L’Irak au bord de l’éclatement « Les dix péchés capitaux d’une reconstruction ratée »

Les causes de la crise irakienne actuelle sont multiples. Au-delà des implications immédiates, les séquelles de l’intervention militaire de 2003 sont les plus déterminantes. L’échec du processus de reconstruction institutionnelle a donné lieu à un État déficient, dysfonctionnel et corrompu offrant ainsi un terreau fertile à l’implantation et à la prolifération des mouvements terroristes et mafieux. L’auteur tente, dans la présente contribution, d’identifier « les raisons profondes » du drame actuel en tenant compte de l’impact des bouleversements intervenus depuis la chute du régime baathiste en avril 2003 sur les structures étatiques.The current Iraqi crisis has several causes. Looking beyond short-term implications, the consequences of the military intervention of 2003 are the most significant. The failure of the process of institutional reconstruction gave birth to a weak, dysfunctional and corrupt state; a fertile ground for the establishment and the proliferation of terrorist and criminal movements. In this working paper, the author attempts to identify the ‘’profound reasons’’ of the current drama while taking into account the impacts of the multiple transformations that have affected state structures since the fall of the Baathist regime in April 2003

Employing VANET technology to alleviate road congestion in real time

Nowadays, traffic road jams are considered one of the most serious problems facing a large group of people, where many drivers die or are exposed to serious injuries because of road accidents that occur due to road congestion, driver's behaviour by disobeying the rules and traffic lights or bad management for traffic system. The eagerness on developing the deployment traffic road information among vehicles to reduce road accident and to make the journey more safe was the main motivation behind the improvement of Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks VANETs. VANETs are a special category of Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (MANET), which considered the cornerstone for Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) that used to established communication among vehicles on a road using an infrastructure-less network. On this study, we will use graph model representation to design a novel algorithm which can deal with Instantaneous accident/incident occasions, road works and roads amendments to provide instant actions list to the transportation team to reduce congestion in shorter time, and to use wireless access technologies to send individual message to the relevant vehicles to avoid the congestion through Road Side Units (RSUs) devices. The aim of this research is to develop Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) for a city (e.g. Northampton) using VANETs technology, specifically vehicle to infrastructure communications which lead to reducing the traffic congestion or mitigation. The performance of proposed study will be evaluated via various congested scenarios using simulations software (Omnet++, SUMO and Veins) to assess the validity of the proposed algorithm

Synthesis of a Spirocyclic Oxetane-Fused Benzimidazole

A new synthesis of 2-oxa-7-azaspiro[3.5]nonane is described. Spirocyclic oxetanes, including 2-oxa-6-azaspiro[3.3]heptane were converted into o-cycloalkylaminoacetanilides for oxidative cyclizations using Oxone((R)) in formic acid. The expanded spirocyclic oxetane successfully gave the [1,2-a] ring-fused benzimidazole. X-ray crystal structure of the resultant new tetracyclic system, 1',2'-dihydro-4'H-spiro[oxetane-3,3'-pyrido[1,2-a]benzimidazole] and the azetidine ring-opened adduct, N-(2-acetamido-4-bromophenyl)-N-{[3-(chloromethyl)oxetan-3-yl]methyl}acetamide are disclosed

Regenerative function of immune system: Modulation of muscle stem cells

Ageing is characterised by progressive deterioration of physiological systems and the loss of skeletal muscle mass is one of the most recognisable, leading to muscle weakness and mobility impairments. This review highlights interactions between the immune system and skeletal muscle stem cells (widely termed satellite cells or myoblasts) to influence satellite cell behaviour during muscle regeneration after injury, and outlines deficits associated with ageing. Resident neutrophils and macrophages in skeletal muscle become activated when muscle fibres are damaged via stimuli (e.g. contusions, strains, avulsions, hyperextensions, ruptures) and release high concentrations of cytokines, chemokines and growth factors into the microenvironment. These localised responses serve to attract additional immune cells which can reach in excess of 1 × 105 immune cell/mm3 of skeletal muscle in order to orchestrate the repair process. T-cells have a delayed response, reaching peak activation roughly 4 days after the initial damage. The cytokines and growth factors released by activated T-cells play a key role in muscle satellite cell proliferation and migration, although the precise mechanisms of these interactions remain unclear. T-cells in older people display limited ability to activate satellite cell proliferation and migration which is likely to contribute to insufficient muscle repair and, consequently, muscle wasting and weakness. If the factors released by T-cells to activate satellite cells can be identified, it may be possible to develop therapeutic agents to enhance muscle regeneration and reduce the impact of muscle wasting during ageing and disease

A bistatic linear frequency modulated radar for on-the-ground object detection

The use of radar systems for detecting on-the-ground objects is a subject of interest for some applications. Among them, foreign object detection systems are important issues in airport aviation safety. Due to the characteristics of the object, a ground-based bistatic radar configuration is introduced in this article. The transmitter sends broadband linear frequency modulated chirp pulses. The reflected pulses are collected simultaneously by at least two ground-based receivers installed in different positions. Accurate range processing is conducted to detect small objects, such as N-type connectors in distances of several meters. A prototype system consisting of one transmitter and two receivers is developed. The system is then launched over land similar in appearance to a runway, and its ability to make an accurate image of the area where the object is placed in different positions is confirmed. Modifications that need to cover a bigger area are also discussed. The system resolution is analyzed and shows that in the case of several existing transmitter-receiver pairs, the best resolution can be achieved by the closer pairs

Genetic polymorphism of drug oxidation in the rat

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The distributed p-median problem in computer networks

The exponential growth of the Internet over the last decades has led to a significant evolution of the network services and applications. One of the challenges is to provide better services scalability by placing service replica in appropriate network locations. Finding the optimal solution to the facility location problem is particularly complex and is not feasible for large scale systems. Locating facilities in near-optimal locations have been extensively studied in many works and for different application domains. This work investigates one of the most notable problems in facility location, i.e. the p-median problem, which locates p facilities with a minimum overall communication cost. All previous studies on the p-median problem used a centralised approach to find the near-optimal solution. In this case the required information needs to be collected in order to apply a sequential algorithm to find a solution. The centralised approach is infeasible in large-scale networks due to the time and space complexity of the sequential algorithms as well as the large communication cost and latency to aggregate the global information. Therefore, this work investigates the p-median problem in a distributed environment. To the best of the author’s knowledge, this is the first work to study the distributed pmedian problem for large-scale computer networks. Solving the p-median problem in a fully distributed way is a challenging task due to the lack of global knowledge and of a centralised coordinator. Two new approaches for solving the p-median problem in a distributed environment are proposed in this thesis. Both are designed to be executed without any centralised collection of the data in a single node. These methods apply an iterative heuristic approach to improve a random initial solution and to converge to a final solution with a local minimum of the cost. The first approach builds a global view of the system and improves the current solution by replacing a single facility at each iteration. The second approach, is designed according to the well-known k-medoids clustering algorithm. At each iteration a local view of each cluster is generated and all facilities can be updated to optimise the solution. Both approaches were implemented within the Java-based PeerSim network simulator for investigating the performance in large-scale systems and tested against different parameters such as the size of networks, number of facilities to be placed and different initial solutions. The results have shown that the first protocol is better at addressing locations for facilities since it converges to a lower total cost of the solution than the second protocol. However, the second one is faster in optimising the solution