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In this paper, the results of a short-term tracing experiment carried out at a beach compartment along the Bay of Nice (southern France) are presented. Nice urban beach is characterized by persistent offshore sediment loss issues that force the local administration to operate frequent artificial replenishments to maintain the current configuration, which also protects the well-renown Promenade des Anglais from high-energy events. As beach refills are quite expensive, the aim of the paper is to provide novel insights about the transport processes of pebble-sized tracers, which might support the Municipality to better adjust future interventions. Pebbles were tracked by means of the Radio Frequency Identification technology, largely used in such settings because of its reliability and efficiency. In addition, the morphology of the beach was monitored during the three-days-long experiment by airborne and ground topographic surveys, as well as the shape and the size of the tracers. Finally, a wave model was produced to simulate wave propagation in the nearshore, which validates the observed transport patterns. The results documented a low recovery rate (56%) 4 h after tracer injection, which is uncharacteristic considering that it jumped to 91% after the second survey, 24 h after the injection. At the end of the experiment (48 h), the recovery rate sank to 14%. These data were adequate to identify a few trends in pebble transport: tracer recovery rate in the swash zone was very low, while many marked pebbles were found at the step crest. Although this transport pattern may corroborate the offshore movement of the sediments, the topographic surveys revealed the destruction and re-formation of the fair-weather berm overnight, which would imply the presence of a shoreward transport under low energy wave conditions. While size did not single out any tendency, shape did: spheres rolled down the beachface earlier than disks; by contrast, disk-shaped pebbles moved for longer distances than spheres. These findings will be useful for local coastal managers because next beach fills will be planned and optimized based on the observed transport patterns. Though the selection of disk-shaped pebbles implies increasing costs, replenishments would be more efficient and fine-tuned for this sector of coast, which would ultimately save resources reducing negative impacts on the environment along the way. These considerations are valid for the Bay of Nice, but they might be useful wherever coarse-clastic beaches need recurring replenishments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a period of significant change caused by economic and ecological crises, the adaptability of urban planning has become a necessity. Temporary planning takes place in abandoned urban spaces that sit between old and new purposes, and can be seen as an important step in defining a future project. Temporary planning can be considered as a tool for promoting the development of urban areas to be more in line with the needs of residents and users, and providing a means of experimenting with new cultural and social forms. Understanding the context plays a key role in the effectiveness of planning proposals that are able to reveal spaces and practices. Many local authorities are at present seeking to define methods of involving people in the project process. Temporary urbanism offers citizens the opportunity to take part in the making of urban space. It allows actors – and not only economic actors – to change their vision of the project, to assess its various stages and to support the gradual transformation of a particular space. Contemporary urban planning is based on a new paradigm: thinking of the city through its uses. Abandoned urban spaces, as latent public spaces, are ideal locations for spontaneous or planned citizen investment. Temporary urbanism can give a particularly effective interpretation of such spaces, as shown by two experiments in Marseille and Clermont-Ferrand. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this work is to investigate the drivers of productivity evolution in the European life insurance industry in the aftermath of the enforcement of the Third Directive. We apply Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) to a panel of 602 life insurance companies operating in five European countries (Germany, France, Italy, Spain and the U.K.) between 1997 and 2004 and develop a generalized Malmquist efficiency decomposition to gauge the relative importance of two sources of productivity change: the improvement of best-practices via innovation, and the adoption of practices currently adopted by local or foreign best-in-class insurers. We find that productivity increased on an annual basis by 6.71 per cent; the increase has been mostly due to innovation in best-practices (6.67 per cent), while best-practice adoption contributed by a mere 0.04 per cent. Our findings also indicate that, over the period of our analysis, innovation of best-practices was attributable to technological change. We find no evidence, instead, that productivity has been driven by a shift in the risk profile of insurers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Water losses from water distribution means have a high environmental impact in terms of natural resource depletion (water, energy, ecosystems). This work aims to develop an optical airborne surveillance service for the detection of water leaks (WADI—Water-tightness Airborne Detection Implementation) to provide water utilities with adequate and timely information on leaks in water transportation mains outside urban areas. Firstly, a series of measurement campaigns were performed with two hyperspectral cameras and a thermal infrared camera in order to select the most appropriate wavelengths and combinations thereof for best revealing high moisture areas, which are taken as a proxy for water leakage. The Temperature-Vegetation-Index method (T-VI, also known as Triangle/Trapezoid method) was found to provide the highest contrast-to-noise ratio. This preliminary work helped select the most appropriate onboard instrumentation for two types of aerial platforms, manned (MAV) and unmanned (UAV). Afterwards, a series of measurement campaigns were performed from 2017 to 2019 in an operational environment over two water distribution networks in France and Portugal. Artificial leaks were introduced and both remote sensing platforms successfully detected them when excluding the unfavorable situations of a recent rain event or high vegetation presence. With the most recent equipment configuration, known and unknown real leaks in the overflown part of a water transportation network in Portugal have been detected. A significant number of false alarms were also observed which were due either to natural water flows (groundwater exfiltration, irrigation runoff and ponds) or to vegetation-cover variability nearby water-distribution nodes. Close interaction with the water utilities, and ancillary information like topographic factors (e.g., slope orientation), are expected to reduce the false alarm rates and improve WADI's methodology performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Invited for the cover of this issue are the groups of Eric Collet from Université de Rennes 1, France, and Shin‐ichi Ohkoshi from The University of Tokyo, Japan. The cover image shows the application of X‐ray diffraction at the synchrotron to study photoinduced phase transition in charge‐transfer systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers information on the 12th Biennial conference of the European Association of Social Anthropologists (ESA) at the Nanterre University of Paris, France on July 10-13, 2012. It states that the conference was participated by 1,450 people from 58 countries. It mentions the Safe as houses workshop in the conference conducted by Tom McDonald, Razvan Nicolescu, and Sabina Stan.

FIP is a French Collaborating Research Group (CRG) beamline at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility (ESRF) dedicated exclusively to crystallography of biological macromolecules, with a special emphasis on multiwavelength anomalous diffraction data collection in the 0.7-1.81 A wavelength range. The optics, consisting of long cylindrical grazing-angle mirrors associated with a cryocooled double-crystal monochromator, delivers an optimal beam in the corresponding energy range. The high level of automation, which includes automated crystal centring, automated data-collection management and data processing, makes the use of this beamline very easy. This is illustrated by the large number of challenging structures that have been solved since 1999.