Showing papers by "School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences published in 2007"
TL;DR: In this paper, the existence of least energy standing waves (solitons) in higher dimensions was studied and conditions on the parameters of the system under which it possesses a solution with least energy among all multi-component solutions were given.
Abstract: In this paper we consider systems of coupled Schrodinger equations which appear in nonlinear optics. The problem has been considered mostly in the one-dimensional case. Here we make a rigorous study of the existence of least energy standing waves (solitons) in higher dimensions. We give: conditions on the parameters of the system under which it possesses a solution with least energy among all multi-component solutions; conditions under which the system does not have positive solutions and the associated energy functional cannot be minimized on the natural set where the solutions lie.
382 citations
TL;DR: It is suggested that prosody acts as a filter, suppressing possible word-like sequences that span prosodic constituents that span statistics over the syllables.
158 citations
TL;DR: This work shows that when familiarized with a short artificial, subliminally bracketed stream, participants can learn relations about the structure of its words, which specify the classes of syllables occurring in first and last word positions, and suggests that different learning mechanisms analyze speech on-line.
121 citations
TL;DR: It is shown that absent collusion, the multiexpert organization dominates the single expert organization, however, this ranking is reversed when the experts can collude among themselves and with the principal (vertical collusion).
120 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors challenge the notion that the reform of accounting principles in accordance with fair value would provide better information, and that more transparency would reinforce the resilience of the economy, arguing that fair value gives at each instant a seemingly relevant liquidation value, but obscures the value creation process by mixing present profit with unrealized capital gains and losses.
Abstract: This article challenges the notion that the reform of accounting principles in accordance with fair value would provide better information, and that more transparency would reinforce the resilience of the economy. Actually, fair value gives at each instant a seemingly relevant liquidation value, but obscures the value creation process by mixing present profit with unrealized capital gains and losses. This discrepancy increases with an increased degree of uncertainty, which is at odds with widely held beliefs about the efficiency of existing financial markets. Fair value introduces an accounting accelerator on top of the already present and typical financial accelerator. It extends to the entire economic system, the source of financial fragility typical of the 1990s. If fair value accounting is applied to banks, an extra volatility may be created unless a new wave of innovations introduces countervailing forces.
116 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors investigated the role played by the body schema to understand the link between bodily sensations and the sense of ownership by investigating the role of body schema, and they found that one might even feel that a body part does not belong to oneself despite feeling sensations in it.
Abstract: What grounds my experience of my body as my own? The body that one experiences is always one's own, but it does not follow that one always experiences it as one's own. One might even feel that a body part does not belong to oneself despite feeling sensations in it, like in asomatognosia. The article aims at understanding the link between bodily sensations and the sense of ownership by investigating the role played by the body schema.
116 citations
TL;DR: In this article, the authors study the distribution of the sales tax burden between consumers and producers in the French market and show that the consumer share of the tax burden is 57% in new car sales market and 77% in the housing repair services market.
95 citations
TL;DR: It is shown that some spontaneous generalizations are driven by specialized, highly constrained symbolic operations, which suggests that some simple grammars are acquired using perceptual primitives rather than general-purpose mechanisms.
93 citations
TL;DR: In this article, the authors discuss the view that metacognition has metarepresentational structure and show that properties such as causal contiguity, epistemic transparency and procedural reflexivity are present in metACognition but missing in metare-presentation, while openended recursivity and inferential promiscuity only occur in met-arepresentation.
Abstract: Metacognition is often defined as thinking about thinking. It is exemplified in all the activities through which one tries to predict and evaluate one's own mental dispositions, states and properties for their cognitive adequacy. This article discusses the view that metacognition has metarepresentational structure. Properties such as causal contiguity, epistemic transparency and procedural reflexivity are present in metacognition but missing in metarepresentation, while open-ended recursivity and inferential promiscuity only occur in metarepresentation. It is concluded that, although metarepresentations can redescribe metacognitive contents, metacognition and metarepresentation are functionally distinct.
93 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors developed an endogenous growth model with elastic labor supply, in which agents differ in their initial endowments of physical capital, and the growth rate and the distribution of income were jointly determined.
Abstract: We develop an endogenous growth model with elastic labor supply, in which agents differ in their initial endowments of physical capital. In this context, the growth rate and the distribution of income are jointly determined. We then examine the distributional impact of different ways of financing an investment subsidy. Policies aimed at increasing the growth rate result in a more unequal distribution of pre-tax income, consistent with the positive correlation between income inequality and growth observed in the recent empirical literature. However, there is no conflict between efficiency and equity if inequality is measured in terms of the distribution of welfare.
73 citations
TL;DR: In this article, an empirical study of the consequences of transnational corporations' presence in the Mexican retailing sector, particularly Wal-Mart, is presented, showing that the arrival of foreign firms accelerates the modernisation but has a negative impact on local firms' performance and worker remuneration.
Abstract: This contribution to the discussion on the impact of foreign direct investment in developing countries is based on an empirical study of the consequences of transnational corporations' presence in the Mexican retailing sector, particularly Wal-Mart. First, it is shown that the arrival of foreign firms accelerates the modernisation but has a negative impact on local firms' performance as well as local worker remuneration as a result of the growing competitive pressure in the sector. Second, the changes that occurred in supply chain governance and the tremendous increase of imports initiated by Wal-Mart are described, and some probable implications for local suppliers are suggested.
TL;DR: The received view about meteorological predicates like ‘rain’ is that they carry an argument slot for a location which can be filled explicitly or implicitly, but this is argued to be incorrect.
Abstract: The received view about meteorological predicates like ‘rain’ is that they carry an argument slot for a location which can be filled explicitly or implicitly. The view assumes that ‘rain’, in the absence of an explicit location, demands that the context provide a specific location. In an earlier article in this journal, I provided a counter-example, viz. a context in which ‘it is raining’ receives a location-indefinite interpretation. On the basis of that example, I argued that when there is tacit references to a location, it takes place for pragmatic reasons and casts no light on the semantics of meteorological predicates. Since then, several authors have reanalysed the counter-example, so as to make it compatible with the standard view. I discuss those attempts and argue that my account is superior.
TL;DR: In this article, the authors study under which conditions local failures to produce or simply to deliver can result in avalanches of shortage and bankruptcies and in localisation of economic activity.
Abstract: Although standard economics textbooks are seldom interested in production networks, modern economies are more and more based upon supplier/customer interactions. One can consider entire sectors of the economy as generalised supply chains. We will take this view in the present paper and study under which conditions local failures to produce or simply to deliver can result in avalanches of shortage and bankruptcies and in localisation of the economic activity. We will show that a large class of models exhibit scale free distributions of production and wealth among firms and that regions of high production are localised.
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors focused on regional IT policies, with attention to the strategic use of peri-urban space and examined the construction of HITEC City and other large-scale projects.
TL;DR: A high number of serodiscordant couples continue to report risky sexual behaviour, and related factors are gender-specific, and couple-level interventions are essential in order to prevent HIV-transmission and to encourage negotiation within couples.
Abstract: Objective:Risky sexual behaviour remains frequent among people living with HIV. We analysed factors associated with unsafe sex within serodiscordant couples among heterosexual individuals living with HIV in France.Methods:In 2003, a face-to-face survey was conducted among individuals selected in a r
TL;DR: A limited number of sero-nonconcordant homosexual couples persist in reporting risky sexual behaviour, and the relationship between unprotected sex with both casual and regular partners is called into question.
Abstract: Objective:We investigated factors associated with unprotected sex in regular partnerships among homosexual men living with HIV.Method:We used data from a French national representative sample of people living with HIV (ANRS-EN12-VESPA survey). This analysis included men in a regular partnership with
TL;DR: In this article, the authors developed a game-theoretic model of "petty corruption" by government officials and characterized the trigger-strategy equilibria that minimize the social loss due to the system of bribes, and those that maximize the expected total bribe income of the bureaucrats.
TL;DR: The results suggest that the phonological codes in perception and in production are separate but connected by two conversion mechanisms and that these two mechanisms can be disrupted independently.
Abstract: In this paper, we study the link between the processing systems that sustain speech perception and production in a patient (F.A.) with conduction aphasia. Her pattern of performance in repetition task - quantitative but also qualitative striking difference in errors with pseudowords versus words - cannot be properly accounted for either by a perception deficit or by a production deficit. We discuss this finding according to theoretical models of phonological processing and show that it is best explained by an impaired ability to transfer phonological information from the perception to the production system. We also probed for a phonological link in the opposite direction, from the production to the perception system. F.A.'s results show that this link was not impaired. Overall, our results suggest that (a) the phonological codes in perception and in production are separate but connected by two conversion mechanisms and that (b) these two mechanisms can be disrupted independently.
TL;DR: On Consonants, Vowels, Chickens, and Eggs Luca L. Bonatti, Marcela Pena, Marina Nespor, and Jacques Mehler International School for Advanced Studies.
Abstract: On Consonants, Vowels, Chickens, and Eggs Luca L. Bonatti, Marcela Pena, Marina Nespor, and Jacques Mehler International School for Advanced Studies, Trieste, Italy; Universite de Nantes, Nantes Atlantique Universites, Labecd (EA 3259), Nantes, France; Laboratorio de Neurociencias, Escuela de Psicologia, Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile, Macul, Chile; University of Ferrara, Ferrara, Italy; and Laboratoire de Science Cognitive et Psycholinguistique, CNRS and EHESS, Paris, France
TL;DR: In this paper, Roitman explores the concept of economic citizenship through an examination of practices in the cross-border territories of the Chad Basin and demonstrates the simultaneous existence of regulated and unlicensed economic activities.
Abstract: Roitman's paper explores the concept of ‘economic citizenship’ through an examination of practices in the cross-border territories of the Chad Basin. In doing so, Roitman demonstrates the simultaneous existence of regulated and unlicensed economic activities. Her exploration of the discourse surrounding these economic practices, and the civil disobedience of the Villes Mortes campaign, which brought regulated and unregulated traders together in a refusal to pay tax, reveals a concept of economic citizenship at work. Her analysis reveals the genealogies of citizenship in the Chad Basin, where notions of freedom were marked by the legacies of Islamic conquest as well as of French colonialism.
TL;DR: The authors explored the history of demands for equalizing women's access to electoral office since the emergence of the second wave of feminism in France, shifting from quota to parity, and showed the discursive tactics used by proponents of parity to shape their claim within the terms of the dominant republican universalism, which was a priori hostile to the recognition of gender in political representation.
Abstract: This article explores the feminist campaign that led to the adoption of the gender parity laws (1999–2000), mandating an affirmative action policy to enhance women's representation in elected assemblies. After reviewing the history of demands for equalizing women's access to electoral office since the emergence of the second wave of feminism in France, shifting from quota to parity, it shows the discursive tactics used by proponents of parity to shape their claim within the terms of the dominant republican universalism, which was a priori hostile to the recognition of gender in political representation. The last section is a discussion of Joan Scott's recent analysis of the ‘refiguration’ of universalism in the discourses of the proponents of parity. The article concludes that these discourses both challenged and reinforced the dominant discourses in which they were embedded, in line with a long history of feminist challenges to the gender hierarchy.
TL;DR: A productive mid-level hypothesis would be that drawing style relies on the dynamics of the hand of the draughtsman and that MNS subserves both style inheritance and recognition, by observers, of such influence betweendraughtsmen.
TL;DR: In this article, the authors study the formation of social networks that are based on local interaction and simple rule following and show that when this self-interested process of link formation operates at level 2 neighbourhoods, agents self-organize into stable and efficient network structures that manifest reciprocity, equity and segregation, reminiscent of hunter gather groups.
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors studied the Ambrosetti-Prodi problem for nonlinear elliptic equations and systems, with uniformly elliptic operators in non-divergence form and non-smooth coefficients, and with nonlinearities with linear or power growth.
TL;DR: A rigorous but simple formalism is proposed to investigate whether a multi-level structure may be responsible for some properties of real-world complex networks, and it is applied to an archive of the Debian user mailing-list.
Abstract: It is well known now that most real-world complex networks have some properties which make them very different from random networks. In the case of interactions between authors of messages in a mailing-list, however, a multi-level structure may be responsible for some of these properties. We propose here a rigorous but simple formalism to investigate this question, and we apply it to an archive of the Debian user mailing-list. This leads to the identification of some properties which may indeed be explained this way, and of some properties which need deeper analysis.
TL;DR: Within the galaxy of optimization, some selected topics relating Combinatorial Optimization and Hierarchical Classification are discussed, including NP-completeness results and search for polynomial instances, and some standard algorithmic approaches are discussed.
Abstract: This paper is devoted to some selected topics relating Combinatorial Optimization and Hierarchical Classification. It is oriented toward extensions of the standard classification schemes (the hierarchies): pyramids, quasi-hierarchies, circular clustering, rigid clustering and others. Bijection theorems between these models and dissimilarity models allow to state some clustering problems as optimization problems. Within the galaxy of optimization we have especially discussed the following: NP-completeness results and search for polynomial instances; problems solved in a polynomial time (e.g. subdominant theory); design, analysis and applications of algorithms. In contrast with the orientation to “new” clustering problems, the last part discusses some standard algorithmic approaches.
TL;DR: In this article, the authors explored the challenge of a community based forest management in Betsileo country (Madagascar) and explored the responses of local actors inscribed in new socio-spatial strategies and practices.
TL;DR: A mechanism through which goals and their achievement in goal-directed actions can be emerging properties of self-organizing networks, not initially endowed with intentionality is proposed, which allows for a monist, non-mentalist description which does not need to resort to intentional mental states as causes of intentional actions.