The Administration of New Zealand Irrigation: History and Analysis

The sharply contrasting ways in which community irrigation schemes in New Zealand were developed and managed before and after 1990 illustrate the operation of decentralised vis-à-vis centralised (planning) industry governance systems. While the evidence is not easily quantifiable what evidence there is suggests that the shift to a decentralised system that took place about 1990 coincides with improved irrigation efficiency. NZ irrigation thus provides an example of the global move away from centrally planned systems and illustrates the important elements of well functioning decentralised systems. Today farmer owned companies - rather than State owned - are responsible and accountable for scheme development and management. In combination with the RMA - which enables a decentralised approach to resource use - this has facilitated innovation in scheme design more efficient management and better water use. It has also revealed more precisely the value of water in irrigation

Quantifying the effect of machine translation in a high-quality human translation production process

This paper studies the impact of machine translation (MT) on the translation workflow at the Directorate-General for Translation (DGT), focusing on two language pairs and two MT paradigms: English-into-French with statistical MT and English-into-Finnish with neural MT. We collected data from 20 professional translators at DGT while they carried out real translation tasks in normal working conditions. The participants enabled/disabled MT for half of the segments in each document. They filled in a survey at the end of the logging period. We measured the productivity gains (or losses) resulting from the use of MT and examined the relationship between technical effort and temporal effort. The results show that while the usage of MT leads to productivity gains on average, this is not the case for all translators. Moreover, the two technical effort indicators used in this study show weak correlations with post-editing time. The translators' perception of their speed gains was more or less in line with the actual results. Reduction of typing effort is the most frequently mentioned reason why participants preferred working with MT, but also the psychological benefits of not having to start from scratch were often mentioned

Identification of Young's Modulus from Indentation Testing and Inverse Analysis

International audienceIn this study, a numerical method for the identification of the Young's modulus of linear elastic coated materials from continuous indentation test is first presented. The identification is based on an inverse analysis where the minimization of a cost functional is performed by a gradient descent algorithm. The main result is the computation of cost function gradient by using a direct differentiation technique, resulting in a time saving method compared to the widely used finite difference method. The validity and illustration of this approach is shown through several numerical examples. The second part of this article is dedicated to the identification of elasto-plastic thin films Young's modulus. A new method is proposed, where the inverse analysis relies only on finite element computations for elastic materials

Inverse Analysis of Multiple Indentation Unloading Curves for Thin Film Young's Modulus Evaluation

International audienceThe Oliver and Pharr method is the prevailing process for thin films Young's modulus evaluation. Introduced initially for homogeneous materials, this method does not account for the substrate and can consequently lead to significant error, especially at large indentation depths. We suggest here possible methods to improve the accuracy by making use of inverse analysis and finite element computations of the one layer elastic indentation problem

English language development of Haitian immigrant students : determining the status of selected ninth graders participating in transitional bilingual education.

Most Haitians in the U.S. area have immigrated over the past three decades, with the largest number of arrival coming in the late 1970\u27s through the mid 1980\u27s. Boston has one of the largest Haitian student populations in the U.S. following Miami and New York City. The purpose of this study was to determine the status of English language development among Haitian immigrant ninth graders participating in Boston\u27s transitional bilingual education. Two major research questions guided this study: (1) What is the effectiveness of oral English language-use among ninth grade Haitian immigrant students in selected bilingual classrooms? (2) What is the effectiveness of English reading among ninth grade Haitian immigrant students in selected bilingual classrooms? Three High schools with transitional bilingual education programs totalling ninety-one Haitian ninth grade students participated in the study. Twenty five students were randomly selected as subjects for the study. A pre- and post-test comparison and an analysis of students\u27 oral and reading scores were done to obtain a preliminary quantifiable impression of the students\u27 growth in English language development over a period of time. Using Halliday\u27s (1973) seven functions of language, classroom observations of students oral English language-use were recorded and analyzed to determine the students\u27 ability to communicate effectively in different classroom contexts. Miscue analyses through a series of reading activities were performed to provide valuable insights into the nature of the reading process and gain appreciation for readers\u27 strengths as well as weaknesses. Over three hundred and fifty hours of classroom observations and reading miscue activities with (N = 25) Haitian immigrant ninth graders reveal that subjects do not differ markedly in their oral and reading effectiveness in English. Although individual differences among subjects in oral and reading effectiveness existed; however, only a minority of students (N = 5/25) in (oral language) and (N = 1/4) in reading did not show positive gains in language effectiveness. Overall, many of the subjects show positive gains in English. Thus, they have the ability to use oral and reading English effectively to succeed academically

Gestion des communications centrée sur les accès mémoire à distance

National audienceL'émergence des processeurs multi-coeurs a radicalement changé la physionomie des machines courantes et des grappes de calcul. Désormais les noeuds de calcul sont dotés courament de plus de dix coeurs. Cette tendance à l'augmentation du nombre de coeurs par noeud est nette et semble durable, avec l'annonce récente d'Intel de la prochaine génération de Xeon Phi Knights Landing dotée de 72 coeurs et qui sera utilisable en tant que processeur principal. À l'avenir, les machines de calcul seront massivement multi-coeur. Le domaine des cartes réseau haute-performance subit également des évolutions importantes. Le paradigme de communication dominant est longtemps resté la réception explicite, dite également send/recv. Avec l'émergence et maintenant la domination de la technologie InfiniBand, le modèle le plus répandu est désormais le RDMA, à savoir l'accès mémoire à distance. Dans ce modèle, il est possible d'accéder directement en lecture ou en écriture à la mémoire d'un noeud distant, sans action de sa part. Ces évolutions du matériel ont d'énormes répercussions sur le logiciel, et en particulier sur la gestion des communications. En effet, même si certains noeuds sont désormais équipés de plusieurs cartes réseaux, elles sont en tout état de cause en nombre bien plus restreint que le nombre de coeurs. L'accès au réseau est donc source de contention, qui va aller en s'aggravant à mesure que le nombre de coeurs augmente. Le changement de paradigme des communications réseau a également des répercussions sur la gestion des communication. En effet, s'il est actuellement courant d'écrire des pilotes qui simulent un mode send/recv sur un réseau nativement RDMA, ceci a un impact sur les performances. Il nous semble opportun d'envisager une bibliothèque de communications nativement RDMA de bout en bout, pour tirer pleinenement profit des performances, d'autant plus que les interfaces de niveau utilisateurs adoptent désormais également le paradigme one-sided. Nous avons proposé la bibliothèque NewMadeleine, capable de tirer profit des flux de communications parallèles issus de différents threads, en appliquant une stratégie d'optimisation à la volée sur les séquences de paquets. En s'appuyant sur la bibliothèque d'ordonnancement de tâches d'E/S PIOMan, elle est par ailleurs capable de paralléliser la progression des communications. En revanche, aussi bien la stratégie d'optimisation que l'ordonnancement des tâches reposent sur la connaissance d'un état global de tous les paquets et toutes les tâches ordonnancées ou en cours. Cette approche globale, donc centralisée, est efficace sur un petit nombre de coeurs, mais atteint désormais ses limites avec le grand nombre de coeurs que l'on trouve dans les nouvelles architectures. L'objet de ce sujet de mémoire de recherche est de s'intéresser aux problématiques posées à bas niveau dans la gestion des communications consécutivement aux évolutions des architectures vers un grand nombre de coeurs et un modèle réseau RDMA

The Administration of New Zealand Irrigation: History and Analysis

The sharply contrasting ways in which community irrigation schemes in New Zealand were developed and managed before and after 1990 illustrate the operation of decentralised vis-à-vis centralised (planning) industry governance systems. While the evidence is not easily quantifiable, what evidence there is suggests that the shift to a decentralised system that took place about 1990 coincides with improved irrigation efficiency. NZ irrigation thus provides an example of the global move away from centrally planned systems and illustrates the important elements of well functioning decentralised systems. Today, farmer owned companies - rather than State owned - are responsible and accountable for scheme development and management. In combination with the RMA - which enables a decentralised approach to resource use - this has facilitated innovation in scheme design, more efficient management, and better water use. It has also revealed more precisely the value of water in irrigation