Search

The "Companion Modeling" community is a French association that gathers dozens of researchers in ecology, computer science and social sciences from France and the Global South. Its objective is to propose tools, such as debates, simulations and games, to administrations and local populations in order to deescalate conflictual situations involving the management of natural commons. ComMod's treatment of futures in the context of committed action-research is distinct. Existing taxonomies seem to neglect the specificity of their practices, whose main objective is pedagogic and empowering, not anticipatory nor predictive. ComMod anticipates the collapse of natural resources through very simple scenario-building, in order to raise awareness within a given community and push people to change their behaviors. The main contribution of this paper is to propose a novel term to describe this specific relationship to futures--"committed scenario-building"--which ComMod can be seen as a prototype of. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using the InCites tool of Thomson Reuters, this study compares normalized citation impact values calculated for China, Japan, France, Germany, United States, and the UK throughout the time period from 1981 to 2010. InCites offers a unique opportunity to study the normalized citation impacts of countries using (i) a long publication window (1981 to 2010), (ii) a differentiation in (broad or more narrow) subject areas, and (iii) allowing for the use of statistical procedures in order to obtain an insightful investigation of national citation trends across the years. Using four broad categories, our results show significantly increasing trends in citation impact values for France, the UK, and especially Germany across the last thirty years in all areas. The citation impact of papers from China is still at a relatively low level (mostly below the world average), but the country follows an increasing trend line. The USA exhibits a stable pattern of high citation impact values across the years. With small impact differences between the publication years, the US trend is increasing in engineering and technology but decreasing in medical and health sciences as well as in agricultural sciences. Similar to the USA, Japan follows increasing as well as decreasing trends in different subject areas, but the variability across the years is small. In most of the years, papers from Japan perform below or approximately at the world average in each subject area. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents the preliminary results of a qualitative survey on the implementation of quotas policies, in the context of higher education and research in France, in the field of computer science specifically. Beyond the theoretical controversy over quotas, it is a question of diving into the heart of an environment that we can describe as specific (and of which we will draw some of the specificities), to collect the experience, the words of women, who are computer scientists in the academic environment, in relation to quotas. The main idea is to question the quotas implementation in order to study in which sense these quotas can indeed lead to more professional equality, but also to study the context in which they can slow down this professional equality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A comparison between the development of cognitive science in France and the USA enables us to analyze some national differences linked to specific connections between the scientific, military, economic and political worlds. The influence of new practices and tools developed during World War II and the Cold War appears to be of crucial importance in understanding the development of this new field, as well as that of cybernetics, computer science, artificial intelligence and molecular biology. This paper can be considered as a study in how the differing contexts in France and the USA shaped the history of the construction of cognitive science in each of these two countries. In spite of various differences, some common aspects may be pointed out: in both cases, computer experts and psychologists using a computational modelling approach were those first engaged in the construction of cognitive science. If in France neuroscience-oriented cognitive science research was stronger than in the USA, it seems that the artificial intelligence orientation is also of growing importance in France. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aim To investigate the content and meaning of nurses' administrative work. Background Nurses often report that administrative work keeps them away from bedside care. The content and meaning of this work remains insufficiently explored. Design Comparative case studies. Method The investigation took place in 2014. It was based on 254 hours of observations and 27 interviews with nurses and staff in two contrasting units: intensive care and long-term care. A time and motion study was also performed over a period of 96 hours. Results Documentation and Organizational Activities is composed of six categories; documenting the patient record, coordination, management of patient flow, transmission of information, reporting quality indicators, ordering supplies- stock management Equal amounts of time were spent on these activities in each case. Nurses did not express complaints about documentation in intensive care, whereas they reported feeling frustrated by it in long-term care. These differences reflected the extent to which these activities could be integrated into nurses' clinical work and this is in turn was related to several factors: staff ratios, informatics, and relevance to nursing work. Conclusion Documentation and Organizational Activities are a main component of care. The meaning nurses attribute to them is dependent on organizational context. These activities are often perceived as competing with bedside care, but this does not have to be the case. The challenge for managers is to fully integrate them into nursing practice. Results also suggest that nurses' Documentation and Organizational Activities should be incorporated into informatics strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Algol was a high-level programming language, created by American and European mathematicians in the late 1950s. It sparked a wave of debates, projects and counter-projects, and remained lively in academic spheres until the 1970s. This article focuses on Algol, less as a programming language than as a research programme, an object of circulation and translation, and a decisive step in the building of a new scientific community: computer science, or informatique. It provides an analysis of the main French actors involved in the global Algol endeavor--small groups of computer scientists who became interested in this project, appropriated it, and participated in its evolution, either within academic laboratories, R&D departments of computer companies, user organizations, or learned societies. This involves grasping each group with its local, particular rationale, culture, and environment as well as its integration in scientific networks at national and transnational levels. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Comparison of control strategies against animal infectious diseases allows determining optimal strategies according to their epidemiological and/or economic impacts. However, in real life, the choice of a control strategy does not always obey a pure economic or epidemiological rationality. The objective of this study was to analyze the choice of a foot and mouth disease (FMD) control strategy as a decision-making process in which the decision-maker is influenced by several stakeholders (government, agro-food industries, public opinion). For each of these, an indicator of epizootic impact was quantified to compare seven control strategies. We then determined how, in France, the optimal control strategy varied according to the relative weights of stakeholders and to the perception of risk by the decision-maker (risk-neutral/risk-averse). When the scope of decision was national, whatever their perception of risk and the stakeholders' weights, decision-makers chose a strategy based on vaccination. This consensus concealed marked differences between regions, which were connected with the regional breeding characteristics. Vaccination-based strategies were predominant in regions with dense cattle and swine populations, and in regions with a dense population of small ruminants, combined with a medium density of cattle and swine. These differences between regions suggested that control strategies could be usefully adapted to local breeding conditions. We then analyzed the feasibility of adaptive decision-making processes depending on the date and place where the epizootic starts, or on the evolution of the epizootic over time. The initial conditions always explained at least half of the variance of impacts, the remaining variance being attributed to the variability of epizootics evolution. However, the first weeks of this evolution explained a large part of the impacts variability. Although the predictive value of the initial conditions for determining the optimal strategy was weak, adaptive strategies changing dynamically according to the evolution of the epizootic appeared feasible. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Commuting data is increasingly used to describe population mobility in epidemic models. However, there is little evidence that the spatial spread of observed epidemics agrees with commuting. Here, using data from 25 epidemics for influenza-like illness in France (ILI) as seen by the Sentinelles network, we show that commuting volume is highly correlated with the spread of ILI. Next, we provide a systematic analysis of the spread of epidemics using commuting data in a mathematical model. We extract typical paths in the initial spread, related to the organization of the commuting network. These findings suggest that an alternative geographic distribution of GP accross France to the current one could be proposed. Finally, we show that change in commuting according to age (school or work commuting) impacts epidemic spread, and should be taken into account in realistic models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]