Documents found
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512.More information
In order to define the educational role of the scientific and technological exhibition intended for children, la Cité des enfants of la Cité des sciences et de l'industrie has developped a research policy in partnership with the universities. The first results indicate the favourable conditions for the development of certain forms oflearning in the exhibition so as to favour cooperative learning between child and child, and adult and child, and also enable the definition of strategies for activities and ways of exhibiting which will encourage ail children in their discoveries, including those who have difficulties in their schooling.
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513.More information
Do new information and communication technologies make work less hard for employees and give them more freedom? This article examines whether these information and communication technologies help to liberate workers or whether they have the opposite effect. To better understand the effects of these technologies on work relations, it is important to consider to what extent the 20th century conceptual model of an "employee" is gradually becoming outdated in firms which organize their internal work processes on the basis of this new equipment. Thus, robotics and telematics are combined in a complex production process but their respective impact on the individual employee can be quite different. These external forces affect the individual employee in a much more direct and personal way than the simple constraints arising from technical means of production.The flexibility sought by the firm translates into a dual requirement for modem workers in terms of performance: rapid development of their professional autonomy (being able to work without a safety net) and continuous increases in their job mobility. While it is unquestionable that this digital technological "revolution" is increasing the supply of skilled jobs, it is also important to know the price that is, or can be, required from current workers.It is true that these memorized and processed data help avoid long debates about who did what, when and how. Nobody can justifiably deny these material and external facts. Moreover, this implies a retrieval of only selected data and not of all the elements of operations carried out by the employee. It goes without saying that a memory that retains such elements is worth ten times more than the memory of a manager, but the latter's valid and responsible judgement is still needed to provide an overall and human appreciation of the work performed by the same employee. Thus, can a firm's human resources manager, in all honesty, be satisfied with the data and rely on this Computing "subcontractor," forgetting that, in this case, the data processed are neither complete nor perfect. Owing to information and communication technologies, employees are always near regardless of their geographical location on any given day. Thus, at least for employees, absence from and presence at work no longer have the same meaning nor the same impact. Teleworkers, in the broad sense of the word, might organize their own work schedule, taking into account their personal constraints and the times of the day when they are at their best physically and mentally and have the optimal environmental conditions to carry out the work. But, is this really the case? In strict legal terms, are these teleworkers who have no roots and no fixed location on the employer's premises still employees? In such circumstances, have they acquired such a degree of autonomy that their legal status might be changed? Even though these teleworkers are judicially and legislatively described as employees, several current raies in employment-related laws would be hard to apply to them. The magnetic badge allows for tight and effective management of staff circulation within the establishment. Entries and exits made using the magnetic badge are thus memorized and processed (time, length of time and place, etc.). Thus, there is data on who circulates where, when, for how long and how many times per day, etc. This by-product of the electronic control of access routes thus makes it possible to track the entire staff and even to establish, at the precise time, an accurate accounting statement of the time spent near the work station and the time when the employee may be elsewhere... This gives rise to another question: should this employee not have a private "protective bubble" that guarantees him or her a degree of privacy, even inside the establishment? To what extent can an individual's actions be monitored so closely?The risk of a few blunders or the existence of a doubt about embezzlement by certain employees cannot justify a Kafkaesque surveillance of all employees, everywhere and all the time. Of course, there is no single, valid answer to any of these issues raised by the presence of information and communication technologies. Whatever the case may be, this "black eye" makes the employee highly visible to others, at the cost of abandoning his or her privacy, self-respect and perhaps, dignity. Employees are made so visible and transparent that they are "laid bare," or at least this is how they may feel and thus may be a source of distress. While not denying the efficiency of information and communication technologies, we should not be less vigilant under their blinding effects. Who knows what logic and model the authors of this software have used to obtain these results? It seems that a responsible manager should be cautious and entertain a systematic doubt so that this hidden technological subcontracting does not replace the necessary analysis of a set of qualitative and contextual data that are not dealt with at all by these new technologies.
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514.More information
Polygenic neo-variables to the rescue of a winter scene. — This article seeks to demonstrate the potential application of remote sensing via a simulated mission of the satellite Spot for elucidating the urban landscape. The case is Strasbourg, the date, February 1982. Certain faults in this simulation exercice have unfortunately precluded the normal possibility of multi-spectral classification. Some attempts have been made to rectify these deficiencies by creating three new band categories: radiometric, structural, and textural. The morphological neo-variables of the two latter categories have provided indispensable help in producing a reasonably satisfactory classification. They have also raised a series of stimulating questions. There were other deficiencies besides those of the initial imagery which made it quite difficult to accomplish this particular case study. There was no specialized information which might facilitate corroborative analysis of the image. The fact that these unfavourable conditions have been surmounted should make for optimism about the potential use of better data from satellite Spot even in research centers which have only a modest level of graphic equipment.
Keywords: methodology, remote sensing, urban morphology, méthodologie, morphologie urbaine, télédétection
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515.More information
Often considered a vector for major change, digital practices represent an opportunity through which to better understand literature and literary space by revealing, more explicitly than ever before, ontological elements that have, as such, timeless value. In particular, and as is the focus of this article, digital creation offers an opportunity to revive a debate that has persisted throughout the history of thought on the status of literature dating back to Plato and Aristotle : that of the relationship between literature and reality, the opposition of which Sartre and Derrida had already sought to deconstruct during the 20th century. We find that digital space highlights the absence of separation between symbolic and non-symbolic, thereby preventing us from considering a break between imaginary and reality. To address this structure, we turn to the concept of editorialization, which refers to the set of devices that allow for content production in digital space while accounting for the fusion of digital and non-digital spaces. Through literary examples – Traques Traces by Cécile Portier and Laisse venir by Anne Savelli and Pierre Ménard – we will demonstrate how literature today participates in editorializing the world, therefore definitively burying the imaginary-reality binary in favour of an anamorphic structure.
Keywords: Littérature numérique, imaginaire, réel, mimesis, éditorialisation, Google Street View, Google Maps, Sartre, Derrida, Digital literature, imaginary, reality, mimesis, editorialization, Google Street View, Google Maps, Sartre, Derrida
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516.More information
Keywords: Culture numérique, web, Cardon, espace public, algorithmes, digital labor, culture digitale, web, cardon, spazio pubblico, algoritmi, digital labor
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517.More information
Eighty-three rituals for the Kadosh Knight grade of the Scottish rite, dated approximately from 1750 to the present day, are digitally processed by methods of text mining or lexical analysis. To facilitate the understanding of our work, these methods are briefly described and software implementations are compared.For these texts, dates of first appearance are often uncertain, and so we attempt to establish chronological criteria and elements of kinship. A phylogenetic dendrogram appears as a necessary resource to determine the probable parentage of these rituals. Such a tree is built on the concept of distance and thus allows to compare the numerical proximity (similarity) or distance (dissimilarity) of these texts. For the purpose of digital processing, a metric based on Muller's method or khi2 is used a priori on the graphical forms. It appears in retrospect that the same metric, when used on syntactic functions, leads to a nearly identical phylogenetic tree.
Keywords: Fouille de texte, distance lexicale, datation, fonctions syntaxiques, arbre phylogénétique, rituels maçonniques, Text Mining, Lexical Distance Dating, Syntactic Functions, Phylogenetic Tree, Rituals of Masonry
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518.More information
Speculation on Simplifying Personal Income Tax, by Réjane Hugounenq and José Sastre Descals.This study analyzes changes in the structure of personal income tax from the point of view of a thorough reform of the entire system of tax and social security contributions. The aim is to simplify the system, broaden the tax base and erase the anomalies observed in the spread of marginal tax rates by eliminating tax relief, reductions and the minimum collection rate as well as altering the tax scale. The proposed reforms reduce the marginal tax rates and improve the system's redistributive properties (as plotted on a Lorenz curve). It is observed that political decision-makers have a fair amount of room for manoeuvre in implementing these improvements as regards the choices of gains and losses relating to the various classes of revenue. Finally and not surprisingly, a choice necessarily needs to be made in the short term between a broadening of the tax base and redistribution.
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519.More information
Érudit is an inter-university consortium whose mission is to promote and disseminate research results. Érudit's infrastructure and the services it provides ensure the electronic publication and distribution of several tens of thousands of documents that are consulted by millions of visitors each year. This paper recounts the brief history and the first development decade of this young organisation. It begins by addressing aspects of public policy, the needs of the research community, the economic model as well as the choice of partnership structures. This is followed by a description of Érudit's electronic editorial services and of technological choices that were made, one of which is the use of XML as a foundation for documentation infrastructure for publication and distribution. And finally, the technological infrastructure of Érudit is described as well as some possible avenues for future development in terms of its editorial platform.
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