An inquiry of the opinions of the French and Belgian populations as regards risk

IRSN (France) and SCK-CEN (Belgium), two institutes of research and expertise in radiation protection and nuclear safety, simultaneously organised a very similar public opinion survey in their respective countries in November 2002. The study explores subjects such as: major people's concerns, perception of environmental risks, perception of risks in general, the role of experts in decision making, opinions on nuclear matters and aspects of nuclear emergency preparedness. In each country, more than 1000 citizens representing the general public have been consulted in face-to-face interviews. The field work has been performed by professional companies (BVA in France and Research International in Belgium). The paper shows that industrial and technological risks are not perceived as one of the major public concerns, although many other risks, of different nature are considered to be high. The actions of the authorities to provide protection against the consequences of many risks or disasters are not considered to be sufficient, and many respondents claim not to believe the information they receive. There exists a large difference between the opinion of French and Belgian public, and within the different language groups in Belgium, with regard to who should be in charge of the control of the hazardous industries. Many of the "actors" within the nuclear industry are not known by the respondents. The perception of the technical competence or the truth being told shows large variations between the main actors (such as members of the nuclear industry, the government or the media). Majorities within the population believe that a disaster as serious as the Chernobyl one can happen in their country and that in case of a nuclear accident, the authorities would not be capable to protect the population adequately.     

Physiology in daily hemodialysis in terms of the time average concentration/time average deviation concept

Quotidian or “daily" hemodialysis (DHD) is practiced in widely differing schedules. Yet all those schedules are reported to significantly ameliorate clinical outcome of patients. It is, however, not clear what is the actual cause of this amelioration. Rational possibilities include increased overall dialysis dose and increased weekly time. Conventional mathematical approaches (Kt/V_urea concept, equivalent renal clearance) cannot be used to study those issues because they do not consider number of dialysis per week and thus ignore the issue of treatment schedule “unphysiology.” The time average concentration/time average deviation (TAC/TAD) concept may well be used to visualize impact of treatment schedule on both plasma urea profile statics (TAC) and dynamics (TAD). The concept may further help to stratify studies for elucidation of the key factors of clinical outcome improvement seen on DHD. Actual physiologic mechanisms responsible for this improvement are to be sought among those with having derivative component (i.e., reacting to the rate of a change rather than to the magnitude of the change). It should, however, be kept in mind that the TAC/TAD concept is able to assess unphysiology of a treatment schedule, not unphysiology of a single treatment session.     

Properties of two’s complement floating point notations

Few designs, mostly those of Texas Instruments, continue to use twos complement floating point units. Such units are simpler to build and to validate, but they do not comply to the dominant IEEE standard for floating point arithmetic. We compare some properties of the two systems in this text. Some features are lost, but others remain unchanged. One strong example is the case of Sterbenzs theorem and our recent extension. We show in the paper that the theorem and its extension hold for the twos complement architecture. Still, users should ensure that results are large enough on circuits that do not implement gradual underflow. Theorems have been proven and validated using the Coq automatic proof checker.     

Solid-solution partitioning of Cd, Cu, Ni, Pb, and Zn in the organic horizons of a forest soil

We report the solid-liquid partitioning of Cd, Cu, Ni, Pb, and Zn in 60 organic horizon samples of forest soils from the Hermine Watershed (St-Hippolyte, PQ, Canada). The mean Kd values are respectively 1132, 966, 802, 3337 and 561. Comparison of those Kd coefficients to published compilation values show that the Kd values are lower in acidic organic soil horizons relative to the overall mean Kd values compiled for mineral soils. But, once normalized to a mean pH of 4.4, the Kd values in organic soil horizons demonstrate the high sorption affinity of organic matter, which is either as good as or up to 30 times higher than mineral soil materials for sorbing trace metals. Regression analysis shows that, within our data set, pH and total metal contents are not consistent predictors of metal partitioning. Indeed, metal sorption by the solid phase must be studied in relation to complexation by dissolved organic ligands, and both processes may sometime counteract one another.     

Software to compute and conduct sequential Bayesian phase I or II dose-ranging clinical trials with stopping rules

The aim of dose-ranging phase I (resp. phase II) clinical trials is to rapidly identify the maximum tolerated dose (MTD) (resp., minimal effective dose (MED)) of a new drug or combination. For the conduct and analysis of such trials, Bayesian approaches such as the Continual Reassessment Method (CRM) have been proposed, based on a sequential design and analysis up to a completed fixed sample size. To optimize sample sizes, Zohar and Chevret have proposed stopping rules (Stat. Med. 20 (2001) 2827), the computation of which is not provided by available softwares. We present in this paper a user-friendly software for the design and analysis of these Bayesian Phase I (resp. phase II) dose-ranging Clinical Trials (BPCT). It allows to carry out the CRM with stopping rules or not, from the planning of the trial, with choice of model parameterization based on its operating characteristics, up to the sequential conduct and analysis of the trial, with estimation at stopping of the MTD (resp. MED) of the new drug or combination.     

Comparative study of purine and pyrimidine nucleoside analogues acting on the thymidylate kinases of Mycobacterium tuberculosis and of humans

Thymidine monophosphate kinase (TMPK) from Mycobacterium tuberculosis (TMPKmt) is an attractive target for the design of specific inhibitors. This fact is the result of its key role in the thymidine pathway and of unique structural features in the active site observed by X-ray crystallography, especially in comparison to its human counterpart (TMPKh). Different 5-modified thymidine derivatives, as well as purine and pyrimidine analogues or C-nucleosides were tested on TMPKmt and TMPKh, and the results were rationalized by docking studies. 5-Halogenated 2'-deoxyuridines are the best inhibitors of TMPKmt found and present the highest selectivity indexes in favor of TMPKmt.     

Anger and time perception in children.

The present study investigated age-related variations in judgments of the duration of angry facial expressions compared with neutral facial expressions. Children aged 3, 5, and 8 years were tested on a temporal bisection task using angry and neutral female faces. Results revealed that, in all age groups, children judged the duration of angry faces to be longer than that of neutral faces. Findings are discussed in the framework of internal clock models and the adaptive function of emotion. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Opto-electronic properties of rough LP-CVD ZnO:B for use as TCO in thin-film silicon solar cells

Polycrystalline Boron-doped ZnO films deposited by low pressure chemical vapor deposition technique are developed for their use as transparent contacts for thin-film silicon solar cells. The size of the columnar grains that constitute the ZnO films is related to their light scattering capability, which has a direct influence on the current generation in thin-film silicon solar cells. Furthermore, if the doping level of the ZnO films is kept below 1 × 10²⁰ cm^− 3, the electron mobility can be drastically enhanced by growing large grains, and the free carrier absorption is reduced. All these considerations have been taken in account to develop ZnO films finely optimized for the fabrication of microcrystalline thin-film silicon solar cells. These TCO allow the achievement of solar cell conversion efficiencies close to 10%.     

A feasibility study on the use of anthropometric variables to make muscle–computer interface more practical

High classification accuracy has been achieved for muscle–computer interfaces (MCIs) based on surface electromyography (EMG) recognition in many recent works with an increasing number of discriminated movements. However, there are many limitations to use these interfaces in the real-world contexts. One of the major problems is compatibility. Designing and training the classification EMG system for a particular individual user is needed in order to reach high accuracy. If the system can calibrate itself automatically/semi-automatically, the development of standard interfaces that are compatible with almost any user could be possible. Twelve anthropometric variables, a measurement of body dimensions, have been proposed and used to calibrate the system in two different ways: a weighting factor for a classifier and a normalizing value for EMG features. The experimental results showed that a number of relationships between anthropometric variables and EMG time-domain features from upper-limb muscles and movements are statistically strong (average r=0.71?0.80) and significant (p<0.05). In this paper, the feasibility to use anthropometric variables to calibrate the EMG classification system is shown obviously and the proposed calibration technique is suggested to further improve the robustness and practical use of MCIs based on EMG pattern recognition.