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.

Chemistry and industrial and environmental governance in France, 1770–1830:

Abstract: This article examines how chemists contributed to the technological reorganization in France at the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth century, how they justified using potentially harmful or polluting processes by stating that this would contribute to national prosperity, and how the idea of improvement helped to legally and rhetorically build a production regime that disqualified traditional precautionary attitudes to certain artisanal and industrial processes. This resulted in the establishment of a new environmental governance regime devoted to the advancement of chemistry and of industrial production. While this shift was clearly perceptible from the 1770s with the first regulatory exceptions for strategic products, the 1810 decree, which was imagined, designed, and implemented by chemists, perpetuated chemistry’s role as an environmental regulator.

Computational appraisal of gender representativeness in popular movies

Abstract: Gender representation in mass media has long been mainly studied by qualitatively analyzing content. This article illustrates how automated computational methods may be used in this context to scale up such empirical observations and increase their resolution and significance. We specifically apply a face and gender detection algorithm on a broad set of popular movies spanning more than three decades to carry out a large-scale appraisal of the on-screen presence of women and men. Beyond the confirmation of a strong under-representation of women, we exhibit a clear temporal trend towards fairer representativeness. We further contrast our findings with respect to a movie genre, budget, and various audience-related features such as movie gross and user ratings. We lastly propose a fine description of significant asymmetries in the mise-en-scene and mise-en-cadre of characters in relation to their gender and the spatial composition of a given frame.

Technological Innovations in Contemporary Music

Abstract: by composers, but rather how innovations such as electroacoustic and computer music were able to 'succeed'. I employ the word 'success' in the organizational sense: it is the lasting formation of new segments of musical creation and the mobilization of composers, of partners from the scientific world, and of the technical and financial resources for establishing these new segments. If the two types of musical production I shall consider - electroacoustic music and computer music - can be strongly distinguished, it is because they neither appeared nor developed in the same contexts, nor did they require the same technical or human resources. And the respective roles played by creation, properly speaking, and the research work of scientific invention are very different. I believe that one might also differentiate them geographically: electroacoustic creation was dominant in Europe up until the late 1970s; the research in the field of computer music developed very early on in the United States. Of course, one might cite examples that contradict this pattern but the main tendency corresponds, I believe, to the presentation that I propose. What in fact interest me are the factors that shape each of these separate activities, i.e. the socio-economic, technical and organizational factors. I shall therefore examine these two sorts of activity successively, and then I shall show how one has sought to reconcile the merits of each, using the example of the French centre for musical research IRCAM (Institut de Recherche et de Coordination Acoustique/Musique).

Bare nouns in predicate position in French

Abstract: In this paper we examine the differences between bare singular nouns and indefinite singular NPs in predicate position in French. Our claim is that the semantic value of the singular indefinite determiner is not empty in French and that various interpretative contrasts between bare singular nouns and indefinite nouns in predicate position can be accounted for if a distinction between two rules of predication supported by copular sentences is introduced. We assume that bare nouns denote properties, which can be attributed to individuals, while indefinite noun phrases denote entities, which can be identified with an individual in context. This distinction between two types of statements, attributive ones and identificational ones, takes its source in Higgin's typology, and will be compared with Roy's and Heller and Wolter's works on predicative and specificational sentences.