Four sets of correction factors needed to apply the new small field dosimetry formalism are provided for several active detectors. A protocol for small photon beams OF determination based on passive dosimeters measurements has been recently proposed to French radiotherapy treatment centers.

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A recent workshop entitled ''The Family Name as Socio-Cultural Feature and Genetic Metaphor: From Concepts to Methods" was held in Paris in December 2010, sponsored by the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) and by the journal Human Biology. This workshop was intended to foster a debate on questions related to the family names and to compare different multidisciplinary approaches involving geneticists, historians, geographers, sociologists and social anthropologists. This collective paper presents a collection of selected communications.In 1983, Human Biology published a special May issue (volume 55, issue 2) devoted to surnames as tools to evaluate average consanguinity, to assess population isolation and structure, and to estimate the intensity and directionality of migrations. Major contributions written by scholars gave a special relevance to this special issue that remained, for many years, a reference (for a review see Lasker 1985; Colantonio et al. 2011).Since that time, many surname studies have focused on extending knowledge on population structure, isonymy, and migration (for an exhaustive synthesis see Colantonio et al. 2003) been applied to about thirty societies all around the world with a geographic scale that ranges from a household or village, to a whole continent. Further and quite recent research put forward a spectrum of methods to analyze Y-chromosome DNA polymorphisms, thus allowing the examination of the degree of cosegregation of family names and Y-chromosome haplotypes, at least in patrilineal naming practice.The workshop The Family Name as Socio-Cultural Feature and Genetic Metaphor: From Concepts to Methods (Paris, France, 5-6 December, 2010) was organized to go further and, even if some presentations were focused towards more classical research, to pinpoint some particularly innovative aspects of current surname research. This summary article is meant to be a synthesis of the papers presented during the workshop; there are two main strands.The first research direction relies on the use of surname databases that are increasingly exhaustive and easy to analyse thanks to the spread of digital techniques. In this respect, Pablo Mateos, James Cheshire and Paul Longley's UCL Worldnames database (which includes about 6 million surnames registered in 26 different countries, http://worldnames.publicprofiler.org/), constitutes an impressive quantity of information and an exciting tool for future research (Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives in the Spatial Analysis of Names, this article). Unfortunately, this large collection of data comes from different sources, such as national electoral registers or telephone directories, and problems of homogenization and representativeness need to be discussed further as they could not be addressed at the workshop. In the same way, long distance comparisons between stocks of surnames with very different historical and linguistic origins are also a challenge and deserve particular attention. The corpus of family names described by Ka...

Hereditary hemorrhagic telangiectasia (HHT) is an autosomal dominant disease characterized by widespread arteriovenous malformations and caused by mutations in two major genes: ENG and ACVRL1. Two decades ago, a French epidemiological study pointed out that its prevalence was higher than previously thought and that its distribution varied greatly from one area to another, one of the highest concentrations of patients being found in the Haut-Jura mountains. Although germline mutations are usually family specific, some of them have been reported in unrelated patients, especially for ACVRL1. We performed haplotype analysis of 116 French and Italian patients carrying 13 ACVRL1 different mutations. For five of these mutations, we estimated the age of the most recent common ancestors (MRCAs) using the ESTIAGE program. Most mutations were related to both recurrent mutational events and founder effects with age estimates ranging from 100 to 550 years. The c.1112dupG mutation, which is likely to be responsible for the very high concentration of HHT patients found in the former epidemiological study, probably occurred in one inhabitant of the Haut-Jura Mountains more than three centuries ago. The p.Arg374Gln mutation occurred independently in at least two distinct geographical areas, including the area with the second highest prevalence in the epidemiological study and where the MRCA is rather recent (about 100 years ago). Partially shared haplotypes between French and Italian patients were found for three mutations. This suggests a common origin and a possible diffusion of these mutations from Italy to France.

An important concentration of patients with Rendu-Osler disease occurs in the Valserine valley of the French Jura. A study of marriages shows that, in spite of its somewhat remote location, the valley cannot be considered an isolate, but that, on the contrary, exogamy is widely practised. Only 17.8% of the genes of inhabitants during the present century can be traced to the original population, but persons affected with the disease belong to a subgroup of the population which has lived in the villages for more than 10 generations. All the patients in 85 sibships are related. The smallest number of originator couples who lived at the beginning of the eighteenth century amounts to 16, the unique originator may therefore have lived approximately four generations earlier. However, as other patients who lived at the periphery of the Valserine valley do not appear to be related to any patients living in the valley, and because there has been considerable immigration into the valley, a number of hypotheses to explain the distribution of the disease in the region remain possible.

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This study uses sets of historical family reconstitutions from all of Quebec and from four villages of the Haut-Jura, France-first marriages of 2226 and 994 women, respectively-to investigate the physiological and social factors affecting age of mother at last birth before and during fertility transition. Age remained high throughout the period covered in Quebec, under 'natural' conditions, but showed a steady decline in the French material which extends to late 19th century generations practising family limitation.Age at marriage had no influence in Quebec; in France, however, women with the most surviving children at age 35 continued childbearing the latest. There was no link between biological ability to achieve a live birth, or in health status or aging rhythm, and age at last birth. Behaviour of mothers and daughters showed no relation. The variability in age at last birth thus appears to be random under natural conditions; with the onset of controls, social differences seem to influence not only the end of childbearing, but all aspects of behaviour governing final family size and child survival.

SummaryMarriage-first birth intervals are examined in two historical populations, Quebec (1608–1765) and Haut-Jura (1689–1980), comparing intervals in mothers and daughters, and in sister-sister pairs. The results point to a weak relationship between intervals of mothers and daughters, though it does not attain significance. Shared environment does not seem to be responsible since there is no association between pairs of sisters from the same populations.