On the calibration of the helicopter borne polarimetric radar René

The cetp and Thomson- csf have developed in 1992 a new polarimetric fm/cw X- band radar which has been designed to be easily mounted on small helicopter or aircraft. As it is devoted to research investigations on radar polarimetry applied to land and vegetation remote sensing, it needs to be calibrated in phase and amplitude with a very good accuracy. A calibration procedure using trihedral and dihedral corner reflectors is presented here and then compared to the calibration method using random distributed targets that has been developed at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. A very good agreement between both methods enables us to apply our calibration algorithms to natural surfaces measurements at different incidence angles (20°, 40° and 50°.     

Articulation of web site design constraints: Effects of the task and designers’ expertise

This paper aims at contributing to a better understanding of the cognitive activities of web site designers and, more precisely, their articulation and satisfaction of various design constraints. In this paper, we first present an experiment in which professional and novice designers have to evaluate a web site developed for reflecting usability errors identified in web sites. Then, the results obtained in this evaluation task are compared with results previously obtained in a design task, in which professional and novice designers had to create a web site. Data analyses focused on the number and nature of constraints articulated by designers in these two types of tasks (evaluation vs design). In particular, we distinguished constraints linked with the client of the site and constraints linked with the future web users. The obtained results show effects of both the level of expertise and the task. While designing, all of the designers focused mainly on constraints linked with the client. In contrast, while evaluating the web site, novices focused on constraints linked with the user, whereas professionals shared their attention between these two kinds of constraints (client vs user-oriented constraints). Based on these results, we conclude with ways for supporting designers’ activities.     

A survey of models and algorithms for winter road maintenance. Part II: system design for snow disposal

This is the second part of a four-part survey of optimization models and solution algorithms for winter road maintenance planning. The first part addresses system design problems for spreading and plowing operations. The aim of this paper is to provide a comprehensive survey of optimization models and solution methodologies for the design of systems for snow disposal operations. These problems include partitioning a region or road network into sectors, locating snow disposal sites, allocating sectors to snow disposal sites, and allocating sectors to private companies or governmental agencies. The two last parts of the survey mainly concentrate on vehicle routing for winter road maintenance.     

Model-driven component adaptation in the context of Web Engineering

Currently, Web-based applications are no longer monolithic and isolated systems but, rather, distributed applications that need to interoperate with third-party systems, such as external Web services, LDAP repositories or legacy applications. When one component provides a service that the Web application requires, it is often not possible to bind the two systems together if they were not programmed to have compatible collaboration specifications. Modeling the adaptation between a Web application and external assets becomes therefore an essential issue in any realistic model-driven development scenario. However, most of the existing Web Engineering proposals do not take this issue into account, or they simply address it at the implementation level (in a platform-specific way). In this work, we discuss the problems involved in dealing with component adaptation within the context of Model-Driven Web Engineering and show how design patterns can help addressing it. We first identify the major interoperability problems that can happen when integrating third-party application or legacy systems into our Web systems, and then propose the mechanisms that need to be put in place at the design level to generate the appropriate specification of adapters that compensate for the possible mismatches and differences. We base our proposal on well-known design patterns as they are established solutions to recurring problems, and the generation of code from them is normally straightforward.     

Selective Cardiomyocyte Oxidative Stress Leads to Bystander Senescence of Cardiac Stromal Cells

Accumulation of senescent cells in tissues during normal or accelerated aging has been shown to be detrimental and to favor the outcomes of age-related diseases such as heart failure (HF). We have previously shown that oxidative stress dependent on monoamine oxidase A (MAOA) activity in cardiomyocytes promotes mitochondrial damage, the formation of telomere-associated foci, senescence markers, and triggers systolic cardiac dysfunction in a model of transgenic mice overexpressing MAOA in cardiomyocytes (Tg MAOA). However, the impact of cardiomyocyte oxidative stress on the cardiac microenvironment in vivo is still unclear. Our results showed that systolic cardiac dysfunction in Tg MAOA mice was strongly correlated with oxidative stress induced premature senescence of cardiac stromal cells favoring the recruitment of CCR2⁺ monocytes and the installation of cardiac inflammation. Understanding the interplay between oxidative stress induced premature senescence and accelerated cardiac dysfunction will help to define new molecular pathways at the crossroad between cardiac dysfunction and accelerated aging, which could contribute to the increased susceptibility of the elderly to HF.     

Synthesis and Pharmacological Evaluation of Enantiomerically Pure GluN2B Selective NMDA Receptor Antagonists

To determine the eutomers of potent GluN2B‐selective N‐methyl‐d ‐aspartate (NMDA) receptor antagonists with a 3‐benzazepine scaffold, 7‐benzyloxy‐3‐(4‐phenylbutyl)‐2,3,4,5‐tetrahydro‐1H‐3‐benzazepin‐1‐ols (S)‐ 2 and (R)‐ 2 were separated by chiral HPLC. Hydrogenolysis and subsequent methylation of the enantiomerically pure benzyl ethers of (S)‐ 2 and (R)‐ 2 provided the enantiomeric phenols (S)‐ 3 and (R)‐ 3 [3‐(4‐phenylbutyl)‐2,3,4,5‐tetrahydro‐1H‐3‐benzazepine‐1,7‐diol] and methyl ethers (S)‐ 4 and (R)‐ 4 . All enantiomers were obtained with high enantiomeric purity (≥99.7 % ee). The absolute configurations were determined by CD spectroscopy. R‐configured enantiomers turned out to be the eutomers in receptor binding studies and two‐electrode voltage clamp experiments. The most promising ligand of this compound series is the R‐configured phenol (R)‐ 3 , displaying high GluN2B affinity (K_i=30 nm ), high inhibition of ion flux (IC₅₀=61 nm ), and high cytoprotective activity (IC₅₀=93 nm ). Whereas the eudismic ratio in the receptor binding assay is 25, the eudismic ratio in the electrophysiological experiment is 3.