Malgré sa défiance pour la théorie, la recherche scientifique de Goethe n’est pas allée sans un soin tout particulier porté à la méthode qu’elle devait mettre en œuvre. Précisément parce qu’il fallait rendre compte du phénomène dans sa diversité et dans sa totalité, il importait de réfléchir aux moyens qui assureraient la réussite d’une telle démarche. Pour Goethe, il s’agissait de mettre en œuvre un concours harmonieux des différentes facultés de l’esprit humain, seul capable de répondre à la richesse du (...) réel tel qu’il se manifeste à nous, et donc seul capable de fonder adéquatement une démarche expérimentale en science. (shrink)

East Asians have been found to reason in relatively holistic fashion and Americans in relatively analytic fashion. It has been proposed that these cognitive differences are the result of social practices that encourage interdependence for Asians and independence for Americans. If so, cognitive differences might be found even across regions that are geographically close. We compared performance on a categorization task of relatively interdependent southern Italians and relatively independent northern Italians and found the former to reason in a more holistic (...) fashion than the latter. Furthermore, as it has been argued that working class social practices encourage interdependence and middle class practices encourage independence, we anticipated that working class participants might reason in a more holistic fashion than middle class participants. This is what we found – at least for southern Italy. (shrink)

In this paper we reconsider, in the light of the Nelson stochastic mechanics, the idea originally proposed by Bohm and Vigier that arbitrary solutions of the evolution equation for the probability densities always relax in time toward the quantum mechanical density ¦ψ¦2 derived from the Schrödinger equation. The analysis of a few general propositions and of some physical examples show that the choice of the L1 metrics and of the Nelson stochastic flux is correct for a particular class of (...) quantum states, but cannot be adopted in general. This indicates that the question if the quantum mechanical densities attract other solution of the classical Fokker-Planck equations associated to the Schrödinger equation is physically meaningful, even if a classical probabilistic model good for every quantum stale is still not available. A few suggestion in this direction are finally discussed. (shrink)

Se propone una lectura sociológica de las recientes movilizaciones estudiantiles en Chile, considerando sus demandas en función de las orientaciones e intereses correspondientes a la base social de nueva clase media. Se discuten cuatro hipótesis: primero, la reivindicación de la educación pública puede expresar una crisis de legitimidad; segundo, tal crisis se corresponde con la ampliación y diferenciación de los grupos constitutivos de la nueva clase media (incluyendo la masificación de estudiantes, profesionales e intelectuales en general) en el contexto de (...) las transformaciones de la estructura social en Chile en los últimos treinta años; tercero, la demanda por educación pública se orienta a ejercer control reflexivo sobre las bases de reproducción estructural y simbólica de este grupo y; cuatro, la crítica a la distribución del poder a través de la educación es una plataforma para el planteamiento de un potencial proyecto alternativo de sociedad. (shrink)

We argue that two powerful error-theoretic concepts provide a general framework that satisfactorily accounts for key aspects of the explanation of physical patterns. This method gives an objective criterion to determine which mathematical models in a class of neighboring models are just as good as the exact one. The method also emphasizes that abstraction is essential for explanation and provides a precise conceptual framework that determines whether a given abstraction is explanatorily relevant and justified. Hence, it increases our epistemological (...) understanding of how one should go about reconstructing scientific practices by making clear that, at a fundamental level, a key aspect of mathematical modeling consists in exactly solving nearby problems. (shrink)

In the present article I aim to make a new contribution to our phenomenological understanding of the foundation between intentional experiences. In order to accomplish this goal, I discuss Husserl’s effort to avoid the conflation of the class of non-objectifying acts, i.e., evaluations and volitions, with the class of objectifying acts, i.e., cognitions. Through the analysis of the transition from his early to his mature account, I explore how Husserl, by readdressing the idea of foundation in relation to (...) the shift from the practical-evaluative to the theoretical attitude, clarifies how evaluations and volitions can exert their intentionality only on the basis of a foundation on cognitions without thereby being reduced to a mere special case of founded representations. (shrink)

It is generally agreed that the major contribution of Lukács to twentieth century thought is to have foregrounded in philosophical inquiry the questions of alienation and reification. However, while the secondary literature on the question has been almost exclusively focused on Lukács's early work, History and Class Consciousness, the present article addresses the wealth of innovative perspectives to be found in his Aesthetics, and in particular in his Ontology of Social Being. The second part of the article addresses the (...) affinities with the Sartrean philosophy and proposes a confrontation with the Heideggerrian analysis of alienation, which is rarely granted a critical treatment in its own rights. (shrink)

In English, some common nouns, like "cat", can be used in the singular and in the plural, while others, like "wate"r, are invariable. Moreover, nouns like "cat" can be employed with numerals like "one" and "two" and determiners like "a", "many" and "few", but neither with "much" nor "little". On the contrary, nouns like "milk" can be used with determiners like "much" and "little", but neither with "a", "one" nor "many". These two types of nouns constitute two morphosyntactic sub-classes of (...) English common nouns; cf. for instance Gillon (1992). They have been respectively called count nouns and mass nouns. In many languages, notably Romance and Germanic languages, one can similarly identify two morphosyntactic subclasses of common nouns, nouns of one class admitting singular and plural number, and nouns of the other being invariable in grammatical number. The question we want to address in this paper is one in lexical semantics: Is there anything characteristic about the meaning of a count noun? (shrink)

Socially responsible investment in France is based on a “best in class” approach as opposed to the “exclusion” approaches used in other countries such as the United States or United Kingdom, where the rejection of sin stocks has been dominant historically. The objective of this research note is to examine whether the French SRI market, by focusing more on financial rather than on ethical considerations, compared with other countries such as the United States, the United Kingdom, or even Sweden, (...) may lead to a form of “mainstreaming” of SRI processes. The authors explore several convergent mechanisms. First, the authors analyze the importance of the mainstreaming issue in the history of SRI as well as in the contemporaneous debate in the academic literature on the links between financial and extrafinancial performance. Second, the authors review the role played by ethical finance laws adopted in France in the early 2000s in the development of the SRI market. Finally, the authors discuss the results of a survey of French SRI analysts working both for large institutional investors and asset managers in France in 2009. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that according to Edmund Husserl “tendency” does not designate a specific class of intentional experiences but rather, on par with “consciousness-of,” a universal mode of intentionality essential for any constitution of sense. In doing so, I explicate Husserl’s distinction between intentionality as tendency (_Tendenz_), which he describes as a striving (_Streben_), and intentionality as consciousness-of (_Bewusstsein-von_), which he describes as a presentation (_Vorstellung_) of an intentional object. Then, I discuss Husserl’s problematic way of relating (...) these two universal modes of intentionality. Although he claims that intentionality as tendency presupposes intentionality as consciousness-of, I argue that the universal validity of this presupposition is put into question by the consideration of drives (_Triebe_), which Husserl describes as passive tendencies that originally lack any consciousness of the end strived toward, and, hence, do not seem to presuppose any presentation of it. I show that the lack of intentionality as consciousness-of poses two major problems in Husserl’s account, in that it makes drives seemingly unintelligible as (i) strivings and as (ii) motivated experiences. Lastly, to find a possible solution to these problems and better clarify the relation between intentionality as tendency and intentionality as consciousness-of at the level of drives, I explore Edith Stein’s account of drives as aimless strivings governed by experiential causality (_Erlebniskausalität_), discussing its advantages and potential drawbacks, as well as its compatibility with Husserl’s account. (shrink)

Une classe capitaliste nationale peut-elle émerger dans les pays africains nouvellement indépendants? Débattue il y a quarante ans à propos du Kenya, la question se pose également pour l’Éthiopie des trois dernières décennies. Bien que ce pays n’ait jamais été colonisé, son passage il y a trente ans d’un régime militaire à un État démocratique et développeur a marqué un tournant comparable à celui des pays africains anciennement colonisés. Cette transition politique promettait d’accorder un rôle économique plus important au secteur (...) privé national, jusqu’alors très limité. Cette transition s’est toutefois accompagnée d’importantes contradictions en matière de propriété du capital, compte tenu de la centralisation de la politique industrielle par l’État éthiopien. Cet article analyse les tentatives de l’État éthiopien de stimuler la formation d’une classe capitaliste productive et autochtone, dans le secteur des métaux et de l’ingénierie, au cours de la dernière décennie. (shrink)

Are all norms cognized in the same way? I present experimental evidence suggesting that they are not. I propose a distinction between two main classes of violations—the victimful and the victimless—and show that while people tend to rate acts belonging to either category as impermissible, the justifications for their judgments refer to salient features of the act only in the former case. I further show that Feinberg's distinction between harmful and offensive acts is useful in discriminating between different types of (...) victimful violations. (shrink)

Effective altruism (EA) requires that when we donate to charity, we maximize the beneficial impact of our donations. While we are in broad sympathy with EA, we raise a practical problem for EA, which is that there is a crucial empirical presupposition implicit in its charity assessment methods which is false in many contexts. This is the presupposition that the magnitude of the benefits (or harms) generated by some charity vary continuously in the scale of the intervention performed. We characterize (...) a wide class of cases where this assumption fails, and then draw out the normative implications of this fact. (shrink)

The graph edit distance (GED) measures the dissimilarity between two graphs as the minimal cost of a sequence of elementary operations transforming one graph into another. This measure is fundamental in many areas such as structural pattern recognition or classification. However, exactly computing GED is NP-hard. Among different classes of heuristic algorithms that were proposed to compute approximate solutions, local search based algorithms provide the tightest upper bounds for GED. In this paper, we present K-REFINE and RANDPOST. K-REFINE generalizes and (...) improves an existing local search algorithm and performs particularly well on small graphs. RANDPOST is a general warm start framework that stochastically generates promising initial solutions to be used by any local search based GED algorithm. It is particularly efficient on large graphs. An extensive empirical evaluation demonstrates that both K-REFINE and RANDPOST perform excellently in practice. (shrink)

Research on mass nouns has focused on concrete terms. So, are there semantic properties shared by all mass terms? We first consider concrete nouns like milk and furniture. Contra Cheng (1973), we show that they can be held to refer distributively (i.e. to apply to any part of what they apply to) only if this property is understood with a new part-relation, that of N-part. In addition, they refer cumulatively: when they apply to each of two things, they also apply (...) to the two things considered together. We then turn to abstract mass terms like beauty and love. We find, surprisingly, that they too refer distributively and cumulatively. (shrink)

Teacher training has the opportunity and availability to raise awarness on the happiness of teaching. The stakes are high: inclusive education contexts require teachers to fully support their pupils’ heterogeneity. The positive psychology PERMA model (Seligman, 2011) seems to be an interesting evidence-based guide to build teacher training in happiness teaching. The PERMA model (Positive emotions, Engagement, Relationships, Meaning, Achievement) provides an identification of the different factors needed for this happiness teaching training. It also highlights the importance of the teacher-pupil (...) relationship. This fundamental relationship is key to the classroom climate. It allows teachers to nurture the joy of teaching as well as learning, sharing a school project, and progressing -together with their pupils- to a common goal. In this vein, teacher training can give itself the means to foster socio-emotional skills which are the cornerstone to teaching as happiness teacher training. This training would aim both at offering the opportunity to experience positive psychology interventions and developing teachers’ reflexive skills. Gratitude practices, emotional regulation interventions, recognition and use of character strengths are levers that act both on intra- and interpersonal relationships. (shrink)

Nul n'est plus fuyant que le mauvais goût. Qu'il soit relatif, ancré dans son temps, frontière sociale ou revendiqué tel une profession de foi artistique. Dans ce Dictionnaire amoureux intime et partial, Nicolas d'Estienne d'Orves vous invite dans son grenier braillard et cocasse. 'Le mauvais goût échappe à toute définition, famille ou clan. Tout comme le bon goût, il est relatif, circonstanciel, ancré dans son temps. Il peut également être une frontière sociale, un racisme de classe. En ce cas, (...) le mauvais goût c'est celui de l'autre, celui qu'on n'a pas et qu'on se défend d'avoir au risque de trahir les siens. Enfin il y a le mauvais goût patenté, revendiqué, qui n'est pas une attitude, une mode, mais une profession de foi artistique, un manifeste esthétique. C'est -sans doute- ce qu'on pourrait appeler le kitsch. C'est-à-dire un style en soi, des formes volontaires, pensées, destinées à déranger la norme. Ce livre sera donc, par essence, partial. Avec le mauvais goût, j'entre dans une zone marécageuse. Est-il possible de faire un livre plus intime, plus narcissique, puisqu'il explore la part d'ombre de ma propre sensibilité? Petit enfant sous Giscard, adolescent sous Mitterrand, j'ai pris racine dans des époques aux esthétiques très contrastées qui seront forcément présentes dans ces pages. Souvenirs intimes, émissions de télévision, films, livres, plats, commerces, personnages imaginaires ou pas, attitudes de tous poils, mon mauvais goût est une auberge qui n'a rien d'espagnole mais tout d'un grenier. Un grenier braillard et cocasse, que j'ai moi-même tenté de ranger pour les besoins de la cause. Le mauvais goût ne se partage pas, en ce qu'il est une exploration de nos propres frontières esthétiques, la ligne de crête entre ce que l'on goûte et ce que l'on recrache. Bienvenue dans mon train fantôme!'"--Page 4 of cover. (shrink)

In a stimulating paper, Piccione and Rubinstein (1997) argued how a decision maker could undertake dynamically inconsistent choices when, in an extensive form decision problem, she has a particular type of imperfect recall named absentmindedness. Such memory limitation obtains whenever information sets include decision histories along the same decision path. Starting from work focusing on the absentminded driver example, and independently developed by Segal (2000) and Dimitri (1999), the main theorem of this article provides a general result of dynamically consistent (...) choices, valid for a large class of finite extensive form decision problems without nature. (shrink)

From an ethnomethodological perspective, this article describes social actors’ everyday and virtual stances in terms of their practices of provisional doubt and belief for the purpose of fact-establishment. Facts are iterated, reinforced, elaborated, and transformed via phenomenal practices configuring relations of equipment, interpretation, and method organized as “other” than, but relevant to, the everyday. Such practices in scientific research involve forms of suspended belief; in other areas they can instead involve forms of suspended doubt. As an illuminating example of this (...) latter class of virtual fact-establishment practices, I offer an extended analysis of the “yes; and…” principle of information-establishment used in improvisational theatre to progressively develop the content of a performance. (shrink)

Dans cet entretien, Nicola Manghi invite Donna Haraway à revisiter les nombreuses années de proximité et d’échanges qui ont vu son travail croiser celui de Bruno Latour. Des études féministes au catholicisme, des guerres des sciences à la lutte des classes, c’est une période et une mouvance importantes de la pensée contemporaine qui se trouvent ainsi revisitées, avec en prime quelques considérations de Donna Haraway sur ses pratiques de recherche et d’écriture, ainsi que sur sa conception de Gaïa.

Among those who posit properties, liberals (mostly nominalists) admit abundant, ontologically free properties, which particulars possess whenever they satisfy the same predicate and belong to the same class, however artificial. I call them “L-properties” (for “Liberal”). Some liberals also admit that some few L-properties are natural, while most of them are artificial (the same applies to the corresponding classes). Others (mostly but not only realists) commit to a more discriminating use of the category: properties are sparse, they make for (...) the objective similarities among particulars, and more importantly, they allow to analyze “objective similarity” and “class naturalness” in terms of property-possessing and sharing. They give particulars their “true nature”, and I call them “A-properties” (for “Analytical”). This article provides a defense of this second type of properties, in the particular case of sortals. To that end, a new fact is put forward: that sorts are classes which are natural not as a primitive feature, but in virtue of what the particulars which belong to them are, and which makes them _naturally belong_ to them. I then argue that this fact entails the existence of the desired type of properties, “sortal A-properties”, although leaving open the question of how they should be construed. (shrink)

Starting in 2005, general logical metatheorems have been developed that guarantee the extractability of uniform effective bounds from large classes of proofs of theorems that involve abstract metric structures X. In this paper we adapt this to the class of CAT\)-spaces X for \ and establish a new metatheorem that explains specific bound extractions that recently have been achieved in this context as instances of a general logical phenomenon.

The often observed complexity gap between the expressiveness of a logical formalism and its exponentially harder expression complexity is proven for all logical formalisms which satisfy natural closure conditions. The expression complexity of the prefix classes of second-order logic can thus be located in the corresponding classes of the weak exponential hierarchies; further results about expression complexity in database theory, logic programming, nonmonotonic reasoning, first-order logic with Henkin quantifiers and default logic are concluded. The proof method illustrates the significance of (...) quantifier-free interpretations in descriptive complexity theory. (shrink)

By using algebraic properties of (commutative unital) indecomposable polynomial rings we achieve results concerning their first-order theory, namely: interpretability of arithmetic and a uniform proof of undecidability of their full theory, both in the language of rings without parameters. This vastly extends the scope of a method due to Raphael Robinson, which deals with a restricted class of polynomial integral domains.

We study a fragment of Intuitionistic Linear Logic combined with non-normal modal operators. Focusing on the minimal modal logic, we provide a Gentzen-style sequent calculus as well as a semantics in terms of Kripke resource models. We show that the proof theory is sound and complete with respect to the class of minimal Kripke resource models. We also show that the sequent calculus allows cut elimination. We put the logical framework to use by instantiating it as a logic of (...) agency. In particular, we apply it to reason about the resource-sensitive use of artefacts. (shrink)

We prove first-order definability of the prime subring inside polynomial rings, whose coefficient rings are reduced and indecomposable. This is achieved by means of a uniform formula in the language of rings with signature $$. In the characteristic zero case, the claim implies that the full theory is undecidable, for rings of the referred type. This extends a series of results by Raphael Robinson, holding for certain polynomial integral domains, to a more general class.

In this paper, we aim to account for the distribution and interpretation of a novel class of free choice items in Romanian, which we refer to as additive free choice items (ADD-FCIs). We show that the internal composition of ADD-FCIs, as well as their distribution, differs from that attested for other free choice paradigms discussed in the literature. Morphologically, ADD-FCIs are a more complex variant of regular universal FCIs, by virtue of an additional morpheme. This morpheme plays an additive (...) role when it functions as a stand-alone particle, and we propose that its role is similarly additive when it functions as an infix in ADD-FCIs. Couched in an exhaustification framework, we put forward a novel compositional account that can derive the interpretation of these ADD-FCIs. As for their distribution, these elements are only found in the presence of the conditional mood, as well as unconditional structures. We show how our analysis, coupled with the Viability Constraint used to explain the distribution of regular FCIs, can also account for their restricted distribution. In doing so, we further show how the pattern we investigate opens new perspectives regarding the licensing of free choice items in unconditionals. (shrink)

An algebraically expandable (AE) class is a class of algebraic structures axiomatizable by sentences of the form $\forall \exists! \mathop{\boldsymbol {\bigwedge }}\limits p = q$. For a logic L algebraized by a quasivariety $\mathcal {Q}$ we show that the AE-subclasses of $\mathcal {Q}$ correspond to certain natural expansions of L, which we call algebraic expansions. These turn out to be a special case of the expansions by implicit connectives studied by X. Caicedo. We proceed to characterize all the (...) AE-subclasses of abelian $\ell $ -groups and perfect MV-algebras, thus fully describing the algebraic expansions of their associated logics. (shrink)

We received several commentaries both challenging and supporting our hypothesis. We thank the commentators for their thoughtful contributions, bringing together alternative hypotheses, complementary explanations, and appropriate corrections to our model. Here, we explain further our hypothesis, using more explicitly the framework of evolutionary social sciences. We first explain what we believe is the ultimate function of fiction in general (i.e., entertainment) and how this hypothesis differs from other evolutionary hypotheses put forward by several commentators. We then turn to the proximate (...) features that make imaginary worlds entertaining and, therefore, culturally successful. We finally explore how these insights may explain the distribution of imaginary worlds across time, space, age, and social classes. (shrink)

The genetic code has evolved from its initial non-degenerate wobble version until reaching its present state of degeneracy. By using the stereochemical hypothesis, we revisit the problem of codon assignations to the synonymy classes of amino-acids. We obtain these classes with a simple classifier based on physico-chemical properties of nucleic bases, like hydrophobicity and molecular weight. Then we propose simple RNA ring structures that present, overlap included, one and only one codon by synonymy class as solutions of a combinatory (...) variational problem. We compare these solutions to sequences of present RNAs considered as relics, with a high interspecific invariance, like invariant parts of tRNAs and micro-RNAs. We conclude by emphasizing some optimal properties of the genetic code. (shrink)

How the formidable diversity of forms emerges from developmental and evolutionary processes is one of the most fascinating questions in biology. The homeodomain‐containing Hox proteins were recognized early on as major actors in diversifying animal body plans. The molecular mechanisms underlying how this transcription factor family controls a large array of context‐ and cell‐specific biological functions is, however, still poorly understood. Clues to functional diversity have emerged from studies exploring how Hox protein activity is controlled through interactions with PBC (...) class='Hi'>class proteins, also evolutionary conserved HD‐containing proteins. Recent structural data and molecular dynamic simulations add further mechanistic insights into Hox protein mode of action, suggesting that flexible folding of protein motifs allows for plastic protein interaction. As we discuss in this review, these findings define a novel type of Hox‐PBC interaction, weak and dynamic instead of strong and static, hence providing novel clues to understanding Hox transcriptional specificity and diversity. (shrink)

Zoos attract millions of visitors every year, many of whom are schoolchildren. For this reason, zoos are important institutions for the environmental education of future generations. Empirical studies on the educational impact of environmental education programs in zoos are still rare. To address this issue, we conducted two studies: In study 1, we investigated students’ interests in different biological topics, including zoos ( n = 1,587). Data analysis of individual topics revealed large differences of interest, with advanced students showing less (...) interest in zoos. In study 2, we invited school classes of this age group to visit different guided tours at the zoo and tested connection to nature before and after each educational intervention ( n = 608). The results showed that the guided tours are an effective tool to raise students’ connection to nature. Add-on components have the potential to further promote connection to nature. The education programs are most effective with students with a low initial nature connection. (shrink)

In this work, we study Hilbert-style proof systems for logics based on the data-aware language CoreDataXPath(↓) where the comparison relation between nodes is not necessarily an equivalence relation. We give a sound and complete axiomatization of the class of tree-like Kripke frames endowed with a general comparison relation between nodes. Modular extensions of this axiomatization are also discussed, including cases where the comparison relation is reflexive, symmetric, transitive and an equivalence. A notable highlight that we recover an axiomatization for (...) CoreDataXPath(↓) over any data-tree when the comparison is by ‘equal data’. Moreover, we prove that all these systems are decidable by leveraging the finite model property of their corresponding frame classes. (shrink)

Various threshold Boolean networks, a formalism used to model different types of biological networks, can produce similar dynamics, i.e. share same behaviors. Among them, some are complex, others not. By computing both structural and behavioral complexities, we show that most TBNs are structurally complex, even those having simple behaviors. For this purpose, we developed a new method to compute the structural complexity of a TBN based on estimates of the sizes of equivalence classes of the threshold Boolean functions composing the (...) TBN. (shrink)

Background: Benzodiazepines have been widely used in clinical practice for over four decades and continue to be one of the most consumed and highly prescribed class of drugs available in the treatment of anxiety, depression, and insomnia. The literature indicates that Benzodiazepine users at a significantly increased risk of Motor Vehicle accidents compared to non-users but the impact on injuries at workplace is not well-defined. We aimed to investigate whether use of benzodiazepine is associated with increased risk of occupational (...) injuries.Methods: PubMed, Embase, and Scopus databases were searched. A meta-analysis was performed to calculate odds ratio and 95% confidence interval among case controls, cross-sectional studies, either questionnaire or laboratory exams based.Results: A total of 13 studies met inclusion criteria, involving 324,168 OI from seven different countries, with an estimated occurrence of benzodiazepine positivity of 2.71%. A total of 14 estimates were retrieved. Of them, 10 were based on laboratory analyses, three on institutional databases, while one study was based on questionnaires. Regarding the occupational groups, three estimates focused on commercial drivers, that exhibited a reduced risk ratio for benzodiazepine positivity compared to other occupational groups. Eventually, no increased risk for benzodiazepine positivity was identified, either from case control studies, or cross sectional studies, when only laboratory based estimates were taken in account.Conclusions: Even though benzodiazepines have the potential to increase injury rates among casual and chronic users, available evidence are insufficient to sustain this hypothesis, particularly when focusing on laboratory-based studies. (shrink)

In this work, we study Hilbert-style proof systems for logics based on the data-aware language CoreDataXPath(↓) where the comparison relation between nodes is not necessarily an equivalence relation. We give a sound and complete axiomatization of the class of tree-like Kripke frames endowed with a general comparison relation between nodes. Modular extensions of this axiomatization are also discussed, including cases where the comparison relation is reflexive, symmetric, transitive and an equivalence. A notable highlight that we recover an axiomatization for (...) CoreDataXPath(↓) over any data-tree when the comparison is by ‘equal data’. Moreover, we prove that all these systems are decidable by leveraging the finite model property of their corresponding frame classes. (shrink)

What makes a human voice agreeable is a matter of scientific discussion. Whereas prosody was shown to play a role regarding “male-female” attraction, the impact of frequency modulations in “non-sexual”, notably commercial, contexts has attracted little attention. Another point unaddressed in the literature is auditory sensitivity to short-term frequency modulations as current studies focus more on sentence. Thirty French female operators were recorded over the phone. All “bonjour” greeting words were classified in terms of frequency modulation linearity and orientation at (...) the syllable and word levels. Then, the different voices were played back to students and seniors who had to rate each voice according to their degree of agreeableness. Listeners preferred non-monotonous voices. Differences between age-classes were greater than between sex-classes. Results suggest that short-term frequency changes are important for auditory evaluation of voice agreeableness. This study opens new research perspectives concerning the importance of prosody during consumer-seller interactions. (shrink)

Quality standards fulfilment is an essential task in manufacturing processes that involves high costs. One target is to avoid the presence of burrs in the edge of machine workpieces, which reduce the quality of the products. Furthermore, they are not easily removed since the part can even be damaged. In this paper, we propose an optimized Convolutional Neural Network, to detect the presence of burrs in images of milling parts. Its design is focused on the optimization of classification (accuracy) and (...) performance metrics (training time and number of trainable parameters). The proposed architecture identifies burrs with a 91.16% accuracy in the test set, outperforming existing models as EfficientNetB0. It also reduces the number of trainable parameters from other models as AlexNet by 1.5 million. The prediction process just takes 48.39 milliseconds per image. Finally, in order to check if the model gets a high activation in the region of interest, a visual explanation of the model is also carried out by using Gradient-weighted Class Activation Mapping. (shrink)

Les dynamiques de classe du changement agraire en Afrique ont fait l’objet de débats importants. Dans son ouvrage de référence, Femmes, greniers et capitaux, Meillassoux prédisait en 1975 la cannibalisation de la paysannerie, avec la domination croissante des relations capitalistes dans les campagnes. Pourtant, près d’un demi-siècle plus tard, la paysannerie reste une construction sociale, économique et politique pertinente. En s’appuyant sur le cas du Mozambique, cet article explore les significations contradictoires de la paysannerie dans le capitalisme contemporain. La première (...) section retrace la création du paysan-prolétaire en Afrique australe, en s’appuyant sur les travaux de Meillassoux sur la « communauté domestique ». La deuxième partie explore les différentes manières dont les camponeses improvisent leur subsistance à travers trois cas. L’article conclut que la paysannerie incarne un ensemble contradictoire de significations qui reflètent les processus de production de marchandises plutôt qu’un passé précapitaliste. (shrink)

The study examines Nicolas de La Chesnaye’s play ‘La Condamnation de Banquet’, a text written shortly after the year 1500 and criticizing heavily the conduct of nightly banquets in the French upper classes of its time. It was also transformed into tapestries, still extant, shortly after its first publication. Bodily conditions (e.g. sobriety), illnesses (e.g. stroke) and institutions (e.g. a tribunal) serve as personifications of such topics as excessive sumptuousness, and the moral depravation and aberration associated with it. The (...) play’s perspective is to highlight social responsibility and to provide its audience with recommendations for a healthy way of living. Asceticism is declared to be a bonum commune and a way of optimizing oneself. (shrink)

Dans le cadre du groupe de Recherches en littérature et spiritualité, fondé à l’Université de Metz, le volume publié par N. Brucker fait place à un large éventail de genres et d’œuvres littéraires, de saint Paul à nos jours. Plus de vingt communications au total, regroupées en six sections, dont les titres (« Spiritualité, éthique et société », « Homme nouveau, nouvelle écriture ? », par exemple) marquent, il faut le reconnaître, ce que risque d’avoir d’artificiel une telle tentative de (...) class.. (shrink)

Illocutionary Force and Romanian Orthodox Sermons: An Application of Speech Act Theory to Some Romanian Orthodox Sermons The aim of the paper is to analyze religious discourse with the use of the instruments of semantics and pragmatics. Essentially, it sets out to identify the linguistic elements which enable the illocutionary force in the Romanian orthodox sermons, especially in the discourse of some important figures which have influenced and still influence the Romanian orthodox theology and the religious life in Romania: Father (...) Cleopa, Father Nicolae Steinhardt, and, nowadays, Father Teofil Pârâianu. It is usually assumed that a sermon implies, on the one hand, a kerugmatik action, that of annunciation, and, on the other hand, a translating action of the biblical induce the human will to practice the words in order to Christian precepts. Mutatis mutandis, the perlocutionary effect depends on the illocutionary act and of the illocutionary force. In theory, the illocutionary force of an utterance is strictly motivated by the pragmatic. But there are linguistic elements which function as efficient markers of the illocutionary force, for example performative verbs, verbal moods and some adverbs. The criteria proposed by Searle in order to differentiate the illocutionary acts resulted in the identification of several types inside this class. Searle's taxonomy serves the research purposes: the identification of illocutionary acts found in this kind of religious discourse and, finally, outlining a pattern of manifestation of the illocutionary force inside the sermon. (shrink)

A generalized and unifying viewpoint to both general relativity and quantum mechanics and information is investigated. It may be described as a generaliztion of the concept of reference frame from mechanics to thermodynamics, or from a reference frame linked to an element of a system, and thus, within it, to another reference frame linked to the whole of the system or to any of other similar systems, and thus, out of it. Furthermore, the former is the viewpoint of general relativity, (...) the latter is that of quantum mechanics and information. Ciclicity in the manner of Nicolas Cusanus (Nicolas of Cusa) is complemented as a fundamental and definitive property of any totality, e.g. physically, that of the universe. It has to contain its externality within it somehow being namely the totality. This implies a seemingly paradoxical (in fact, only to common sense rather logically and mathematically) viewpoint for the universe to be repesented within it as each one quant of action according to the fundamental Planck constant. That approach implies the unification of gravity and entanglement correspondiing to the former or latter class of reference frames. An invariance, more general than Einstein's general covariance is to be involved as to both classes of reference frames unifying them. Its essence is the unification of the discrete and cotnitinuous (smooth). That idea underlies implicitly quantum mechanics for Bohr's principle that it study the system of quantum microscopic entities and the macroscopic apparatus desribed uniformly by the smmoth equations of classical physics. (shrink)