School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences

About: School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences is a facility organization based out in Villejuif, France. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Population & Politics. The organization has 1230 authors who have published 2084 publications receiving 57740 citations. The organization is also known as: Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales & EHESS.

Inequality of opportunities vs. inequality of outcomes: Are Western societies all alike?

Abstract: This paper analyzes the relationship between income inequality and inequality of opportunities for income acquisition in nine developed countries during the nineties. We develop a new definition of equality of opportunity and show how it can be implemented empirically. Equality of opportunity is defined as the situation where income distributions conditional on social origin cannot be ranked according to stochastic dominance criteria. Stochastic dominance is assessed using non-parametric statistical tests. We measure social origin by parental education and occupation and use national household surveys to assess inequality of income and opportunities. USA and Italy show up as the most unequal countries both in terms of outcome and opportunity. At the opposite extreme, income distributions conditional on social origin are very close in Scandinavian countries even before any redistributive policy. The analysis highlights that inequality of outcome and inequality of opportunity can sometimes lead to different pictures. For instance, France and Germany experience a similar level of inequality of income but the former country is much more unequal than the latter from the point of view of equality of opportunity. Differences in rankings according to inequality of outcome and inequality of opportunity underscore the importance of the policymaker's choice of the conception of equality to promote.

Introduction : la tension savoirs-pouvoirs à l’épreuve du gouvernement par les indicateurs de performance

Abstract: Aussi bien dans les Etats qu’au niveau international, il est devenu courant de s’appuyer sur des indicateurs pour fixer des objectifs quantifies et evaluer l’evolution de l’action publique et des fonctionnements administratifs. La recherche en sciences sociales qui traite du developpement des indicateurs de performance est abondante et releve de traditions intellectuelles variees. Beaucoup assimilent ce mouvement a une composante du tournant neo-liberal et a une manifestation du New Public Management. Ce dossier explore les tensions entre l’utilisation d’indicateurs et l’exercice du pouvoir, en soulignant l’ambivalence de cette relation, le chiffre etant tantot craint, tantot desire. Trois dimensions interdependantes sont distinguees pour analyser le gouvernement par les indicateurs : les enjeux de savoir, les logiques de pouvoir et les formes de publicisation qui leur sont associees. Les quatre textes rassembles portent principalement sur le suivi des resultats de politiques publiques, nationales ou internationales, abordes par des auteurs relevant de plusieurs disciplines. Ils rappellent que l’elaboration d’indicateurs participe de la construction des problemes publics pris en charge. Ils confirment l’interet des analyses qui prennent au serieux d’une part la fabrication des nombres et les conventions de calcul retenues et, d’autre part, les dispositifs de gouvernement dans lesquels ils s’inscrivent. Enfin, ils montrent que le gouvernement par les indicateurs debouche sur des formes nouvelles de bureaucratisation.

From Citizen Investigators to Cyber Patrols: Volunteer Internet Regulation in Russia

Abstract: State control over the Russian internet (Runet) has been enforced by dedicated administrations and private digital entrepreneurs since the early 2010s. Along with them, groups of digital vigilantes report on “negative” online content and claim to be fighting against activities considered to be criminal or contrary to social norms. However, their ideological convictions and moral supports are diverse and changing. This article analyses two nonprofits: Molodezhnaia Sluzhba Bezopasnosti (MSB, Youth Security Service) and Liga Bezopasnogo Interneta (LBI, Safe Internet League), which sponsors an emergent “cyber Cossack” movement. MSB, which can be referred to as “citizen investigators,” has developed a high degree of technical and legal experience and cooperates actively with the police. LBI promotes a conservative vigilantism to ensure “virtuous browsing,” with a strong focus on education. In March 2019 hearings at the Russian Civic Chamber on a bill addressing the activity of kiberdruzhiny (cyber patrols) revealed tensions between the “politically involved” (Duma members and kiberdruzhiny’s organizations) supporting the bill and the “experts” (representatives of internet companies and security specialists) opposed to it alleging the proposed law’s inefficiency. A third group, the supporters of a free and democratic Runet, is absent from the official debates but speaks out on social networks and through independent media against the development of civil surveillance. Article in English DOI: 10.25285/2078-1938-2019-11-3-46-70

A three-level classification of French tweets in ecological crises

Abstract: The possibilities that emerge from micro-blogging generated content for crisis-related situations make automatic crisis management using natural language processing techniques a hot research topic. Our aim here is to contribute to this line of research focusing for the first time on French tweets related to ecological crises in order to support the French Civil Security and Crisis Management Department to provide immediate feedback on the expectations of the populations involved in the crisis. We propose a new dataset manually annotated according to three dimensions: relatedness, urgency and intentions to act. We then experiment with binary classification (useful vs. non useful), three-class (non useful vs. urgent vs. non urgent) and multiclass classification (i.e., intention to act categories) relying on traditional feature-based machine learning using both state of the art and new features. We also explore several deep learning models trained with pre-trained word embeddings as well as contextual embeddings. We then investigate three transfer learning strategies to adapt these models to the crisis domain. We finally experiment with multi-input architectures by incorporating different metadata extra-features to the network. Our deep models, evaluated in random sampling, out-of-event and out-of-type configurations, show very good performances outperforming several competitive baselines. Our results define the first contribution to the field of crisis management in French social media.

Vocal development in a large-scale crosslinguistic corpus

Abstract: This study evaluates whether early vocalizations develop in similar ways in children across diverse cultural contexts. We analyze data from daylong audio recordings of 49 children (1-36 months) from five different language/cultural backgrounds. Citizen scientists annotated these recordings to determine if child vocalizations contained canonical transitions or not (e.g., "ba" vs. "ee"). Results revealed that the proportion of clips reported to contain canonical transitions increased with age. Furthermore, this proportion exceeded 0.15 by around 7 months, replicating and extending previous findings on canonical vocalization development but using data from the natural environments of a culturally and linguistically diverse sample. This work explores how crowdsourcing can be used to annotate corpora, helping establish developmental milestones relevant to multiple languages and cultures. Lower inter-annotator reliability on the crowdsourcing platform, relative to more traditional in-lab expert annotators, means that a larger number of unique annotators and/or annotations are required, and that crowdsourcing may not be a suitable method for more fine-grained annotation decisions. Audio clips used for this project are compiled into a large-scale infant vocalization corpus that is available for other researchers to use in future work.