We provide general expressions for the joint distributions of the k most significant b-ary digits and of the k leading continued fraction (CF) coefficients of outcomes of arbitrary continuous random variables. Our analysis highlights the connections between the two problems. In particular, we give the general convergence law of the distribution of the jth significant digit, which is the counterpart of the general convergence law of the distribution of the jth CF coefficient (Gauss-Kuz’min law). We also particularise our general results for Benford and Pareto random variables. The former particularisation allows us to show the central role played by Benford variables in the asymptotics of the general expressions, among several other results, including the analogue of Benford’s law for CFs. The particularisation for Pareto variables—which include Benford variables as a special case—is especially relevant in the context of pervasive scale-invariant phenomena, where Pareto variables occur much more frequently than Benford variables. This suggests that the Pareto expressions that we produce have wider applicability than their Benford counterparts in modelling most significant digits and leading CF coefficients of real data. Our results may find practical application in all areas where Benford’s law has been previously used.

Combination therapy of peginterferon and ribavirin for HCV has been recommended as a first choice for chronic hepatitis C. INF therapy has been associated with various IFN-related adverse events, such as psychological disturbances. Beyond that preexisting mental disorders are considered risk factors for INF-alfa-induced severe psychiatric side effects such as depression and/or suicidality, consequently many of these patients remain untreated even tough they fulfil the medical criteria for antiviral treatment of chronic hepatitis C.

The authors relate the case of a patient, 56 year's old, sent to infecciology consultation because she had alterations in abnormal liver function tests. She had a previous history of mental disorder with neurotic personality traits and she was treated with psychiatric medication.

She had treatment for chronic hepatitis C with peginterferon and ribavirin as well psychiatric and psychotherapeutic support.

A low sustained virologic response was obtained however the depressive picture has been difficult to handle so she had had already had a psychiatric hospitalization. There were several adverse life events that can not be forgotten as they certainly trigger and exacerbate the depressive symptomatology.

We assume that psychiatric patients have more depressive symptoms before and during treatment compared with patients without no psychiatric history. This shows that this patients have an increase need for treatment with antidepressants and that a close cooperation with a psychiatrist is always needed.

Although overhunting is amongst the main threats to biodiversity, wild meat is culturally and nutritionally important for many communities. Conservation initiatives should therefore address the drivers of hunting, rather than its practice alone. Here we gathered information from structured interviews with 68 local households to assess the drivers of hunting in a highly threatened Amazonian savannah complex, the Cerrado of Amapá in Brazil. We used regression models to evaluate the influence of socio-economic parameters and spatial variables on hunting prevalence and frequency. The only identified driver of hunting prevalence was forest cover, whereas five variables had significant effects on hunting frequency. The positive effect of forest cover and the negative effect of hunter's age on hunting frequency suggest that logistical and physical feasibility are important drivers of hunting frequency. Furthermore, we suggest that the negative effect of distance to urban centres may be related to the profitability of hunting. We base this on the negative effect of river length in the vicinity of households and per capita monthly income on hunting frequency, which corroborates the tendency of hunting frequency to decrease when alternatives to wild meat are more readily available. We argue that to reduce unsustainable hunting it is necessary both to raise awareness amongst local communities and involve them in the creation of management plans that conserve biodiversity and meet economic and social needs.

In recent decades, concern about rabbit welfare and sustainability has increased. The housing system is a very important factor for animal welfare. However, information about how different available housing types for female rabbits affect their health status is scarce, but this is an important factor for their welfare. Hence, the objective of this study was to evaluate the health status of female rabbits in five common housing systems: three different single-housing systems with distinct available surfaces and heights; a single-housing system with a platform; a collective system. Female rabbits in the collective and platform cages had greater cortisol concentrations in hair than those in the single-housing system with no platform. Haptoglobin concentrations and kit mortality rates during lactation were greater for the collective-cage female rabbits. The collective group had more culled females and more lesions than in the other groups. The main reasons for culling in all the groups were reproduction problems and presence of abscesses, and the collective group of females was the most affected. In conclusion, it appears that keeping females together in collective systems negatively affects their health status and welfare, while single-housing systems imply lower kit mortality rates during lactation and cortisol concentrations, and fewer lesions in female rabbits.

This work presents an alternative methodology for monitoring flight performance during airline operations using the available inboard instrumentation system. This method tries to reduce the disadvantages of the traditional specific range monitoring technique where instrumentation noise and cruise stabilisation conditions affect the quality of the performance monitoring results. The proposed method consists of using an unscented Kalman filter for aircraft performance identification using Newton’s flight dynamic equations in the body X, Y and Z axis. The use of the filtering technique reduces the effect of instrumentation and process noise, enhancing the reliability of the performance results. Besides the better quality of the monitoring process, using the proposed technique, additional results that are not possible to predict with the specific range method are identified during the filtering process. An example of these possible filtered results that show the advantages of this proposed methodology are the aircraft fuel flow offsets, as predicted in the specific range method, but also other important aircraft performance parameters as the aircraft lift and drag coefficients (CL and CD), sideslip angle (β) and wind speeds, giving the operator a deeper understanding of its aircraft operational status and the possibility to link the operational monitoring results to aircraft maintenance scheduling. This work brings a cruise stabilisation example where the selected performance monitoring parameters such as fuel flow factors, lift and drag bias, winds and sideslip angle are identified using only the inboard instrumentation such as the GPS/inertial sensors, a calibrated anemometric system and the angle-of-attack vanes relating each flight condition to a specific aircraft performance monitoring result. The results show that the proposed method captures the performance parameters by the use of the Kalman filter without the need of a strict stabilisation phase as it is recommended in the traditional specific range method, giving operators better flexibility when analysing and monitoring fleet performance.

When embryos are cultured individually or in small groups, blastocyst yield efficiency and quality are usually reduced. The aim of this work was to investigate the effect of supplementation of the embryo culture medium (CM) with several growth factors (GFs) on embryo development and apoptosis rate when a reduced number of embryos were in vitro cultured. Two experimental studies (ES) were carried out. In ES 1, five treatments were tested to study the effect of GF on embryo development: Control (∼30 to 50 embryos cultured in 500 μl of CM); Control 5 (Five embryos cultured in 50 μl microdrops of CM), without addition of GF in either of the two control groups; epidermal GF (EGF); IGF-I; and transforming GF-α (TGF-α) (Five embryos were cultured in 50 μl microdrops of CM with 10 ng/ml EGF, 10 ng/ml IGF-I or 10 ng/ml TGF-α, respectively). In ES 2, following the results obtained in ES 1, four different treatments were tested to study their effect on embryo development and quality (number of cells per blastocyst and apoptotic rate): Control; Control 5; EGF, all three similar to ES 1; EGF + IGF-I group (five embryos cultured in 50 μl microdrops of CM with 10 ng/ml EGF and 10 ng/ml IGF-I). In both ESs, it was observed that a higher proportion of embryos cultured in larger groups achieved blastocyst stage than embryos cultured in reduced groups (22.6% v. 14.0%, 12.6% and 5.3% for Control v. Control 5, IGF-I, TGF-α groups in ES 1, and 24.9% v. 17.1% and 19.0% for Control v. Control 5 and EGF in ES 2, respectively; P < 0.05), with the exception of embryos cultured in medium supplemented with EGF (18.5%) or with EGF + IGF-I (23.5%), in ES 1 and ES 2, respectively. With regard to blastocyst quality, embryos cultured in reduced groups and supplemented with EGF, alone or combined with IGF-I, presented lower apoptosis rates than embryos cultured in reduced groups without GF supplementation (11.6% and 10.5% v. 21.9% for EGF, EGF + IGF-I and Control 5 groups, respectively; P < 0.05). The experimental group did not affect the total number of cells per blastocyst. In conclusion, this study showed that supplementation of the CM with EGF and IGF could partially avoid the deleterious effect of in vitro culture of small groups of bovine embryos, increasing blastocyst rates and decreasing apoptosis rates of these blastocysts.

Micromanipulation of oocytes is time consuming during ICSI experiments; however the ‘time frame’ to manipulate oocytes without a drop in efficiency is not very wide due to the use of not completely matured and/or aged MII oocytes. Therefore, the aim of this work was to study the effect of a short roscovitine pretreatment for 5 h and two different IVM periods (5R + 40IVM or 5R + 45IVM) and a prolonged IVM time from 45 h (45IVM) to 50 h (50IVM) on parthenogenetic and ICSI embryo development, in order to fit the time frame to manipulate pig oocytes to the whole labour day session. In the first experiment, oocytes, pretreated with roscovitine and IVM cultured for 5 h, showed a similar nuclear stage as non-cultured oocytes and a significantly higher percentage of GVI-GVII oocytes compared with non-roscovitine treated oocytes cultured for 5 h in IVM conditions. When COC were cultured under the 5R + 40IVM system, nuclear maturation and cleavage rates after electrical activation were significantly lower than when COC were cultured under the 45IVM, 50IVM and 5R + 45IVM culture systems (54.2% vs. 72.6–76.8% and 58.8% vs. 81.4–88.3%, respectively). However, this difference was not statistically significant for parthenogenote blastocyst rate. No differences were observed in MII and in parthenogenote and ICSI embryo development among 45IVM, 50IVM and 5R + 45IVM experimental groups. In conclusion, under our conditions and using parthenogenetic and ICSI embryos, we observed that it is feasible to prolong the pig oocyte manipulation ‘time frame’ by at least 5 h with no significant drop in blastocyst rate.

The viability of SCNT embryos is poor, with an extremely low cloned piglet production rate. In the present work, we studied the effect of three activation protocols based on ionomycin treatment (5 μM ionomycin for 5 min and incubated in 2 mM 6-DMAP for 3.5 h) or electric stimuli (two square wave electrical DC pulses of 1.2 kV/cm for 30 μs) combined or not with 6-DMAP on parthenogenetic embryo development. Oocytes activated by ionomycin plus 6-DMAP showed lower cleavage (47.2 vs. 78.5–81.5; p < 0.05) and blastocyst rates (11.3 vs. 29.2–32.1; p < 0.05) than those activated by electrical and electrical plus 6-DMAP treatments. Also, we studied the effect of addition of serum to maturation medium (0% vs. 10%) on nuclear maturation and further parthenogenetic and SCNT embryo development. We observed in the parthenogenetic embryos that cleavage rates in the serum-free group were significantly higher than in the serum-supplemented group (81.8 vs. 69.6% respectively; p < 0.05), although these differences were not detected in blastocyst rates or blastocyst nuclei numbers. Regarding SCNT embryos, no significant differences were observed in cleavage or blastocyst rates between different experimental groups of SCNT embryos. In conclusion, electrical pulse followed or not by 6-DMAP was found to be an efficient procedure to artificially activate MII porcine oocytes. Moreover, the addition of serum to oocyte maturation media did not seem to improve parthenogenetic or SCNT porcine embryo development.

Multi-drug-resistant gastrointestinal nematode parasite populations are becoming more and more prevalent. Since anthelmintic treatments are of limited effectiveness, one solution could be to replace the anthelmintic-resistant population by a susceptible population, in order to re-establish the possibility of drug-based anthelmintic control. We investigated this substitution strategy in 4 paddocks of 0·7 ha, each of which was seeded with a benzimidazole-resistant Teladorsagia circumcincta population. The proportion of benzimidazole-resistant worms in these paddocks ranged from 20% to 89%. A 2-step replacement was performed: first, the paddocks were not grazed for 6 months (from December to July), and then the grass was cut to eliminate any residual infective larvae, before contaminating each of the paddocks with 10 seeder lambs experimentally infected with a benzimidazole-susceptible strain of T. circumcincta (from July to November). At the end of the experiment, all the populations on the 4 paddocks were phenotypically benzimidazole-susceptible, but genotyping indicated that 2 populations harboured 1% and 3% resistant worms respectively. This study demonstrates that nematode replacement is feasible in temperate areas, using semi-intensive stock management, even when the initial levels of benzimidazole-resistance are very high. Further research should next assess replacing the whole community to cope with the species diversity observed under field conditions.

Hydrogen incorporation in n-type Si-doped GaAs epilayers is now a well-known process. This paper is devoted to the study of the stability of SiH (SiD) complexes when submitted to an electron beam in n-type Si-doped GaAs epilayer and also in 2D-AlGaAs heterostructures exposed to a hydrogen or deuterium plasma.

The results obtained by Hall effect measurements on hydrogenated and deuterated GaAs epilayers with different thicknesses (0.2 and 0.35νm) and Si planar-doped AlGaAs/GaAs/InGaAs heterostructures exposed to an electron beam with different injection energies (10 to 50 keV) are presented. On one hand, the reactivation of Si dopants strongly decreases when deuterium is used. On the other hand, the study of this reactivation versus injection energies of electrons suggests an energetic electron excitation effect rather than a minority carrier generation effect. In addition, for the 0.2νm thick GaAs epilayer and the 2D heterostructures, the free carrier density does not vary significantly for low electron densities, and as a consequence, the reactivation of the Si dopants occurs above an electron dose threshold. This phenomenon might be attributed to the filling of surface states as the dopants are progressively reactivated.

As a result, due to the electron dose threshold as well as their high electron mobility properties, Si planar-doped AlGaAs/GaAs/InGaAs heterostructures are particularly interesting to reactivate dopants, with a good spatial contrast, using an electron beam irradiation and the effects described in this paper could open the fabrication of high mobility 1D or 2D mesoscopic structures for electronic or optoelectronic applications.

In GaAs, (Si,H) complexes are efficiently dissociated at 300 K by photons with energies above 3.5 eV. Their optical cross-section is 10-19-10-18 cm2. This dissociation is the result of an electronic excitation of the Si-H bond of the complex from a bonding state to an antibonding state. (Si,H) and (S,H) complexes in AlGaAs alloys are also dissociated under UV illumination with optical cross-sections similar to GaAs. In passivated 2D AlGaAs-GaAs heterostructures, the evolution of the extra sheet carrier concentration at low photon densities presents a loss of free carriers attributed to the filling of surface states. In AlGaAs and in 2D AlGaAs-GaAs heterostructures, the replacement of hydrogen by deuterium in the complexes shows that the (Si,D) and (S,D) complexes are significantly more stable than the (Si,H) and (S,H) complexes as previously found in GaAs:Si,H.

Previously, atomic hydrogen has been shown to be effective in reducing the segregation of Sb on Si(100) during solid source molecular beam epitaxy growth. In this work we have investigated the electrical activation of the Sb. Using Hall measurements, spreading resistance profilometry, and secondary ion mass spectrometry, we have demonstrated that the co-deposition of atomic hydrogen during Sb doping of Si at 500°C produced well-defined doping spikes. Comparing the sheet carrier concentration obtained by Hall measurements to the Sb atomic concentration obtained by SIMS, the overall activation of the Sb was greater than 50%.

To produce Silicon-On-Insulator (SOI) materials with thin Si overlayer, sacrificial oxidation is often used. This creates defects which have adverse effects on device performance. It has been observed that Stacking Faults (SFs) in thin Separation-by-IMplantation-of-OXygen (SIMOX) or Bonded-and-Etched-back-SOI (BESOI) films of less than 600 Å, do not shrink as expected during neutral Ar anneals. Shrinkage of SFs in standard bulk substrates with different capping layers has been investigated to promote the understanding of the Si/Si02 interface effects on Si interstitial incorporation during anneals. The activation energy for growth and shrinkage of SOI samples thicker than 800 A was found to be the same as bulk Si: 2.3 eV (growth) and 4.6 eV (shrinkage). Bulk silicon implanted with low doses of oxygen, permitted investigation of the nucleation sites of SFs in SIMOX where oxygen precipitates are believed to act as nuclei for SFs. A five step etch procedure was modified to reveal the defects in very thin SOI and an automatic defect counting system developed at T.C.D. permitted fast and reliable measurements of size and density of the defects. It appears that the two Frank partial dislocations that bound SFs, are pinned at the two Si/Si02 interfaces for both SIMOX and BESOI films thinner than 500 Å. In thicker SOI, the mechanisms for growth and shrinkage of SFs are the same as for bulk silicon.