NCube/papyrus huggingface dataset:
Bits et Rarezas : deux compositions assistées par ordinateur

This project consists in the composition of two electroacoustic pieces for fixed media entitled Bits and Rarezas. Both works are based on sounds created in Max/MSP programming environment, a tool that has enabled an approach based mainly on the composition of sound by the manipulation and organization of very simple sound materials, such as microsounds and sinusoidal waves. The algorithms implemented in Max were used to efficiently control these sounds, building the complex sound textures used in the pieces.  The first chapter is centered on the basic technical and aesthetic ideas that have guided me. These concepts include microsound, granular synthesis and electronic minimalism. For the second chapter I begin with an overview on the Max patches used, focusing on the concepts behind the algorithms as well as on the interaction strategies used to model the sound. The remaining part of the second chapter discusses in more detail the five patches Max used in the project, presenting a description of the user interfaces, as well as a discussion of the typical procedures to compose different types of sounds. A few sound excerpts have been included in the accompanying CD to illustrate the possibilities shown. Finally, the last chapter analyses in detail the pieces Bits and Rarezas. In order to describe the sounds and textures included in the pieces, I have used as a reference the terms proposed by Pierre Schaeffer in his seminal work: Traité des objets musicaux.

Keyphrases: Composition, Max, Music, Computer music, Electroacoustic, Composition, Microsound, Algorithm, Stochastic, Max
Technologies de l'information et de la communication (TIC) et rendement académique en contexte universitaires béninois : cas des apprenants en droit de l'Université d'Abomey-Calavi

This study attempted to determine whether a qualitative relationship existed between information and communication technologies (ICT) and academic performance in universities in Benin. The aim was to understand how ICT may be used to significantly improve inadequate student grades, particularly in bachelor programs. This study is particularly relevant at a time when ICT are increasingly part of university life, and when students use ICT more than their professors do.  The research framework is therefore structured around the concepts of teaching and learning with ICT, motivation in education, and academic performance.  To achieve our objectives, we used a mixed quantitative and qualitative approach to conduct a descriptive and explicative study. We administered a survey questionnaire to 156 students and 15 professors and held interviews with 11 students and 6 professors.  The main results are presented in articles on the impact of ICT on motivation and academic success, the most frequent uses of ICT by students, and the role of ICT in the teaching practices of law professors at the Université d’Abomey-Calavi, Benin. More precisely, the results show that most of the participants had an overall positive perception of the motivational potential of ICT for teaching and learning. Nevertheless, out of a maximum score of 7 (very strong), respondents rated their perception of the positive impact of ICT use on academic performance at 4 (moderate) on average. Hence, their perception of the relationship between learning with ICT and success was generally middling. Crossing the results of the quantitative data with the results of the qualitative analysis concerning this aspect revealed a pronounced positive perception of the relationship between ICT and performance. Results also show that the most frequent uses of ICT by students are email (heading the list), followed by research and word processing, at once a week on average. These uses do not really amount to ICT for academic purposes.  Among professors, results also showed that ICT are not yet being fully applied to teaching practices. They are used more for personal than for pedagogical purposes.  The conclusion is that we have not yet found a direct qualitative relationship between ICT and academic performance in universities in Benin.

Keyphrases: Information and communications technologies (ICT), Education, Education, University pedagogy, Academic performance, Pedagogical integration of ICT
Indicateurs de durabilité urbaine selon une approche épidémiologique : la ville de Maringá, au Brésil

The aim of this research is to contrast the effects of urban development with environmental conservation practices. The investigation focuses on socio-economic segregation and its impact on sustainability, as measured by specific sustainability indicators. The city of Maringa in Central Brazil was selected as a case study, applying a targeted analysis to certain neighbourhoods. The study set out to determine which urban sustainability indicators are most appropriate to identify those neighbourhoods with the most sustainable practices and life-styles, assuming a fundamental link between sustainability practices and awareness of social and environmental responsibility.  Using a epidemiological, but not anthopocentric, approach, this research contributes to and enriches the urban sustainability discourse by proposing a theoretical framework and model for the systemic construction of viable urban sustainability indicators. Applying these indicators to demographic and socio-economic data analysis results in a way of assessing urban sustainability that diverges from the socio-economic stratification approach of the HDI. This approach to sustainability assessment is validated through being applied to two sample areas of Maringa: the neighbourhoods of Conjunto Residencial Inocente Villanova Júnior and of Zona 05, using corrélations between ecological footprint, satisfaction index, social integration index, residents' health habits and body weight. Results suggest that income has a strong influence on household ecological footprint. However, in 10 % of cases a sustainable footprint is possible even in households with high incomes. Additional studies are recommended to refine the proposed model.

Keyphrases: socio-economic analysis, urban sustainability indicators, epidemiological method, healthy communities, tropical sustainable cities, Brazil
Portée et limites du principe de non refoulement de l'article 33 de la Convention relative au statut des réfugiés dans le contexte du traitement extraterritorial des demandes de statut de réfugié

For the past few years, States have been adopting policies aimed at separating the admission of refugees on a territory from the determination of their refugee status. In Europe, this kind of political choice is usually designated by the term externalization. However, we have used the term extraterritorial to qualify this process, as we felt that externalization lacked objectivity. Indeed, externalization contains an implicit criticism of our research object.    In Europe, these extraterritorial policies have not yet attained a legal status.  Indeed, no legal rules are being currently applied which provide for the dissociation between admission and determination. Nevertheless, this idea is part of ongoing reflections and it remains an objective of the European agenda.    This thesis analyzes the legality of the European proposal related to an extraterritorial treatment of the status of refugee, in light of the theoretical principle of non-refoulement which is at the heart of the protection granted to refugees by international refugee law. To this end, it is necessary to analyze the scope and the legal limits of the non-refoulement principle in regards to its interpretation and implementation. Although there exists a lively debate on this issue, extraterritorial treatment of refugee claims does not, at least prima facie, violate the principle of non-refoulement enshrined in s. 33, para. 1 of the Convention relating to refugee status.

Keyphrases: Extraterritorial, Europe, Non principle refoulement, Refugee status
Assymétries cérébrales lors de traitement de l’information visuelle rapide : investigations chez une population clinique et neurologiquement saine

The Attentional Blink (AB) refers to a transient impairment in the accurate report of a second target (T2) if it closely follows the presentation of a first target (T1) in a rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP), when both targets must be reported. This study investigated both the possibility of hemispheric asymmetries of attentional processes as well as the possibility that presenting targets to different hemispheres could diminish the AB in neurologically intact participants and abolish it in the case of a split-brain patient. To do so, a modified AB paradigm was used in which targets could appear in any of four simultaneous RSVP streams, one in each quadrant of the visual field, so as to have trials in which both targets were presented to the same hemispheres and trials in which targets were presented to different hemispheres. Although no evidence of a diminished AB was observed by presenting targets to separate hemispheres, in both neurologically intact individuals and the split-brain patient, overall accuracy was higher when targets were presented to separate hemispheres. A left hemisphere advantage was only observed in the split-brain patient.

Keyphrases: cognitive neuroscience, visual-spatial attention, Split-Brain, attentional blink, hemispheric asymmetries, neurosciences cognitives
Causes multiples de décès chez les personnes âgées au Québec, 2000-2004

To this day, mortality analysis has primarily focused on the underlying cause of death which represents the disease or injury which initiated the sequence of morbid events leading to the death. But since death is due to a complex process, especially at advanced ages, analysis based solely on this concept has its limitations and some causes are more likely to be identified as the underlying cause than others. Selecting only one cause per death may influence the relative importance of the various causes of death. Multiple causes of death statistics provide a more complete view of mortality patterns.   The analysis of multiple causes of death among the elderly in Quebec for 2000-2004 identifies certain conditions that contributed to death, but have not been selected as the cause that initiated the disease process. This is particularly the case of hypertension, atherosclerosis, sepsis, influenza and pneumonia, diabetes mellitus and nephritis, nephrotic syndrome and nephrosis.   This research therefore demonstrates the importance of taking into account multiple causes in order to provide a more accurate portrait of Quebec's mortality at older ages that allows analysis of the underlying cause alone.

Keyphrases: Multiple causes, Underlying cause, Mortality, Elderly, Quebec
Une architecture parallèle distribuée et tolérante aux pannes pour le protocole 
interdomaine BGP au cœur de l’Internet

The increasing number of end users has led to an exponential growth in the Internet routing table. The routing table is expected to reach a size of one million prefixes within the coming few years. Besides, current core routers may easily attain hundreds of connected BGP peers simultaneously. In classical monolithic architecture, the BGP protocol runs as a single entity inside the router.  This architecture suffers from two drawbacks: scalability and reliability. BGP scalability can be measured in terms of the number of connected peers that can be handled and the size of the routing table. On the other hand, the reliability is a critical issue in core routers. If the BGP instance inside the router fails, all peers’ connections will shutdown and the new reachability state will be propagated across the Internet in a non trivial convergence delay. Although, in current core routers, the resiliency is increased considerably, it’s mainly implemented via a primary-backup redundancy scheme which limits the BGP scalability. In this thesis we address the two mentioned BGP drawbacks by proposing a novel distributed approach to increase both scalability and reliability of BGP without changing the semantic of the protocol. The BGP distributed architecture in the first paper is built to satisfy both requirements: scalability and reliability by adequately exploiting parallelism and module separation. In our model, BGP functionalities are split in a master-slave manner and the RIB (Routing Information Base) is replicated to multiple controller cards, to form a cluster of parallel computing entities. In the second paper, we address the fault tolerance of BGP within the distributed architecture presented in the first paper. We prove analytically that, by adopting the distributed architecture of BGP the availability of BGP will be increased considerably versus a monolithic architecture. In the third paper we propose a distributed parallel scheme called DRTP to partition the BGP routing table on multiple controller cards. DRTP aims at increasing the BGP scalability and the parallelization of the Best Match Prefix algorithm.

Keyphrases: Routers, BGP, BGP, Parallelism, Distributed systems, Reliability, Fault Tolerance
Vers une théorie philosophique du processus créatif artistique

Despite the otherwise noteworthy efforts for honorific theorisation on the part of contemporary philosophers, it is our concern here that nothing much has been done in this field concerning the growing but still misunderstood field of creativity in terms of “descriptive” accounts. Recent discoveries in the arts and psychology have witnessed a growing and justified interest for this very kind of research, which has earned, we believe, its rightful place alongside the most debated philosophical questions. This theory tries to point out some of the most intricate psycho-phenomenological structures of real-life creativity, some of it general (all domains combined) and some more institution-specific. For the sake of this thesis, we have limited the field of our inquiry to the most notorious case, which is now considered to be the arts. It is our belief that every descriptive theoretical enterprise wishing to initiate an understanding of these worlds in a truthful and respectful way should, at least, be mindful of this structure.

Keyphrases: art, processus, philosophy, creativity, art, theory, psycho-phenomenological, process
Analyse des tendances et configurations de la criminalité au Québec à l’aide d’un indice de gravité de la criminalité

The traditional measure of the criminality (rate for 100 000 inhabitants) raises problem in the analysis of the variations of the criminality in time or space. The problem is due to the fact that the rate of criminality is essentially determined by less serious and very frequent crimes. The present study allowed testing the utility of a new tool developed by Statistics Canada which gets an index of "severity of criminality" in which every crime is weighted by its score of severity (based on the sentencielles decisions average in Canada from 2002 till 2007 for every kind of crime. Applied to the official statistics of Quebec from 1977 till 2008, our analyses show that the indication of gravity turns out to be a useful measure to draw up a more realistic portrait of the trends of violent crimes from one year to the next. More precisely, the crime seriousness index shows that the rate of violent crimes remained stable from 1977 till 1992, on contradiction to what is shown by traditional rate which rather demonstrates a huge rise during this period. Crime seriousness index can also be used towards violent crimes, in order to compare more adequately territories, to establish those who show more serious crimes. However, among global criminality and crimes without violence, the indication of gravity is of no utility and presents the same reading of the criminality as traditional measures. It explains that it is always the same crimes (thefts, mischief and breaking and entering) that contribute mainly to each of both measures of the criminality.

Keyphrases: crime analysis, trends of criminality, crime seriousness, weighted crime severity index
Mémoire de la culture, mémoire de la barbarie : l’intertextualité dans le témoignage de Jorge Semprun sur le camp de Buchenwald

This essay covers the issue of intertextuality in the four works that Jorge Semprun (1923-) wrote about his memories from Buchenwald : Le grand voyage (1963), Quel beau dimanche! (1980), L’écriture ou la vie (1994) and Le mort qu’il faut (2001). Each work stems from the search of an apropriate language for narrating an experience that poses a radical challenge to its représentation. Intertextuality, as well as memories of works of art, yield a complex image of the experience of a survivor, where shadow and light, anguish and joy, Radical Evil and fraternity coexist, far away from the traditional cliché. The objective here is to read Semprun’s wounderfull testimonies as a profound dialogue between art and the Holocaust, creation and destruction, cultural memory and traumatic memory.

Keyphrases: Intertextuality, Memory, Holocaust
Capacité en matière de prise de décisions chez des récidivistes de conduite avec capacités affaiblies par l’alcool

Objectives:  Poor decision making in ambiguous high-risk situations, such as driving while impaired (DWI) by alcohol, may differentiate DWI recidivists from non-offenders. In this study, we test the hypothesis that DWI recidivists (R) will exhibit poorer decision-making performance on the Iowa Gambling Task (IGT), and in line with the Somatic Marker Hypothesis, weaker anticipatory somatic activation (using skin conductance response as index) than non-offenders (C, comparison group).   Methods: DWI recidivists and non-DWI control drivers were recruited, [R (n=23) and C (n=24), mean ages (± SD) 44.17(10.03) and 37.29 (10.60) years respectively]. Participant selection criteria included ≥ 18 years old and ≥2 DWI convictions for group R and 0 DWI convictions lifetime and a driver’s license for group C. The participants performed the IGT, a decision-making neurocognitive task containing 100 card selection trials that we divided into 5 blocks for analyses. A 2 (group) x 5 (blocks) repeated measures ANOVA was used to compare group R performance on the IGT versus group C, followed by post hoc independent t-tests on aggregated blocks 1-2 (decision under ambiguity) & 3-5 (decision under high risk) to identify the source of group X block significant interactions. Two 3 (group) x 5 (blocks) repeated measures ANOVAs (for good decks and for bad decks) were used to compare the aSCR of groups C and R. Results: ANOVA repeated measures on blocks 1 to 5 produced a significant effect of group by block interaction F(1,45)=5.28, p=.03, partial ƞ2 =.11.  Post hoc t-tests on aggregated blocks 3 to 5 were statistically significant, t(45) = 3.38, p = .002. A significant group x block interaction effect was found for good decks aSCR, F(8,160)=2.33, p=.02, partial ƞ2 =.10 .  Conclusion:  DWI recidivists performed more poorly than controls on the IGT, persistently making decisions based on potential immediate gains and neglecting associated loss risks and long-term outcome. This suggests they have reduced neurocognitive decision-making capacities distinguishable from the general population.  While DWI recidivists’ behaviour appears as impulsive, these results suggest that their behaviour pattern involves decision-making difficulties.  Larger sample sizes may be needed to detect a between-group effect in the aSCR analyses, as they were considerably underpowered.

Keyphrases: driving while impaired, recidivists, decision making, driving under the influence, relapse, alcohol dependence, neurocognitive function
Accès social à l'eau : étude de cas dans un village mossi du Yatenga

The purpose of this report is to examine access to water, not from a technological but from a social point of view. Any human society has had to cope with the issue of access to water. This is especially true for the people living under arid climates such as in Sahel, where water is a limiting resource. The village under study is located in the Yatenga region, north of Burkina Faso. I will first examine the space and time distribution of wells and of human groups in this territory, then I will question the regulation of access to water as a political issue within traditional structures. I will show that it contributes to sometimes strengthen and sometimes circumvent patterns of social hierarchy. Then I will study access to water in different social groups: women, men, younger and older people, elders, farmers, herders. I will show that their access to water is implicitly checked, thus limiting opportunities of economical improvement for some of them. In this developing society, disadvantaged users may develop tactics to circumvent these constraints. Thus access to water is taken between conflicting strategies, pertaining to social reproduction as opposed to social change.

Keyphrases: Yatenga, Mossi, Sahel, Access to water, Water management, Well, Social hierarchy, Social change, Development, Natural resources
Développement d’un microréacteur à base d’enzyme microencapsulée en vue d’un
couplage en ligne à un système d’électrophorèse capillaire

The principal objective of this research project is to study the efficiency of microencapsulation, technique used for enzyme immobilization in order to create new types of electrochemical biosensors. Generally, the target analyte involved either produces or consumes electrons and the electrochemical response is measured to identify or quantify the analyte. In the development of a biosensor, it is desirable to quantify the conversion of substrate (analyte) and/or the formation of product of the enzymatic reaction. The structural similarity between substrate and product in redox reactions means that the technique used to determine these species must be very selective. The high resolving power of capillary electrophoresis (CE) for rapidly separating similar compounds is thus an attractive method, particularly if substrate and product can both be monitored during or following the reaction catalyzed by microencapsulated enzyme. A judicious choice of substrate with respect to its behaviour in CE separations can help provide information on enzyme activity as well as microencapsulation efficiency. To achieve this, we chose the substrate o-phenylenediamine (OPD), which is oxidized by laccase to form the product 2,3-diaminophenazine (DAP) concomitant with the reduction of molecular oxygen to water. We firstly prepared the microcapsules and evaluate the impact of microencapsulation on the behaviour of the enzyme. After that, we developed a CE based separation method to quantify the conversion of OPD to DAP by free laccase. We also used the CE method to characterize laccase immobilized in microcapsules. Subsequent, the microencapsulated laccase was packed into a microreactor format permitting its off-line coupling with CE as a means to follow the enzymatic reaction. Finally, we tried to implement the on-line system and the preliminaries results are presented.

Keyphrases: Laccase, Microencapsulation, Ortho-phenylènediamine, 2,3-diaminophenazine, 2-hydroxy-3-aminophenazine, Laccase, Microencapsulation, Immobilized enzymes, On-line microreactor, Capillary electrophoresis, Ortho-phenylenediamine, 2,3-diaminophenazine, 2-hydroxy-3-aminophenazine