Search results for "Computing"
showing 10 items of 25279 documents
A European multicentre evaluation of detection and typing methods for human enteroviruses and parechoviruses using RNA transcripts
2020
Polymerase chain reaction (PCR) detection has become the gold standard for diagnosis and typing of enterovirus (EV) and human parechovirus (HPeV) infections. Its effectiveness depends critically on using the appropriate sample types and high assay sensitivity as viral loads in cerebrospinal fluid samples from meningitis and sepsis clinical presentation can be extremely low. This study evaluated the sensitivity and specificity of currently used commercial and in‐house diagnostic and typing assays. Accurately quantified RNA transcript controls were distributed to 27 diagnostic and 12 reference laboratories in 17 European countries for blinded testing. Transcripts represented the four human EV…
Consensus in inventory games
2008
This paper studies design, convergence, stability and optimality of a distributed consensus protocol for n-player repeated non cooperative games under incomplete information. Information available to each player concerning the other players' strategies evolves in time. At each stage (time period), the players select myopically their best binary strategy on the basis of a payoff, defined on a single stage, monotonically decreasing with the number of active players. The game is specialized to an inventory application, where fixed costs are shared among all retailers, interested in reordering or not from a common warehouse. As information evolves in time, the number of active players changes t…
Communication versus waterproofing: the physics of insect cuticular hydrocarbons
2019
Understanding the evolution of complex traits is among the major challenges in biology. One such trait is the cuticular hydrocarbon (CHC) layer in insects. It protects against desiccation and provides communication signals, especially in social insects. CHC composition is highly diverse within and across species. To understand the adaptive value of this chemical diversity, we must understand how it affects biological functionality. So far, CHCs received ample research attention, but their physical properties were little studied. We argue that these properties determine their biological functionality, and are vital to understand how CHC composition affects their adaptive value. We investigat…
Spatial beam self-cleaning in multimode fibres
2017
Multimode optical fibres are enjoying a renewed attention, boosted by the urgent need to overcome the current capacity crunch of single-mode fibre systems and by recent advances in multimode complex nonlinear optics [1-13]. In this work, we demonstrate that standard multimode fibres can be used as ultrafast all-optical tool for transverse beam manipulation of high power laser pulses. Our experimental data show that the Kerr effect in a graded-index multimode fibre is the driving mechanism for overcoming speckle distortions, leading to a somewhat counter-intuitive effect resulting in a spatially clean output beam robust against fibre bending. Our observations demonstrate that nonlinear beam …
Achieving Intelligent Traffic-aware Consolidation of Virtual Machines in a Data Center Using Learning Automata
2016
Cloud Computing (CC) is becoming increasingly pertinent and popular. A natural consequence of this is that many modern-day data centers experience very high internal traffic within the data centers themselves. The VMs with high mutual traffic often end up being far apart in the data center network, forcing them to communicate over unnecessarily long distances. The consequent traffic bottlenecks negatively affect both the performance of the application and the network in its entirety, posing nontrivial challenges for the administrators of these cloudbased data centers. The problem can, quite naturally, be compartmentalized into two phases which follow each other. First of all, the VMs are co…
An entrepreneur's social capital and performance: the role of access to information in the Argentinean case
2012
Purpose - The aim of this paper is to analyze the impact of an entrepreneur's social capital on their access to information, and how such access improves the performance of their entrepreneurial project. Design/methodology/approach - A structural equations model (SEM) is estimated and validated from a database including information from 282 Argentinean entrepreneurs who answered a questionnaire specifically designed for this research. The analysis of this model allowed the impact of dependent latent variables on the performance of the start-up to be determined. Findings - The performance of an entrepreneurial project depends on an entrepreneur's access to finance, markets and information. S…
A computer-assisted experiment to study the influence of the point spread function in the image formation process
2018
[EN] We present a new open experimental setup assisted with LabView to be used to teach the concept of the point spread function (PSF). The PSF describes the response of an image-forming system to a point object. The PSF concept is of fundamental importance in optics since the output of an image-forming system can be simulated as the convolution of the PSF with the input object. In this work, a new graphical user interface has been developed to obtain a real-time measure of the PSF and the corresponding images provided by different lenses and pupils with different sizes and shapes. From a didactical point of view, the proposed method allows students to interpret the results in a visual and …
Les phénols de la lignine et le 13C, traceurs de l'origine des matières organiques du sol
2001
Abstract In spodosols of Gascony (France), conversion of maritime pine stands into maize cropping leads to an incorporation of maize organic matter, which changed the isotopic (δ13C) and phenolic signature in A and L horizons of soil. Hydrolysis of phenol lignin in forests and cultivated soils showed the predominance of vanillic units under forest and the early but moderate incorporation of cinnamic acids. Incorporation of syringic units appeared higher, related to a large maize production of stable syringic phenols. Syringic units represented a long-term marker of maize inputs in soils, whereas vanillic units revealed the degradation of forest organic matter.
IQSEC2-related encephalopathy in males and females: a comparative study including 37 novel patients.
2019
Variants in IQSEC2, escaping X inactivation, cause X-linked intellectual disability with frequent epilepsy in males and females. We aimed to investigate sex-specific differences.
Foreign Aid to Education in Sub-Saharan Africa : How Useful Is It?
1988
International audience