Quelles contraintes limitent l'adoption d'une nouvelle technologie? Quelles technologies ont les meilleures chances d'etre adoptees? Et quels changements sont associes a cette adoption? Pour repondre a ces questions, il est souvent utile de developper un modele quantitatif capable de representer une exploitation ou un ensemble d'exploitations. L'objet de cette etude est de construire un modele bio-economique des fermes de la region du lac de Guiers et d'etudier l'impact des previsions meteorologiques sur la production et le revenu de maniere generale. Dans un premier temps nous essayerons de caracteriser la zone d'etude, ensuite nous tenterons de faire une breve presentation du logiciel utilise; une serie de scenarios et analyse des sorties du modele s'en suivront. (Resume d'auteur)
Abstract Recent improvements in the capability of statistical or dynamic models to predict climate fluctuations several months in advance may be an opportunity to improve the management of climatic risk in rain-fed agriculture. The aim of this paper is to evaluate the potential benefits that seasonal climate predictions can bring to farmers in West Africa. The authors have developed an archetypal bioeconomic model of a smallholder farm in Nioro du Rip, a semiarid region of Senegal. The model is used to simulate the decisions of farmers who have access to a priori information on the quality of the next rainy season. First, the potential economic benefits of a perfect rainfall prediction scheme are evaluated, showing how these benefits are affected by forecast accuracy. Then, the potential benefits of several widely used rainfall prediction schemes are evaluated: one group of schemes based on the statistical relationship between rainfall and sea surface temperatures, and one group based on the predictions of coupled ocean–atmosphere models. The results show that forecasting a dryer than average rainy season would be the most useful to Nioro du Rip farmers if they interpret forecasts as deterministic. Indeed, because forecasts are imperfect, predicting a wetter than average rainy season exposes the farmers to a high risk of failure by favoring cash crops such as maize and peanut that are highly vulnerable to drought. On the other hand, the farmers’ response to a forecast of a dryer than average rainy season minimizes the climate risk by favoring robust crops such as millet and sorghum, which will tolerate higher rainfall in case the forecast is wrong. When either statistical or dynamic climate models are used for forecasting under the same lead time and the same 31-yr hindcast period (i.e., 1970–2000), similar skill and economic values at farm level are found. When a dryer than average rainy season is predicted, both methods yield an increase of the farmers’ income—13.8% for the statistical model and 9.6% for the bias-corrected Development of a European Multimodel Ensemble System for Seasonal-to-Interannual Prediction (DEMETER) multimodel ensemble mean.
ABSTRACT Daptomycin exhibits clinical activity in the treatment of infections with Gram-positive organisms, including infections due to methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus . However, little is known about its penetration into bone and synovial fluid. The aim of our study was to assess the penetration of daptomycin into bone and synovial fluid after a single intravenous administration. This study was conducted in 16 patients who underwent knee or hip replacement and received a single intravenous dose of 8 mg of daptomycin per kg of body weight prior to surgery. Plasma daptomycin concentrations were measured 1 h after the end of daptomycin infusion and when bone fragments were removed. Daptomycin concentrations were also measured on bone fragments and synovial fluid collected at the same time during surgery. All samples were analyzed with a diode array–high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) method. After a single-dose intravenous infusion, bone daptomycin concentrations were above the MIC of daptomycin for Staphylococcus aureus in all subjects, and the median bone penetration percentage was 9.0% (interquartile range [IQR], 4.4 to 11.4). These results support the use of daptomycin in the treatment of Staphylococcus aureus bone and joint infections.
Improving resilience to drought in complex social-environmental systems (SES) is extraordinarily important, particularly for rural tropical locations where small changes in climate regimes can have dramatic SES impacts. Efforts to build drought resilience must necessarily be planned and implemented within SES governance systems that involve linkages in water and land use administration from local to national levels. These efforts require knowledge and understanding that links climate and weather forecasts to regional and local hydrology, to social-economic and environmental systems, and to governance processes. In order to provide structure for such complex choices and investments, we argue that a focus on structured decision processes that involve linkages among science, technological perspectives, and public values conducted with agencies and stakeholders will provide a crucial framework for comparing and building insight for pursuing alternative courses of action to build drought resilience. This paper focuses on a regional case study in the seasonally-dry northwest region of Costa Rica, in watersheds rated as most threatened in the country in terms of drought. We present the overall framework guiding the transdisciplinary efforts to link scientific and technical understanding to public values, in order to foster civil society actions that lead to improved drought resilience. Initial efforts to characterize hydrological and climate regimes will be reported along with our approach to linking natural science findings, social inventories in terms of perspectives on SES, and the psychology and patterns of reliance on forecast information that provide the basis for characterizing public understanding. The overall linkage of technical and value information is focused on creating and comparing alternative actions that can potentially build resilience in short and long time frames by building decision making processes involving stakeholders, agencies and interested parties.
Participatory modelling has to deal with strong constraints related to the expression and sharing of viewpoints and to the intelligibility of models, which implies that simplifications and trade-offs must be made. Our hypothesis is that the mediation that takes place during the foresight process helped by simulation is effective in highlighting the main issues at the local/regional scale, as well as the more probable adaptation strategies, thus making it possible to validate issues found for other scales of analysis. We analyze the foresight processes in five companion modelling (ComMod) projects on the co-evolution of extensive husbandry systems (EHS) and territories scale in France, Senegal, Brazil, Uruguay and Argentina. The processes are broken down according to the scenario study objectives, to the method of construction and to the parameters associated with models and simulations. Comparative analysis contributes to improving the design of future ComMod experiments on EHS and reveals a more operational definition of local, regional and global issues which the EES of these regions will face in the next decade.
Aim: The purpose of the study was to evaluate the feasibility of Norian SRS bone cement injected into a distal radius following reduction and stable fixation in preventing shortening and loss of pronation-supination. Material and methods: Between 1998 and 2000 48 patients with a mean age of 65 (54–82) sustained distal radius fracture (AO classification stage A in 26 cases, B in 15 cases, C in 7 cases) with metaphyseal comminution. Functionnal and radiological outcomes of the wrist (O’ Brien scorring, Gartland and Werley scoring, DASH) were evaluated with a mean follow up of 46 months (36–56) by a surgeon not involved in treatment. Fixation was performed in 34 cases by pins, in 14 cases by dorsal plate, in 2 cases by external fixator. Results: 4 patient lost of follow up and 5 mal union were excluded of final evaluation. 3 RSD were pointed on the 39 evaluated patients. O’ Brien scoring reached 84/100 (54–100), Gartland and Werley scoring reached 4,6 (0–11) with 89% excellent and good results, DASH reached 23,6 (5,8–62,7). Ulnar variance changed less than 2mm between postoperative time and maximal follow up in 88%. There were no clinically adverse effects but one case of volar extrusion of injected Norian was pointed with resolutive evolution. Bone substitute was always in place at the longest follow up. Discussion: Adams, Pogue, Mc Queen pointed the bio-mecanical and clinical advantage to fill the void secondary to the comminution to avoid the shortening of the radius. First cases reported by Kopylov and Jupiter, and prospective series of Kopylov, Sanchez Sotello and Cassidy proved the interest of an adaptative injectable cement in case of comminution. Injectable bone substitute allows to maintain the ulnar variance in competition with bone graft or bio ceramic. Conclusion: Norian is able to fill a metaphyseal void but fixation of the fracture remains necessary.
Decentralization of land use governance creates new challenges for participatory approaches, including the involvement of highly diverse participants and the search for coherence among multiple regulations. In France, the 2000 law of Urban Reform and Solidarity (Solidarite et Renouvellement Urbain) provides a legal framework to land use decentralization. It requires the planning design process to be participative and to involve civil society through consultation phases. It also addresses the issue of coherence among legal planning documents along the scale hierarchy, the larger scale plan conditioning the others. In the Reunion Island, the multi-level institutional system includes a region, its four micro-regions and 26 districts; each having their own land use plan. The revision of the regional plan (Schema d'Amenagement Regional, SAR) was the opportunity to revisit the various plans to make them more coherent across scales. This paper presents how research was included in this political process. The SAR revision was initially thought as a one-scale regular participatory foresight process in three stages, i.e. (1) a land use assessment (diagnostic); (2) the definition and discussion of contrasted scenarios; (3) the development of the final land use plan. The overall consultation process involved a large group of participants, including members of various institutions and of the civil society. They defined the logic of four contrasted land use scenarios, and sorted key challenges for the future of the Reunion Island. Stage 2 was however handled in an innovative way due to the collaboration with a research project called DOMINO- Reunion. The DOMINO-Reunion Project put together a team of researchers from various disciplinary backgrounds, and members of extension and support services for rural and agricultural development involved in the various debate on land use at each scale. Together, the team followed a companion modelling approach to develop a prototype of a dynamic model meant to assist the main players in building various land use scenarios and simulating their mid- to long-term consequences on urban, agricultural and natural stakes. A subset of participants of both processes, the SAR revision and DOMINO-Reunion, collaborated to adapt the model prototype to the SAR scenarios and feed the regional land use debate. This paper analyses how our companion modelling approach in two steps has helped integrating multi- scale stakes in the SAR revision process. It discusses specific challenges for participatory modelling, which are linked to power balance such as stakeholder's exclusion, over representation of specific interests and political co-optation, focussing on two specific processes: • the integration of multi-scale negotiation processes and indicators in the evolving model; • the implication of stakeholders, which are involved in various land use decision-making arena, in the participatory modelling of the system. We showed that companion modelling helped increase the representation and the weight of agricultural issues in the debate, although urban considerations still prevailed in the regional arena. The paper concludes on the benefits and drawback of integrating progressively different decision-marking scales in a participatory process.
