BACKGROUND AND AIMS The date of emergence may have far-reaching implications for seedling performance. Seedlings emerging early in the growing season often have a greater rate of survival or grow better if early emergence provides advantages with respect to an environmental cue. As a result, the benefits of early emergence may be lost if the environmental stress creating the differences among c...

Introduction Organization in the international community has been extensively, if not completely, moulded over the past decades by the Western organizational model. Indeed an « organization » has come to mean a Western style organization. This model has acquired considerable credibility owing to its successes in many different arenas. The techniques contributing to these successes have been stu...

Litigants are generally charged for using court services. The charges involved are usually set to achieve a combination of efficiency, equity and funding goals. This paper presents a simple model, based on regulated monopoly pricing, to address the question of how these charges should be set. We find that fixed fees generally form part of the optimal charging package, despite concerns about the...

The clinical strain Escherichia coli TO799 was resistant to penicillin-clavulanate combinations and ceftazidime and was not reproducibly detected as an extended-spectrum -lactamase (ESBL) according to the standards of the Clinical Laboratory Standards Institute (CLSI; formerly NCCLS) and the national guidelines of the French Society for Microbiology (Comité de l’Antibiogramme de la Société Fran...

The AIS field, which seeks to understand immune system operation and exploit these principles in engineering contexts, has been critized for “reasoning by metaphor” [Stepney 05]: algorithms are based on naïve biological analogies, are poorly understood, and weekly capture their inspiring biological properties. Various frameworks have been proposed that enable the richness of emergent biological...

We studied 120 patients less than 1 yr of age, allocated randomly to receive atropine 40 micrograms kg-1 orally 1 h before operation (group A) or no premedication (group B). All patients underwent a standardized anaesthetic, including inhalation induction with halothane followed by atracurium 0.5 mg kg-1, tracheal intubation and positive pressure ventilation. Monitoring during anaesthesia inclu...

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES The use of alpha2-agonists to control heart rate and blood pressure, to attenuate hemodynamic responses to tracheal intubation and extubation and to reduce anesthetics requirement are already well established in the literature since clonidine introduction for therapeutic use. Dexmedetomidine, recently approved for clinical use, presents more alpha2-adrenergic receptors...

Concerns about an imminent influenza pandemic have been intensified after the emergence of the new influenza A(H1N1) v strain. Mathematical modeling was employed on recent epidemiological data from Mexico in order to assess the impact of intervention strategies on the spread of influenza A(H1N1)v in the setting of the European region. When initiating the intervention of 100% school closure in a...

We consider complex networks where line failures occur indirectly as line flows are influenced by fluctuating input at nodes, a prime example being a power grid where power is generated by renewable sources. We examine the propagation of such emergent failures in the small noise regime, combining concepts from statistical physics and the physics of power flow. In particular we characterize rigo...

When dealing with dynamically evolving systems, components may be inserted or removed while the system is being operated. Unsafe run-time changes may compromise the correct execution of the entire system, and online analysis techniques have been proposed to mitigate the effects of such failures. With CASSANDRA we want to move one step ahead, by defining a novel proactive monitoring and verifica...