Délégation Paris Michel-Ange

In the context of a global food system, the dynamics associated to international food trade have become key determinants of food security. In this paper, we resort to a diffusion model to simulate how shocks to domestic food production propagate through the international food trade network and study the relationship between trade openness and vulnerability. The results of our simulations suggest that low-income and food insecure countries tend to be the more exposed to external shocks and, at the same time, they are usually not in a position to take full advantage of international food trade when it comes to shield themselves from shocks to domestic production. We also study and discuss how nodes characteristics are associated with the propagation dynamics and with countries' vulnerability, finding that simple centrality measures can significantly predict the magnitude of the shock experienced by individual countries.

Abstract In the context of a command, control, communication, and intelligence (Cff) system, we have built a case-based reasoning module for plan recognition. It is based on knowledge representation structures called XPlans, inspired in part by Schank's Explanation Patterns. The uncertainty inherent to an uncontrolled flow of input and the presence of lacunar data make the retrieval of cases difficult. This led us to develop an algorithm for partial and progressive matching of the target case onto some of the source cases. This matching amounts in practice to a credit assignment mechanism, included in the algorithm associated with each XPlan. This method has been designed to meet the requirements of a DRET project to build a decision support module for a C3I system— the MATIS project. Its task is to interpret and complete the results of an intelligent " pattern-recognition-and-data-fusion" module in order to make the intentions underlying the recognized situation explicit to the decision maker. This advice is given as a causal explanation of an agent's behavior from low-level information.

Large-scale wind power forecasting at intraday horizons of minutes-ahead up to hours-ahead is essential to secure important operations in transmission systems. It is clear that recent information collected about neighboring sites improve the predictive performance of autoregressive models. At the scale of a region or of a country, regularization or feature selection are needed to mitigate the high dimensionality of the autoregressive model. Unconditional approaches of regularization have shown limited added value compared to benchmark models in the context of wind power forecasting. This work proposes an intraday wind power forecasting method that predicts the production of any wind farm in the control area of a Transmission System Operator (TSO), taking into account the information collected from other wind farms. The method combines feature selection, regularization and local-learning via conditioning on recent production levels or on expected weather conditions. Improvements in Root Mean Squared Error (RMSE) with respect to other models, evaluated on a dataset with a large number of wind farms are comprised between 4% (10-min horizon) and 11% (3-h horizon). Interpretability of the forecasting model is demonstrated via an analysis of the model coefficients and a discussion of the performance in a challenging situation, namely a wind front.

“Cultural omnivorousness” refers to the tendency to mix, in one’s cultural space, elements belonging to highbrow cultural forms with others which may be considered as popular or less legitimate. This article explores different patterns of cultural activities that mix differently ranked cultural elements, focusing on their relations to sociability. Drawing on examples from qualitative research, we show how cultural legitimacies can be produced by and worked out through the activities of groups and the ways in which cultural activities are combined and distributed, either in conversations — in talking — or in shared practices — in doing — according to the various groups that compose one’s relational network. Our hypothesis is that sociability and its different forms play an active role in the formation of omnivorous cultural tendencies and that, in return, the latter influence the differentiation of social frequentations. This article therefore concentrates on the architecture of relational practices and their peculiar forms when mobilising cultural contents that are heterogeneous in terms of their degree of legitimacy.

Depuis sa fondation au début des années 1840, plus de quarante ans s’écoulèrent sans que la cité coloniale de Victoria à Hong Kong ait disposé d’un vrai centre architectural ou d’une grande place centrale encadrée de bâtiments prestigieux. L’une des raisons tenait au fait que dans une colonie qui était à l’origine, et qui est restée depuis, essentiellement une cité portuaire construite sur le bord d’une île montagneuse, les étendues de terrain plat étaient quasi inexistantes. Cependant, en l’espace d’une quinzaine d’années, vers la fin du règne de Victoria, un vaste programme de poldérisation eut pour effet de faire reculer le front de mer. Et c’est au beau milieu de ces nouveaux terrains que, petit à petit, sans grande vision d’ensemble, le « Statue Square » vit le jour. Tout autour de la place, de splendides bâtiments de style colonial furent construits et complétèrent un ensemble architectural que l’on peut lire comme la fière signature de l’époque victorienne. Le présent article examine le processus qui donna naissance au « Statue Square » et les valeurs symboliques incarnées dans cette place.

Up until Tenebrae, the sonnet had been given a prominent place in Geoffrey Hill’s work. Relying on a slightly modernised form harking back to the Renaissance, Hill used it as a vehicle for metaphysical questioning on the nature of poetry, violence or religion. In more recent volumes, however, the form seemed to have disappeared, only to survive in a palimpsestic way. Surprisingly, Hill’s last two collections feature a return to the sonnet, with its twin themes of amorous discourse and political eloquence. Though for the most part shunning rhyme and rigid stanzaic format, the sonnets retain syllabic lines and a dialectical structure typical of the genre. The flexible placing of the volta, the use of a coda, as well as some of the thematics following on from The Orchards of Syon, point to Milton as Hill’s main influence, as well as to Coleridge and Wordsworth, as practitioners of the political sonnet. Moreover, the appearance of the autobiographical lyric ‘I’ in these sonnets as in recent collections points to the persistence of a Romantic ethos, of which the poet had been suspicious in his early writing. The sonnet, with a fresh autobiographical ‘I’ and a renewed political dimension, thus re-anchors Hill in a Romantic tradition.

During 2023, the leads of the ECNP TWG focused on Clinical Outcomes in Early-Trials in Neurosciences scheduled two brainstorming sessions to allow a deep discussion about challenges facing neurosciences drug development in neuropediatric rare diseases. Sessions were led by Dr Maria T. Acosta from the Undiagnosed Disease Program (UDP) at the National Human Genome Research Institute, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Maryland, EE.UU. The experts discussed about challenges and potential solutions as well as alternative options to design appropriated for clinical outcomes assessment (COA) instruments for this population. An important discussion took place due to extensive expertise of the participants and hands-on experience with clinical trials. Participation from experts from several disciplines was a key factor for appraising and brainstorm innovative solutions in the field. Identification of challenges and propose of innovative solutions were a central core of the discussion. Despite of the increasing number of rare and ultra-rare diseases being identify by the day, and the significant differences in biology, and clinical presentation, it is clear most of them face similar problems when is time to select the appropriated COAs to test potential interventions, and experts have a limited potential to drive efficient solutions. Some of the commonly identified common problems include: small number of patients affected, disease changes over time, developmental aspects impacting the clinical presentation according with age, individual variability in terms of disease severity between patient, variable window for intervention and in some cases, need to expedite treatment as per the disease progression. All these and other features, require an extensive dialogue and continue communication between preclinical researchers, clinicians, patients and family members, pharma and treatment designers and regulatory agencies in each condition, making this process, expensive, time consuming and very difficult to accomplish. A feasible solution, that may be applicable to several conditions, is to develop a “back bone” structure to approach rare diseases, allowing each “disease team” to tailored assessments and study design, according with the specific features of the condition. We concluded that it is fundamental to establish effective bridges of communication between the different actors implicated in the clinical trial design and execution, sharing experiences, as well as clear understanding of meaningful outcomes not only for researchers, but clinicians, patients and families. Important emphasis is done in the need or careful selection of COAs in each individual condition to be able to obtain more efficient and reliable results in clinical trials in this population. We need to be creative, and there is a need to leave the “comfort zone” of current methodologies and start piloting new methods at clinical settings. A specific research platform was proposed as a solution in the creation, sharing and validation of new assessment instruments, which would be available to clinicians and researchers attending small patient samples distributed over the world.

Miss Grief is a story by Constance Fenimore Woolson, an American novelist who often wrote about the difficulty a woman had in becoming an artist — a writer or a painter — in the nineteenth century. This tale is a very strange text, a kind of anticipation of a meeting to come, in Italy, in 1880, between Woolson and Henry James, and a friendship which lasted until the former’s death in 1894. For thirteen years, both writers would share a common inspiration. Death itself could not break the links between the two authors, who were connected even when settled in different European countries. William James, who was a member of the American Society for Psychical Research, probably helped his brother Henry to communicate — or so it appears — in some way with Woolson, even after her fatal accident, or possible suicide, in Venice. Henry James probably had in mind Miss Grief, a story by his dead friend, before writing some of his books. Indeed, Woolson had been the first to develop the image of “the figure in the carpet,” which was later transformed by Henry James. Woolson was also the first to devise a plot which Henry James would later use as a canvas for his novel The Wings of the Dove. What is an author and what is authorship? It seems impossible to separate what is Woolson’s and what is Henry James’s in four works of fiction that are in fact to be read together : Miss Grief, The Figure in the Carpet, The Beast in the Jungle, The Wings of the Dove.

Mieux connu pour son roman Le Dieu des petits riens qui a ébloui le monde anglophone par son style novateur et choqué les lecteurs indiens en mettant en scène l’amour entre une femme de haute caste et un paria, Arundhati Roy est une écrivaine engagée qui dénonce les dérives pronucléaires et néolibérales du gouvernement indien et mène une lutte contre la mondialisation capitaliste là où elle se manifeste. Les essais polémiques que Roy a écrits après les attentats du 11 septembre s’attaquent de façon virulente à l’impérialisme américain. Elle déconstruit l’Empire en exposant les piliers invisibles de son architecture et en décodant sa rhétorique. Elle en analyse les présupposés éthiques, les rouages économiques, la pénétration culturelle et les implications juridiques afin de définir les stratégies de résistance pour réaffirmer les valeurs de la dignité humaine, de la justice sociale et de la paix. Dans le projet d’assiéger l’Empire, elle est appuyée par des dissidents célèbres tels que Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, Amy Goodman et d’autres.

Alexander Abela’s Makibefo (1999) shot in Madagascar and played by non-professional actors. The use of the Antandroy people or “an ancient tribe” who had never even seen a film before, is an example of cultural appropriation or a “transcultural” approach to the play, a complex process of rewriting which consists in a narrative and aesthetic remoulding of the play adapted. By transposing the play Macbeth to an unusual context, a poor fishermen’s village lost at the other end of the world, the filmmaker means to enhance its mythic and universal dimension. He resorts to various narrative and aesthetic strategies such as plot displacements, character suppressions or dialogue simplifications as well as ample and systematic use of cinematic rhetoric (camera movements, framing and angle shot effects or light contrasts), which helps create a filmic mode. The process is paradoxical, as it is not so much meant to deconstruct the play as to reconstruct its essential meaning in a novel, powerful and visionary way, thus offering an alternative reading of the play.

Constance Fenimore Woolson (1840-1894) was an American novelist, famous toward the end of the 19th century. She was educated in the Great Lakes region, and her familiarity with the frontier gave her many subjects for her first stories published, among others, in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine and in the Atlantic Monthly. In 1873 she moved to Florida and began to feel inspired by the South, the Reconstruction after the war and the racial problem. She discovered Europe in 1880 and she met with Henry James in Florence. A strange friendship between the Master and the popular woman writer was to last until 1894. Leon Edel, Henry James’s biographer, supposed she felt an unrequited love for him. New feminist studies assert she was, on the contrary, independent and never asked literary figures for their help. Did she commit suicide or fall from a window by accident? Nobody knows. Contemporary novelists like David Lodge, Colm Toibin or Emma Tennant are puzzled by her relationship with Henry James.

“Cultural omnivorousness” refers to the tendency to mix, in one’s cultural space, elements belonging to highbrow cultural forms with others which may be considered as popular or less legitimate. This article explores different patterns of cultural activities that mix differently ranked cultural elements, focusing on their relations to sociability. Drawing on examples from qualitative research, we show how cultural legitimacies can be produced by and worked out through the activities of groups and the ways in which cultural activities are combined and distributed, either in conversations — in talking — or in shared practices — in doing — according to the various groups that compose one’s relational network. Our hypothesis is that sociability and its different forms play an active role in the formation of omnivorous cultural tendencies and that, in return, the latter influence the differentiation of social frequentations. This article therefore concentrates on the architecture of relational practices and their peculiar forms when mobilising cultural contents that are heterogeneous in terms of their degree of legitimacy.

Native Americans have opened some 250 museums and cultural centers in the last twenty years for several reasons: to re-possess their patrimony, memorize their culture and maintain their identity. Their museums are spaces of cultural and educational experience, replacing split families who no longer transmit traditional values orally. They safeguard oral testimonies of the old people (recordings) and the sacred objects collected by the tribes after the vote of the NAGPRA in 1990. In the Navajo Museum in Window Rock, AZ, the tribe wants to regain control of its representation and narrate its version of its history. Museums are mnemonic tools. But, according to a Navajo medicine man, they do not need museums. The memory of the tribe is a living one and the culture is lived daily. The real place of memory is his brains (as the transmitter of the sacred words and mediator of the Spirits) and those of grandparents in every family. He is the possessor of the knowledge that makes up the Navajo philosophy: Hózhó, the Blessed Way, and healing ceremonies, which are links with the past, the ancestors and the Spirits. The true spiritual memory cannot be exhibited: it is lived and practiced in secret. Museums are evidence of a secularized world that tends to lose the memory of the past and of the sacred. They display the erosion of the transmission of knowledge and are henceforth places of anti-memory. However, for a young Navajo, the archives stored in the Navajo Museum will enable her to write the biography of her grandfather, Albert “Chic” Sandoval. If he helped two “anglo” linguists and anthropologists to become famous in the early 20th century, he also saved the Navajo culture, memory and language from disappearance. By doing so, he, in fact, applied the principle of Hózhó, i.e. of balance and harmony. Indian museums are ambivalent contact zones, built on compromises with the intrusive “anglo” society and experienced as the embodiment of the juxtaposition of two cultures: they in fact are both places of memory and anti-memory.

This article presents a novel approach that integrates asset ranking and portfolio weighting within a single framework. Unlike traditional methods, which separate asset ranking from portfolio weighting, this research employs a multi-task neural network to concurrently learn asset rankings and optimize the number of assets for long and short positions. This innovation aims to better align the investment strategy with investor preferences right from the model prediction phase. To assess its effectiveness, the authors conduct experiments using historical weekly market data from China A-shares. The findings indicate that incorporating portfolio weighting into a multi-task learning framework significantly improves out-of-sample financial performance in contrast to benchmark methods that rely on heuristics or historical estimations.

Français 1840 Constance Fenimore Woolson est née à Claremont, New Hampshire (5 mars). Elle était le sixième enfant de Charles Jarvis et de Hannah Cooper Pomeroy Woolson. Elle était, par sa mère, une petite-nièce de James Fenimore Cooper. Automne 1840 Les Woolson déménagent à Cleveland, Ohio, après le décès de trois de leurs filles, atteintes de la scarlatine. Enfant et jeune fille, Constance voyage en Ohio, dans le Wisconsin et en Nouvelle Angleterre. Eté 1855 Elle découvre l’île de Mackinac ...

Drawing from a selection of movies (and a documentary), I propose to study some images of men and women in the context of the Vietnam War, taking a closer look at women’s. To some extent, they contribute to revealing how the “field of battle” has become a “field of gender” and what is at stake. The film as a medium is involved in what we may call “war propaganda”: in the movies, there are elements that are part and parcel of what makes the traditional image of men and women in wartime. It is mostly about defining men as visible acting characters on stage and women as secondary characters (Path to War), playing the part of the apolitical and maternal Other (Heaven and Earth). Indeed, their historical identity mainly defines them as “those who do not make war” (The Deer Hunter). Sometimes, the female image is ambivalent. But the portraits of those who betray their gender, the women warriors (Full Metal Jacket) and the unfaithful (Coming Home), though proposing new facets, do integrate into gender war propaganda. Occasionally the images showed also reveal new voices and paths (Regret to Inform, In Country, Heaven and Earth). It is true that overall we encounter no heroines but “super-hero soldiers” who rescue women (Heaven and Earth, Coming Home); however the representations offer a new space, emancipated from historical and social expectations. But do these stories suggest that women’s stories may be war stories and be part of history?

This article examines the trade-off between feature relevance and redundancy in feature selection for linear regression models. The analysis focuses on two widely used feature selection paradigms, F-test and Random Forest, each implemented in two variants: a relevance-only version and a redundancy-aware extension that jointly accounts for both factors. To evaluate these methods, the authors construct a synthetic data generation framework that enables precise control over average feature relevance and redundancy. By assessing out-of-sample performance across a grid of such configurations, they identify the conditions under which redundancy-aware methods offer meaningful advantages. These findings are further validated on three real-world financial datasets. Results show that relying on relevance alone is often insufficient, and explicitly addressing redundancy improves both the predictive performance and the explanatory power of linear models.

By and large, women have been maintained at a “reasonable” distance from the war. Their historic identity has mainly been that of mother, and therefore that of those who do not make war. They are not to belong to this sphere; it is to remain masculine, a men’s world. The Vietnam War (1964-1973) is no exception to the rule. This characteristic may be even more visible in the context of Vietnam given the power granted to authenticity: “having been there” has been essential. However, it seems that, just as Vietnam was a confused war, the border between genders has been sometimes blurred as well. We have thus found that some women have constructed and developed a strange process, a(n) (unconscious) strategy, in order to enter the world of war while not “having been there” really, while not knowing physically what war is and was. If “Vietnam is the land of [their] imagination”, as Barbara Sonneborn put it (Regret to inform, 1999), mimetism has allowed them to fill out the blanks, to uncover and discover their man’s reality, to “see what it was he saw […] to be in the field with him”, says Gail Gilberg (Snake’s Daugher, 1997). I will therefore expose and study this phenomenon that appears in various women’s stories, written or told, by themselves or others, through their own narrative styles and speeches. In doing so, I intend to examine whether the use of this mechanism reinforces the traditional representations of men and women in war: Does it allow a re-writing of these excluded female voices, while putting forward the specificities of women’s experiences in war? Does it grant women a voice and a visible presence? Considering that “societies are, in some sense, the sum total of the war stories” (Jean B. Elshtain), it seems interesting to examine to what extent this strategy allows the American women to find their place in the story of the Vietnam war, in a very specific way.

In this article, I consider the birth of the first illustrated magazine in the context of editorial trends in England in the 1830s, a period of political and social change. Studying the relationship between the Penny Magazine and its competitors allows me to question the choices made by some political and religious interests concerning the use of images. I also show how the wish to diffuse an encyclopaedist culture to as many people as possible resulted in both the extension of readership towards the middle classes and a secularisation of knowledge. Finally, the article insists on the supranational character of the cultural imaginary that was constructed by magazines published in various countries, in the same format and with very similar content.

Dans A New Way to Pay Old Debts de Philip Massinger la réputation est perçue comme une feuille blanche sur laquelle le personnage doit écrire le récit de sa vie. L’idée de la vie d’un homme comme livre ou comme feuille de papier est fort ancienne, elle figure aussi bien dans la Bible que dans les livres d’emblèmes des XVIe et XVIIe siècles. Au moment de la mort, l’homme laisse ainsi à la postérité un texte édifiant dont il aura été l’auteur (auctor). Cet article démontre qu’il faut néanmoins faire une distinction entre l’homme, qui prend plume et rédige son propre texte, et la femme qui doit attendre passivement qu’un autre compose le sien.