Paraplane PSE-2 Osprey

The Paraplane PSE-2 Osprey is an American powered parachute that was designed and produced by Paraplane International of Medford, New Jersey. Now out of production, when it was available the aircraft was supplied as a kit for amateur construction.

Design and development

The PSE-2 Osprey was designed to comply with the US FAR 103 Ultralight Vehicles rules, including the category's maximum empty weight of 254 lb (115 kg). The aircraft has a standard empty weight of 235 lb (107 kg). It features a Hi-Pro 370 sq ft (34 m²) parachute-style wing, single-place accommodation, tricycle landing gear and a single 50 hp (37 kW) Rotax 503 engine.

The aircraft carriage is built from aluminium tubing. In flight steering is accomplished via foot pedals that actuate the canopy brakes, creating roll and yaw. On the ground the aircraft has foot pedal-controlled nosewheel steering. The main landing gear incorporates spring rod suspension.

The standard day, sea level, no wind, take off with a 50 hp (37 kW) engine is 200 ft (61 m) and the landing roll is 75 ft (23 m).

PSE-36

In computing, PSE-36 (36-bit Page Size Extension) refers to a feature of x86 processors that extends the physical memory addressing capabilities from 32 bits to 36 bits, allowing addressing to up to 64 GB of memory. Compared to the Physical Address Extension (PAE) method, PSE-36 is a simpler alternative to addressing more than 4 GB of memory. It uses the Page Size Extension (PSE) mode and a modified page directory table to map 4 MB pages into a 64 GB physical address space. PSE-36's downside is that, unlike PAE, it doesn't have 4-KB page granularity above the 4 GB mark.

PSE-36 was introduced into the x86 architecture with the Pentium II Xeon and was initially advertized as part of the "Intel Extended Server Memory Architecture" (sometimes abbreviated ESMA), a branding which also included the slightly older PAE (and thus the Pentium Pro, which only supported PAE, was advertised as having only "subset support" for ESMA).

The heyday of PSE-36 was relatively brief. PSE-36's main advantage was that, unlike PAE, it required little rework of the operating system's internals, and thus PSE-36 proved a suitable stopgap measure around the Windows NT 4.0 Enterprise Edition timeframe. Newer Microsoft operating systems, including Windows 2000, support only PAE. Some operating systems like Linux skipped PSE-36 entirely. Despite this, AMD and later Intel chose to provide up to 40 bits PSE support in their 64-bit processors, when operated in legacy mode.

Certified First Responder in France

See also : Certified First Responder and Emergency medical responder

In France, the pre-hospital care is either performed by first responders from the fire department (sapeurs-pompiers, most emergency situations) or from a private ambulance company (relative emergency at home), or by a medical team that includes a physician, a nurse and an ambulance technician (called "smur"). The intermediate scale, the firefighter nurse (infirmier sapeur-pompier, ISP), is only a recent evolution and is performed by nurses specially trained acting with emergency protocols; these nurses are the French equivalent of the paramedics. The first responders are thus the most frequent answer to emergency calls.

First aid associations (about 15 nationwide associations, including the French Red cross, St John ambulance, order of Malta and the volunteers of the Civil protection) also train their volunteers as first responders; the top diploma (PSE 2) is exactly the same as the firefighters. They usually act in preventive first aid post, e.g. for concerts, sporting or cultural events.