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In this paper, we analyze and compare two didactical designs for introducing primary school pupils to proportional reasoning in the context of plane polygons. One of them is well-documented in the literature; the other one is based on our own data and is accordingly presented and discussed in more detail in this paper. The two designs come from different cultural and intellectual environments: lesson study in Japan (implicitly based on the “open approach method”) and “didactical engineering” in France (based on the theory of didactical situations). The general aim of our paper is to compare these two environments and their approaches to didactical design, basing our discussion on the concrete designs mentioned above. Clear differences among them are presented, while we also identify links which hold potential for integrating research and practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes the French initiative in materials research against both a national and an international background, in an attempt to disentangle the local circumstances, which prompted this governmental initiative, and to characterize the specific profile of materials research in France. In presenting a biography of the interdisciplinary program in materials research (PIRMAT), we argue that: i) the PIRMAT denotes a failure of the French science policy in materials research; ii) the leadership of the CNRS led to a specific style of research, quite different from the engineering approach of Materials Science and Engineering, and characteristic of a French style in materials research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, the recently proposed approach known as 'risk targeting' for the development of national seismic design maps is investigated for mainland France. Risk targeting leads to ground-motion maps that, if used for design purposes, would lead to a uniform level of risk nationally. The Eurocode 8 design loads currently in force for France are used as the basis of this study. Because risk targeting requires various choices on, for example, the level of acceptable risk to be made a priori and these choices are not solely engineering decisions but involve input from decision makers we undertake sensitivity tests to study their influence. It is found that, in contrast to applications of this methodology for US cities, risk targeting does not lead to large modifications with respect to the national seismic hazard map nor to changes in the relative ranking of cities with respect to their design ground motions. This is because the hazard curves for French cities are almost parallel. In addition, we find that using a target annual collapse probability of about 10 for seismically designed buildings and a probability of collapse when subjected to the design PGA of 10 leads to reasonable results. This is again in contrast to US studies that have adopted much higher values for both these probabilities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]