French Project Research Articles

The French project LEVEAB: remove the barriers to growing almonds in organic farming

The French project LEVEAB: remove the barriers to growing almonds in organic farming

Experimental study of poromechanical behavior of Callovo-Oxfordian claystone in undrained triaxial compression and extension tests

The Callovo-Oxfordian (COx) claystone is selected as the host rock in the French project for geological disposal of radioactive waste. In its initial state, the host rock is fully saturated. Due to the low permeability, the pore fluid pressure can locally evolve in a quasi undrained condition due to subsequent mechanical and thermal loading, and then significantly affects deformation and cracking process of geological barrier. Most previous studies were carried out in quasi drained conditions or with constant pore pressure. Poromechanical behavior of COx claystone in undrained condition has been so far rarely investigated. In the present work, we carry out a new series of laboratory tests. Two representative loading paths are considered: triaxial compression with constant confining pressure and triaxial extension with constant mean stress. The variations of strain and pore pressure are measured during the tests. It is found that the poromechanical behavior of the claystone is clearly affected by loading path. The failure strength is higher in triaxial compression than in extension. The evolution of pore fluid pressure is correlated with volumetric strain. Compared with the results obtained in drained tests, it seems that the Terzaghi effective stress can be used for the description of pore fluid pressure effect on failure strength.

An investigation into the vapour permeability and durability of natural renders on an earthen wall system

This paper describes a novel methodology for establishing the relative moisture performance of renders used to protect a novel walling system combining traditional dense cob with a low-density thermal cob. A new method of enhancing the thermal insulation of cob walls has been developed by an European Union (EU)-funded joint UK and French project called CobBauge. The external surface of traditional cob walls (comprising subsoil, fibre and water) is normally protected from driving rain by placing the walls on a short wall called a plinth, a pronounced eaves overhang and a breathable exterior render. As the low-density fibre and clay insulating layer in the CobBauge system differs from traditional cob, a method of establishing the moisture-related performance of a range of renders needed to be instituted to aid the materials selection process. A series of test panels were constructed with the thermal cob infill, faced by a number of render types. The panels were hung in an open position in a high exposure zone and the moisture content monitored using wood-block sensors, electrical resistivity and gravimetric measurements over a period of six months. The wood-block and electrical resistivity moisture measurements showed a good level of agreement with gravimetric measurements and showed a clear differentiation between the various render choices.

The embedded Wh- in situ clause: French tout court? Les spasmes musculaires incontrôlés, je sais pas c’est quoi (France Info 20/10/21)

AbstractAlthough not studied by the generative approach (Shlonsky 2017), the embedded Wh- in situ clause nevertheless belongs to the French language spoken in a large amount of areas, and, we believe, to “français tout court” (Blanche-Benveniste & Jeanjean 1987): until now, it has mainly been studied in Quebec (Lefebvre & Maisonneuve 1982; Blondeau & Ledegen 2021) and in Reunion Island (Ledegen 2007a, 2007b, 2007c, 2016; Ledegen & Martin 2020), but it has recently been massively attested in the Multicultural Paris French project in the suburbs of Paris (Gardner-Chloros & Secova 2018) and Strasbourg (Marchessou 2018). These new data could be read as a language contact, as a recent linguistic change, or as a long-established “popular” structure (Guiraud 1966), different analytical hypotheses that will be detailed in this study. These recent data also argue in favour of the methodology of ecological corpora, obtained within the framework of a strong acquaintanceship and located at the pole of communicative proximity (Koch & Oesterreicher 2001). The examination of various existing corpora will reveal the structural functioning of the structure and contrast the corpora following the modes of interaction, the oral or written medium, as well as on the chronological axis.

Maritime trajectory mining: An automatic zones of interests discovery and annotation framework⋆

As global traffic continues to grow, the identification of areas of particular significance, known as Zones of Interest (ZOI), becomes crucial for optimizing transportation systems and analyzing mobility patterns. In the maritime domain, effective ZOIs discovery is essential for enhancing route planning, improving safety measures, and managing resources efficiently. Within the context of trajectory mining, these ZOIs provide valuable insights into movement behaviors and operational efficiencies. In this paper, we present a framework for discovering and annotating ZOIs within maritime trajectories. The proposed approach involves processing raw positional data to initially identify candidate ZOIs, which are subsequently refined using contextual information. By leveraging real georeferenced vessels trajectories, collected from thousands of commercial ships, this framework proposes a structure of elements that will be implemented as part of the TNTM French project. While this research contributes to maritime field by providing a method for ZOIs discovery and annotation, it can be generalized to various application domains that may leverage of mobility data analytics.

A Mythic France for Export: Auguste Genin, Cultural Brokers, and the Third Republic's Mission Civilisatrice in Porfirian Mexico

Abstract: Historians of Mexico after its independence from Spain in 1821, especially during the era of rapid modernization under President Porfirio Díaz (1876–1911), speak generally of the strong French cultural influence on the middling and privileged classes in the Republic who viewed France as a model of emulation for national development. This afrancesamiento (Francophilia) is often taken for granted and few have questioned what "Frenchness" meant at a time when France itself was constructing a national identity, who were its greatest promoters in Mexico, and how did the Mexican experience compare with the Third Republic's (1870–1940) civilizing mission ( mission civilizatrice ) in France's formal colonies in Southeast Asia and Africa. The goal of this article is two-fold. The first is to advance the notion of certain members of the French immigrant community in Porfirian Mexico as cultural brokers, and the second is to place the French model of modernity to which these foreign residents and Mexican elites referred to in its domestic and larger imperial context. The influential Franco-Mexican Auguste Genin and his writings offer an illustrative case study through which to introduce and assess this. Particularly revealing is how Genin imagines the process by which the indigenous population of Mexico would be transformed into modern citizens and how this project—this imaginary construct—found a source of inspiration in the simultaneous French project to construct a French identity and a model ideology for overseas empire during the Third Republic.

Modelling the uncertainties of wind farm noise predictions

Representative predictions of wind turbine noise require to accurately model the main mechanisms and characteristics of acoustic emission (i.e., extended sound source with aeroacoustic noise generation) and acoustic propagation in outdoor environment (i.e., ground effects and atmospheric properties). As these phenomena fluctuate over time and space, it leads to great uncertainty on Sound Pressure Level (SPL) estimated at local resident bulidings/facades. Such uncertainty is not yet properly quantified by engineering noise prediction models. Thus, this paper presents a modeling tool developed in the framework of the French project PIBE, which aims at quantifying the SPL uncertainty involved in wind farm noise predictions. Ultimately, this modeling tool will be freely available online and will help to better understand the risk of noise pollution at each stage of a wind farm's life, in order to guarantee compliance with the regulatory requirements concerning the exposure of local populations.

The role of media, policy and regional heterogeneity in renewable energy project crowdfunding

Renewable energy public tenders require French project developers to rely on local crowdfunding to finance their projects in exchange for a mark-up on the energy selling price. In this paper, I study the effects of media-coverage and geographical restrictions on the number of participants of successful crowdfunding campaigns and their duration. I tackle this question using an internet scrapped dataset on the financing characteristics of successful renewable energy campaigns from a leading French crowdfunding platform, Lendopolis, over the 2017–2021 period. First, I find that the higher the media coverage, the larger the number of investors. I uncover that using a combination of social and traditional media attracts more investors than using a single outlet. Second, I show that an unintended policy consequence is that geographically restricted campaigns are longer and involve fewer investors. Third, I find evidence that the impact of geographical restrictions varies across regions. Regional heterogeneity in terms of income, internet connectivity, and population density affects the number of investors and the duration of the geographically restricted campaigns.

Numerical study to evaluate characteristics of an embedded SHM sensor to prevent rebar corrosion in concrete using magnetic flux density

Rebars corrosion is the main durability threat of Reinforced Concrete (RC) structures that reduce the service life, in marine environment. The chloride ions penetration to RC, can accelerate the corrosion process which increase RC structures collapsing risk. Therefore, regular health monitoring inspections is necessary to evaluate chlorides ingress, before they reach rebars. Many None Destructive Techniques (NDT), such as Electrochemical or Electromagnetic (EM) Methods, have been developed to detect rebar’s corrosion. However, most of them are not able to precisely determine the chlorides transfer mechanism or their results suffer from uncertainty and cannot distinguish chloride ions from other environmental factors changing. Under framework of ANR French project LabCom OHMIGOD, we want to propose a novel Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) sensor for detection of chlorides penetration front in cover concrete, as preventive ND method. The sensor is made of magnetic and ferromagnetic materials that are sensitive to chloride ions and could generate magnetic flux density (B), as output signature. By embedding sensor in cover concrete, exposed to chlorides penetration, corrosion could emerge on the sensor’s reactive part. Thereby, its geometrical properties and consequently, its output signature would be affected, too. By using an external interrogator, it would be possible to obtain variation of B, in function of corrosion evolution on sensor, as ND observable. In order to evaluate the sensor’s characteristics, we present a sensor’s numerical model and thereby, the related efficient geometrical parameters (surface and thickness) and also the location in concrete, are investigated. We used the Finite Element Method (FEM) for numerical modeling of the sensor. The simulation results show that the variation range of B, up to 70% is achieved for the reactive part geometry of 25 mm × 25 mm × 0.8 mm, in depth’s range of 1 cm up to 3 cm from concert’s surface.

A Jesuit-Lyonnais Project in Nineteenth-Century Beirut: Multiplicities of the Local and Global at the Université Saint-Joseph

This paper examines the establishment of the Jesuit Université Saint-Joseph from 1875 in Beirut and explores the Jesuits’ dual allegiance to France and Rome. Countering the prevailing notion that the University was a French project in this period, I contend that the Jesuit Mission was much more reliant on its supranational Jesuit network than on French imperial support. Questioning precisely how the Jesuits were able to construct such an imposing urban complex in a city under Ottoman rule, I show that “empire” and “nation” were not bounded notions in the nineteenth century. Rather, the Jesuit project was simultaneously inscribed within multiple localities and spheres of influence that allowed the Jesuits to navigate various oppositions and to ensure the survival of their project in the city. By operating at the fringes of what constituted “foreign” or “colonial” power, they were able to consolidate their urban position; their constructions became the basis for their later integration with French colonial interests. Thus, the case study of the Université Saint-Joseph opens up the possibility of understanding colonial architecture not as an extension of colonial power but as a precondition for it.

LiDAR and SCADA data processing for interacting wind turbine wakes with comparison to analytical wake models

This study is a follow up on a previous one carried out within the frame of the French project SMARTEOLE, during which, a ground-based scanning LiDAR measurement campaign was conducted in the onshore wind farm of Sole du Moulin Vieux. That previous study focused on the wakes of two wind turbines that experienced different degrees of interaction depending on the incoming wind direction, through the processing of LiDAR measurements. The measurement duration (7 months) ensured the statistical convergence of the ensemble-averaged flow fields obtained after holding a categorisation process based on the wind speed at hub height, wind direction, and atmospheric stability, where only near-neutral stability conditions were considered. The present study focuses on integrating the operational data of the wind turbines through SCADA processing to complement the LiDAR wake field observations and to be used as an input for analytical wake models. First, the correlation between the atmospheric stability, deduced from MERRA-2 dataset, and the free-stream turbulence intensity, measured by the wind turbines’ anemometers, is studied for different wind speed ranges. It is observed that the turbulence intensity tends towards a consistent value as the atmospheric stability approaches near-neutral stability conditions, giving confidence into the applied strategy of data categorisation based on MERRA-2 outputs. The influence of the degree of wake interaction on the wake added turbulence, the velocity and power deficits between both turbines is assessed. Clear trends between the wake added turbulence and both the velocity and power deficits are detected. Consequently, two fitting laws are proposed. Then, different analytical wake models and wake superposition methods are fed with the operational data deduced from the processed SCADA data, and are used for predicting the evolution of the velocity deficit within the wake. Some statistical metrics are used for error quantification of the different engineering wake models compared to the scanning LiDAR measurements, used as reference, and Blondel and Cathelain produces the closest results to the field measurements.

Numerical modelling of a large tunnel lining in a creeping rock mass based on 20 years monitoring data

The French project of deep geological storage for nuclear waste (Cigéo) gives rise to a lot of innovative issues for underground space technologies. For example, the nuclear activity of the waste generates temperature effects on the lining, needing to mitigate the number of waste containers in the gallery section. For the Intermediate-Level waste (ILW), thanks to lower temperature effects, the number of containers in the cross section can safely be increased. Therefore, a largest diameter gallery (10 meters) could be more cost effective. The challenge is to design the lining of such a gallery for 100 years in a context of high displacements, due to 500 meters overburden and the creeping behaviour of the rock mass (COx argillite). To improve our understanding of long term behaviour of large galleries, this paper details the experience of the road tunnel of Chamoise (France), including an advanced processing of the available data (rock and lining displacements, linings yielding) recorded since the tunnel excavation, more than 20 years ago. Besides, a numerical modelling of the tunnel has been carried out, using two constitutive laws accounting for a viscoplastic mechanism: L&K (EDF) and H&B-Lemaitre (ANDRA). The simulations results have then been compared with the processed records on 20 years. Finally, the calculations have been carried on until 100 years, improving the demonstration of feasibility of a large gallery in claystone for the challenging Cigéo project.

PeaMUST (Pea MultiStress Tolerance), a multidisciplinary French project uniting researchers, plant breeders, and the food industry

AbstractThe French government has supported as part of its “Investments for the Future” program a 9‐year research project, PeaMUST, devoted to pea and to a lesser extent, faba bean improvement. Focusing on the main causes of yield irregularity that limit pea and faba bean cultivation, an integrated approach, including molecular exploitation of the pea genome sequence, was applied to identify and incorporate favorable alleles and allele combinations in prebreeding material.

Dynamic Processes in Dictionaries of Word Associations in French

The paper presents preliminary results of the comparison of the Dictionaries of word associations for French referred further to as FAS-1 and FAS-2, compiled respectively in 2010 and 2020. To check the reliability of their data we used information on word associations provided by an alternative source, the French project Jeuxdemots, which began in 2007. The first part of the article accounts for dynamic processes in the vocabulary of direct associative dictionaries, focusing on the analysis of the associative field of the adjective malade . We established that the psycholinguistic meaning of this item hasn’t undergone considerable changes during the last 10 years: most frequent associations are the same, its structure has not changed, small semantic changes in the content of certain categories are not essential and can be neglected. As for its structure, the associative field of malade includes the following major slots: ‘kind of disease’, ‘symptoms’, ‘treatment’, ‘visual characteristics of the patient’, ‘ways of spreading’, ‘health’, and some other related concepts. Cultural allusions and reactions to the form (not to the meaning) of the lexeme were singled out too. The paper also puts emphasis on the emergence of words related as reactions to the pandemic of COVID-19 though they represent only 0.03 % of the 506317 reactions collected in FAS-2. To provide a comprehensive comparison, dynamic changes in the inverse vocabulary were also studied. The list of reactions elicited by 50 or more stimuli (so called super-connectors) was analyzed, as well as the list of the most frequent reactions. For this purpose, two special research dictionaries were designed, based on the reactions to 610 identical stimuli. The lists of the first 75 super-connectors in FAS-1 and FAS-2, as well as the most frequent reactions, proved to be almost identical. We only observed an increase in the frequency and number of stimuli which provoked reactions related to the material side of life (namely, work, earning money, studies), and their decrease for reactions related to social life. However, to summarize the major result of the comparative analysis, we may state that the changes in the associative norms of speakers of French are insignificant, being within the statistical margin of error.

ExxonMobil backing French pyrolysis project

ExxonMobil backing French pyrolysis project

Assessment of plutonium inventory management in the french nuclear fleet with the fuel cycle simulator CLASS

The ASTRID French project aimed at designing, building and operating a sodium fast reactor cooled with liquid sodium. One of the goals of the project was to demonstrate the feasibility of the plutonium multi-recycling in a fast spectrum. Commissariat à l’énergie atomique et aux énergies alternatives (CEA - Atomic & Alternative Energies Commission) has recently announced the abandon of the project which involves that no sodium fast reactor project is planned in France. As a consequence, there is a real interest in assessing technical feasibility for alternative plutonium management. In this work, the plutonium multi-recycling in PWR is assessed from fuel cycle simulations performed with the library CLASS developed by CNRS/IN2P3. The technical conditions for plutonium incineration and stabilization are investigated. It is shown that plutonium can be stabilized with 30% of PWR using multi-reprocessed plutonium in MOX fuel, the rest being composed by PWR loaded with UOX. The transuranic (plutonium and minor actinides) stabilization involves a plutonium incineration. For this reason, around 50% of PWR using multi-reprocessed plutonium is required and the nuclear power has to decrease. In this paper, the methodology and the output analysis are described in detail.

Biblissima

Reviewed by: Biblissima Róisín Astell Biblissima. https://biblissima.fr/Managed by Anne-Marie Turcan-Verkerk, Scientific Director, École Pratique des Hautes Études There are many useful online repositories cataloguing medieval manuscripts and early modern printed books in French collections. While each is important, the multiplication of such catalogues has created a fragmented landscape of digital resources. Every platform has a different interface, many are old-fashioned in design and function, each offers different search capabilities, and the data among them vary. Trying to find information about a manuscript often involves going back and forth among these websites. This is where Biblissima comes in. Biblissima is a French project funded by the Agence Nationale de la Recherche’s “Investissements d’Avenir” and is run by the Campus Condorcet. Its aims are to provide an online data facility for historians focusing on the history of ancient and modern collections and the circulation of books. By sharing information from research communities in France and beyond, Biblissima has created an indispensable online library of medieval manuscripts and early modern books for researchers. Ten founding partners across France participate in the Biblissima project.1In 2013, the Biblissima Consortium was formed from a group of twelve research institutions acting as supervisory authorities to the founding partners. Since then, the project has collaborated with international institutions, including the University of Oxford, the University of Padua, and the University of Mississippi. The main goal of Biblissima is to federate digital libraries that contain digitized medieval manuscripts and early printed books. The project has clustered the data from existing collections and created a digital image repository, bringing information from as many as forty databases from across French institutions. These data have then been linked to the online platform documenting digital editions and a digital image repository. This platform, known as the Biblissima portal, provides unified access to the digital data of medieval manuscripts, incunabula, and early printed books produced by the partners of the Biblissima consortium. [End Page 331] The portal regularly receives updates every three to four months. The ever-growing database contains nearly 124,000 manuscripts, more than 300,000 illuminations and decorations, 7,000 editions, and more than 19,000 early printed books. Its interface is straightforward to use. Via a search bar on the homepage, one can comb through key sections, such as “Manuscripts and Early Printed Books,” “Places,” “Historical Collections,” and the “Iconographic Thesaurus.” These can also be accessed directly below or in the dropdown menu “Explore,” via the tool-bar at the top of the page. The IIIF embedded Mirador viewer is a fantastic workspace for researchers, allowing users to view individual pages as an open book or in a gallery format. The “My Selection” option appears at the top of individual manuscript pages. This organizes your manuscript selections into a basket and allows you to open them in a new Mirador viewer and compare them with one another. You can then save and share these workspaces. Another useful feature is the Iconographic Thesaurus, which uses metadata from the Mandragore (BnF) and Initiale (IRHT-CNRS) databases. Its interface is a vast improvement on the existing Mandragore website. That site was published online in 2003 and remains outdated and difficult to navigate and offers only low-resolution images. In contrast, the Biblissima Thesaurus contains more than 160 thematic categories and about 27,000 descriptors. There are thirteen main categories, which are further divided. They include Arts (divided into Architecture, Textiles, Painting, Illumination, Stained Glass, etc.); Bible and Apocrypha (Old Testament, New Testament, etc.); Geography (Africa, Germany, Asia, Oceans, etc.); and Science (Astronomy, Meteorology, Optics, etc.). Within these secondary divisions are associated descriptors that provide further avenues for searching. For example, in Architecture, one can find descriptors of abbey, architect, non-specific architecture, baptistry, trilobed arches, and flying buttresses. (Note: all of the descriptors are in French, even when you are using the English version. In future updates, it would be helpful to make these available in English and other languages.) Searching by using iconography terms is simple. You can either make your way through the different lists or use the toolbar at the top of the page. When searching for words...

Evolution in the real-world therapeutic strategies in more than 20,000 women with breast cancer having received human epidermal growth factor receptor 2-targeted treatments: Results from the french personalized reimbursement model database (2011-2018).

There is a growing need for real-world data on cancer treatments usage, especially to assess compliance with recommendations. We developed a French project using hospital data to analyse evolution in the therapeutic strategies implemented in patients with human epidermal growth factor receptor 2 (HER2)-overexpressed (HER2+) breast cancer (BC) and exposed to injectable HER2-targeted therapies, i.e. trastuzumab, pertuzumab or trastuzumab emtansine (T-DM1). Data from 26,350 women with BC were extracted in September 2018 from the Electronic Pharmacy Record systems of 120 French randomly recruited hospitals. Evolution in the treatments used, and combination regimens were described from 2011, in accordance with the BC stage and treatment line. Overall, 21,119 patients treated since 2011 were analysed: 16,398 patients with early BC (eBC) and 6030 patients with metastatic BC (mBC) including patients treated at both stages. In eBC, 89.2% of patients received trastuzumab combined with at least taxanes (trastuzumab-taxane-anthracycline: 62.6%). Patients with mBC weretreated in the first line (80.3%) and/or the second line (40.1%) and/or≥the third line (28.3%). After its approval in 2014, pertuzumab was first used in first-line therapy combinations in 67.4% of the total cases, while trastuzumab-taxane decreased from 47.2% to 9.2%. Similarly, T-DM1 was used as the second-line treatment in 53.8% of cases. Given recent changes in available treatments for patients with HER2+ BC, this large French project provides robust information on real-world evolution in therapeutic strategies. Our data suggest there is room for significant improvement in optimal drug utilisation. Such data will be useful to build drug-related indicators for future value-based pricing solutions.

Co-Designing a New Educational Tablet App for Preschoolers

This paper describes a French research project to co-design an early literacy/early numeracy tablet app for kindergarten students. In order to create an app that takes into account classroom/teaching constraints and the results of recent research, we adopted a theoretical co-design framework and followed a methodology involving researchers, education professionals and software engineers. We describe the design process and the app’s educational content, together with the results of an initial trial of the app on a small sample of preschoolers, which showed that it is ready for larger scale testing. We conclude by discussing the specificities of our project and its contribution to the literature on the development of classroom apps for preschoolers.

How to make smoking prevention work for vulnerable populations: insights from French project DCAP

Abstract Issue Smoking prevention interventions tend to reach with difficulty young people and disadvantaged groups in France. Yet, limited research provides practical evidence detailing tobacco prevention interventions (TPI) aimed at them. Documenting the practical experience of health promotion, social and education workers tackling this issue is therefore crucial. To that end, the French Society for Public Health designed and carries out a project to CAPitalize experiential Data on TPI: DCAP. DCAP Initiated in 2019, DCAP consists in capitalizing, i.e. collecting, documenting and circulating, experiential knowledge from practitioners who implement TPI at the local level for young people and vulnerable people. Goals include building up original knowledge from field actions, documenting how TPI unfold in various contexts and take into account health inequalities, and supporting professional practices. DCAP follows 3 main steps: 1/identifying promising TPI, 2/ documenting selected TPI and the key mechanisms impacting how TPI unfold (context, partnerships, barriers and levers, ethics), 3/ sharing knowledge built up on TPI, via an online portal. Results DCAP will document 40 interventions total. Preliminary results, based on TPI documented in 2019, highlight experiential knowledge built up to face 3 types of Issues 1/building and sustaining partnerships for long-term TPI programs, between health professionals, schools and parents for example, 2/building support for TPI in difficult contexts: prisons, emergency housing, etc. 3/innovating and inventing collective TPI adjusted for disadvantaged groups. Insights also emerge on current trends. For example, programs for young people tend nowadays to favor global approaches to addiction prevention over smoking prevention alone. Lessons Most TPI remain confidential yet form a rich corpus of original and practical evidence other stakeholders can benefit from. Future research projects can also benefit from the data collected through DCAP. Key messages Documenting the practical experience health promotion, social and education workers hold is crucial to share knowledge and implement tobacco prevention interventions that work for vulnerable people. DCAP details key mechanisms in smoking prevention interventions aimed at vulnerable groups in France, including long-lasting partnerships building and innovative collective formats design.