study was to evaluate and recommend policy relevant, cost-effective soil biological indicators for biodiversity and ecosystem function across Europe. A total of 18 potential indicators were selected using a logical-sieve based approach. This paper considers the use of indicators from the ‘top down’ (i.e. concerned with the process of indicator selection), rather than from the ‘bottom up’ detail of how individual indicators perform at specific sites and with specific treatments. The indicators assessed a range of microbial, faunal and functional attributes, newer nucleic acids based techniques, morphological approaches and process based measurements. They were tested at 6 European experimental sites already in operation and chosen according to land-use, climatic zone and differences in land management intensity. These were 4 arable sites, one each in Atlantic, Continental, Mediterranean and Pannonian climate zones, and 2 grassland sites, one each in Atlantic and Continental zones. At each site we sampled three replicated plots of contrasting management intensity and, while the treatments varied from site to site, their disturbance effects were quantified in terms of land use intensity. The field sampling and laboratory analysis were standardised through a combination of ISO protocols, or standard operating procedures if the former were not available. Sites were sampled twice, in autumn 2012 and spring or autumn 2013, with relative costs of the different indicators being determined each time. A breakdown of the cost effectiveness of the indicators showed the expected trade-off between effort required in the field and effort required in the laboratory. All the indicators were able to differentiate between the sites but, as no single indicator was sensitive to all the differences in land use intensity, we suggest that an indicator programme should be based upon a suite of different indicators. For monitoring under the European climatic zones and land uses of this study, indicators for ecosystem functions related to the services of water regulation, C-sequestration and nutrient provision would include a minimum suite of: earthworms; functional genes; and bait lamina. For effective monitoring of biodiversity all taxonomic groups would need to be addressed
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[hal-01342351] Traceability analyses between features and assets in software product lines
In a Software Product Line (SPL), the central notion of implementability provides the requisite connection between specifications and their implementations, leading to the definition of products. While it appears to be a simple extension of the traceability relation between components and features, it involves several subtle issues that were overlooked in the existing literature. In this paper, we have introduced a precise and formal definition of implementability over a fairly expressive traceability relation. The consequent definition of products in the given SPL naturally entails a set of useful analysis problems that are either refinements of known problems or are completely novel. We also propose a new approach to solve these analysis problems by encoding them as Quantified Boolean Formulae (QBF) and solving them through Quantified Satisfiability (QSAT) solvers. QBF can represent more complex analysis operations, which cannot be represented by using propositional formulae. The methodology scales much better than the SAT-based solutions hinted in the literature and were demonstrated through a tool called SPLAnE (SPL Analysis Engine) on a large set of SPL models.
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[hal-01342826] Survey of radio resource management issues and proposals for energy-efficient cellular networks that will cover billions of machines
A huge increase of machines attached to wireless networks is expected in the next few years. A large part of these machines will be covered by some wireless wide area networks. The arrival of cellular M2M (machine-to-machine) communication poses new requirements due to its specific characteristics. For most of the cellular M2M applications, the essential requirement is low energy consumption level or high energy efficiency. This survey provides a global view of the network technologies previewed for cellular M2M. In this survey, we study the existing classifications of M2M applications according to different criteria in the literature. The comparison of traffic characteristics between M2M and human-to-human is also proposed. Quality of service (QoS) requirements for typical M2M applications are resumed. The advance of reference M2M network architectures proposed by the Standard Development Organization (SDO) is investigated. We identify two possible effort directions to improve the energy efficiency for cellular M2M. The first one is to evolve the current existing 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) Consortium cellular networks to effectively support MTC (Machine Type Communication). The other direction is to design M2M-dedicated networks from scratch, which are often called low-power wide-area (LPWA) networks. We review, compare and categorize the proposals related to energy issues of cellular M2M mainly over the period 2011-2015 for the first direction. We introduce the development of LPWA networks for the other research directions. We highlight that the cooperative relaying, the design of energy-efficient signaling and operation, the new radio resource allocation schemes, and the energy-efficient random access procedure are the main points of improvement. It is important to jointly use the aforementioned approaches, for example, joint design of random access control and radio resource allocation, to seek for a trade-off between energy efficiency and other system performances.
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[hal-01343348] D.1.3 – Protocols for emergent localities
This report presents two contributions that illustrate the potential of emerging-locality protocols in large-scale decentralized systems, in two areas of decentralized social computing: recommendation, and eventual consistency of mutable data structures. The first contribution consists of a framework supporting the development of dynamically adaptive decen-tralised recommendation systems. Decentralised recommenders have been proposed to deliver privacy-preserving, personalised and highly scalable on-line recommendations. Current implementations tend, however, to rely on a hard-wired similarity metric that cannot adapt. This constitutes a strong limitation in the face of evolving needs. Our framework address this through a decentralised form of adaptation, in which individual nodes can independently select, and update their own recommendation algorithm, while still collectively contributing to the overall system's mission. Our second contribution addresses the growing demand for differentiated consistency requirements in large-scale applications. A large number of today's applications rely on Eventual Consistency, a consistency model that emphasizes liveness over safety. Designers generally adopt this consistency model uniformly throughout a distributed system due to its ability to scale as the number of users or devices grows larger. But this clashes with the need for differentiated consistency requirements. In this contribution, we address this need by introducing UPS, a novel consistency mechanism that offers differentiated eventual consistency and delivery speed by working in pair with a two-phase epidemic broadcast protocol. We propose a closed-form analysis of our approach's delivery speed, and we evaluate our complete protocol experimentally on a simulated network of one million nodes. To measure the consistency trade-off, we formally define a novel and scalable consistency metric operating at runtime.
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[hal-01316014] A Methodology for Quality Assessment in Collaborative Score Libraries
We examine quality issues raised by the development of XML-based Digital Score Libraries. Based on the authors' practical experience, the paper exposes the quality shortcomings inherent to the complexity of music encoding, and the lack of support from state-of-the-art formats. We also identify the various facets of the ``quality'' concept with respect to usages and motivations. We finally propose a general methodology to introduce quality management as a first-level concern in the management of score collections, and an initial taxonomy of quality problems based on real use cases.
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[hal-01343121] Impact de la recherche d'amorces mutées sur les résultats d'analyses métagénomiques
En métagénomique ciblée, une problématique récurrente concerne la quantité de lectures réellement exploitables en sortie d'un séquenceur à haut débit. L'une des étapes influençant cette quantité est la détection dans chaque séquence des amorces utilisées pour amplifier le gène ciblé. Usuellement les séquences n’ayant pas les amorces parfaites sont rejetées. Notre étude interroge l’impact d’accepter également les séquences avec amorces mutées. Il s’agit de répondre aux questions suivantes : Accepter les séquences avec amorces mutées permet-il d'augmenter le nombre de séquences exploitables par échantillon ? Cette augmentation impacte-t-elle les résultats obtenus au terme de l'analyse métagénomique , c’est-à-dire permet-elle d’augmenter le nombre d’OTU (Operationnal taxonomic unit), et donc potentiellement d’espèces, détectés ? L’étude a été menée sur 9 échantillons, dans le cadre d’une étude de la biodiversité des sols tropicaux chez les eucaryotes unicellulaires. Les échantillons ont été séquencés à la fois en Roche/454 et en Illumina MiSeq, afin de pouvoir constater l'impact de la technologie sur les résultats. Le séquençage a ciblé la région V4 de la sous-unité 18S de l'ARN ribosomique. En résultat, on observe que la recherche des amorces V4F et V4R mutées permet d'améliorer de façon non-négligeable la sensibilité de l’analyse métagénomique. Cela augmente le rappel parmi les séquences d'un échantillon et cela permet également la détection de nouveaux OTU (+7 à +10 %, dans notre étude, en fonction de la technologie de séquençage), que ce soit en augmentant l'abondance de séquences détectées en nombre insuffisant pour être validées ou que ce soit en détectant des séquences totalement nouvelles qui n'étaient pas visibles auparavant. Une étude supplémentaire a par ailleurs montré que ces nouveaux OTU, et notamment les totalement nouveaux, étaient aussi crédibles que les OTU avec amorces exactes.
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[hal-01313749] Temperature dependence of the particle/gas partition coefficient: An application to predict indoor gas-phase concentrations of semi-volatile organic compounds
The indoor gas-phase concentrations of semi-volatile organic compounds (SVOCs) can be predicted from their respective concentrations in airborne particles by applying the particle/gas partitioning equilibrium. The temperature used for partitioning is often set to 25 °C. However, indoor temperatures frequently differ from this reference value. This assumption may result in errors in the predicted equilibrium gas-phase SVOC concentrations. To improve the prediction model, the temperature dependence of the particle/gas partition coefficient must be addressed. In this paper, a theoretical relationship between the particle/gas partition coefficient and temperature was developed based on the SVOC absorptive mechanism. The SVOC particle/gas partition coefficients predicted by employing the derived theoretical relationship agree well with the experimental data retrieved from the literature (R > 0.93). The influence of temperature on the equilibrium gas-phase SVOC concentration was quantified by a dimensionless analysis of the derived relationship between the SVOC particle/gas partition coefficient and temperature. The predicted equilibrium gas-phase SVOC concentration decreased by between 31% and 53% when the temperature was lowered by 6 °C, while it increased by up to 750% when the indoor temperature increased from 15 °C to 30 °C
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[hal-01308004] Impact of the French 3rd and 4th generation pill scare in women seeking termination of pregnancy
Introduction The aim of this study was to evaluate changes in the contraceptive profile of women seeking termination of pregnancy following the debate on 3rd and 4th generation pills in France in 2012. Materials and methods Single-center case-control study comparing the attitude to contraception before (between 02/15/2012 and 07/16/2012) and after the debate (between 02/25/2013 and 06/24/2013). Results A total of 291 patients consulted before and 601 after the debate. We showed that there were more students (+9.5%), more single women (+8.3%) and fewer working women (–7.7%) in the cohort after the debate. After the termination procedure, prescriptions for long-acting reversible contraceptive (LARC) methods increased (+7.8%, P = 0.03), in particular in patients aged 25 or younger, including nulliparous (+12.6%, P = 0.02). Conclusion The media alert about the pill led to a change in the contraceptive standard in the post-abortion period and altered patient profiles. An increase was notably observed in certain vulnerable populations (high school students, unemployed and single women). It remains to be seen whether these changes are transient or permanent
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[hal-01290932] An Extension of SPARQL with Fuzzy Navigational Capabilities for Querying Fuzzy RDF Data
The Resource Description Framework (RDF) is the graph-based standard data model for representing semantic web information, and SPARQL is the standard query language for querying RDF data. Because of the huge volume of linked open data published on the web, these standards have aroused a large interest in the last years. This paper proposes a fuzzy extension of the SPARQL language that improves its expressiveness and usability. This extension allows (1) to query a fuzzy RDF data model, and (2) to express fuzzy preferences on data and on the structure of the data graph, which has not been proposed in any previous fuzzy extensions of SPARQL.
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[hal-01343753] Frederic Lee and post-Keynesian pricing theory
Frederic Lee has been a major contributor to post-Keynesian economics, mainly to its theory of pricing. This article summarizes his objections to the neoclassical view of the firm and pricing, as well as his view that changes in quantities, rather than in prices, provide the important information to firms. It also outlines Lee's views on competition, and examines the three pricing doctrines Lee carefully analyzed—markup pricing (associated with Kalecki), normal-cost pricing or full-cost pricing (associated with Andrews), and target-return or administered pricing (associated with Means). The article then discusses the relationship between Lee and three strands of post-Keynesianism: Kaleckian, Sraffian and Eichnerian pricing theories. It explains why Lee objected to some features of each of these. The article concludes by discussing why, towards the end of his life, Lee felt (mistakenly) that his ideas had been dismissed by heterodox economists.
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[hal-01343731] Ecological monetary economics: a post-Keynesian critique
The monetary analysis of some ecological economists currently appears to be mostly articulated around the following core: a stationary economy (and a fortiori a degrowth economy) is incompatible with a system in which money is created as interest-bearing debt. To question the relevance of the debt-money/positive interest rate/output growth nexus, this paper adopts a critical stance towards the currently emerging ecological monetary economics from the standpoint of another strand of heterodox economics – the post-Keynesian approach. In its current state, ecological monetary economics is at odds with post-Keynesian economics in its analysis of the money–growth relationship. This will be shown using the theory of endogenous money and a simple Cambridgian–Kaleckian model where debt-money and a positive interest rate are compatible with a full stationary economy.
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[hal-01343736] Teaching monetary theory and monetary policy implementation after the crisis
The author reflects on the state of macroeconomic theory, and more specifically on how monetary economics is being taught in the aftermath of the global financial crisis. Whereas heterodox macroeconomic theory is very much alive due to the influx of a large number of contributions and contributors, the latter still have a hard time finding positions in the academic world, as journal and departmental ranking exercises have restricted so-called standards of excellence to the neoclassical approach. The crisis has not yet induced mainstream economists to open up to different approaches that put more emphasis on realistic features than on imaginary ones based on neoclassical micro-foundations. As an exemplar, the chapters on money and banking in two first-year textbooks are being examined, an orthodox one by Greg Mankiw and a heterodox one by Neva Goodwin et al. Unsurprisingly there is little to be learned about the crisis from Mankiw's book, while the book by Goodwin et al. devotes a large amount of space to the causes and consequences of the crisis. Still, Goodwin and her co-authors are not heterodox enough: they are less heterodox than a number of central bankers when it comes to a number of key features of monetary theory.
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