Migrations in an Irish Context: New Worlds, New Words

International audienceThis book addresses the issue of migration from or to Ireland since the 17th-18Th century and examines the dynamics of emigration and immigration down to the present day. It is distinctive through its pluri-disciplinary approach of migrating issues in Ireland but also in the way it confronts individual and collective dynamics in the context of migration. Thus, this book aims at offering a comprehensive and englobing understanding of key issues of migration in Ireland today and their legal, social and linguistic impacts, while also focusing on the representations of the migrating experience in literature, be it in poetry or in fiction. In so doing it also aims at reassessing issues of home, place-making and belonging. The book does not restrict itself to a study of emigration or immigration, nor to a historical or economic approach because its goal is to show the complexity of migrating trajectories, whether individual or collective, and how those migrating stories are inscribed within national and supra national dynamics. The study of the words used to narrate those experiences offers a creative insight into the plurality of migrating experiences, hence the place devoted in this book to literary representations

Not on my plate! Challenges to promote meat substitutes

International audienceWe implement an online survey on a sample of 1,088 French respondents to assess their willingness-to-pay (WTP) for meat substitutes and to test the effectiveness of informational treatments aimed at encouraging a switch to these substitutes. Using insights from the mental accounting theory, our treatments inform respondents about the carbon content of the different alternatives. We show that there is no significant difference in the WTP between the veggie and meat-like alternatives, both exceeding the WTP for cultured meat. Second, we detect weak and heterogeneous effects of our informational treatments. Third, our study emphasizes the need for careful consideration in study design, as certain results suggest that respondents’ choices may not exhibit behavioral consistency with the independence of irrelevant alternatives principle

Fast in-place accumulation

International audienceThis paper deals with simultaneously fast and in-place algorithms for formulae where the result has to be linearly accumulated: some output variables are also input variables, linked by a linear dependency. Fundamental examples include the in-place accumulated multiplication of polynomials or matrices, C += AB (that is with only O(1) extra space). The difficulty is to combine in-place computations with fast algorithms: those usually come at the expense of (potentially large) extra temporary space, but with accumulation the output variables are not even available to store intermediate values. We first propose a novel automatic design of fast and in-place accumulating algorithms for any bilinear formulae (and thus for polynomial and matrix multiplication) and then extend it to any linear accumulation of a collection of functions. For this, we relax the in-place model to any algorithm allowed to modify its inputs, provided that those are restored to their initial state afterwards. This allows us to ultimately derive unprecedented in-place accumulating algorithms for fast polynomial multiplications and for Strassen-like matrix multiplications.We then consider the simultaneously fast and in-place computation of the Euclidean polynomial modular remainder R(X) ≡ A(X) mod B(X). Fast algorithms for this usually also come at the expense of a linear amount of extra temporary space. In particular, they require one to first compute and store the whole quotient Q(X) such that A = BQ+R. We here propose an *in-place* algorithm to compute the remainder only. If A and B have respective degree m+n and n, and M(k) denotes the complexity of a (not-in-place) algorithm to multiply two degree-k polynomials, our algorithm uses at most O((n/m) M(m) log(m)) arithmetic operations. In this particular case this is a factor log(n) more than the not-in-place algorithm. But if M(n) = Θ(n^{1+ε}) for some ε>0, then our algorithms do match the not-in-place complexity bound of O((n/m) M(m)). We also propose variants that compute – still in-place and with the same kind of complexity bounds – the over-place remainder A(X) ≡ A(X) mod B(X), the accumulated remainder R(X) += A(X) mod B(X) and the accumulated modular multiplication R(X) += A(X)C(X) mod B(X), that is multiplication in a polynomial extension of a finite field.To achieve this, we develop techniques for Toeplitz matrix operations, for generalized convolutions, short product and power series division and remainder whose output is also part of the input

Bruno Latour, le physicien et les atomes

International audienc

Electronic structure and transport in materials with flat bands: 2D materials and quasicrystals

reviewInternational audienceIn this review, we present recent works on materials whose common point is the presence of electronic bands of very low dispersion, called "flat bands", which are due to specific atomic order effects without electron interactions. These states are always indicative of some form of confinement and have significant consequences on the electronic structure, transport properties and magnetism of these materials. A first part is devoted to the cases where this confinement is due to the long-range geometry of the defect-free structure. We have thus studied periodic approximant structures of quasiperiodic Penrose and octagonal tilings, and twisted bilayers of graphene or transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDs) whose rotation angle between the two layers assumes a special value, called "magic angle". In these materials, the flat bands correspond to electronic states distributed over a very large number of atoms (several hundreds or even thousands of atoms) and are very sensitive to small structural distortions such as "heterostrain". We have shown that their electronic transport properties cannot be described by usual Bloch-Boltzmann theories, because the interband terms of the velocity operator dominate the intraband terms as far as quantum diffusion is concerned. In the case of twisted bilayer graphene, flat bands can induce a magnetic state and other electron-electron correlation effects. The second part focuses on two-dimensional nanomaterials in the presence of local point defects that cause resonant electronic states (vacancies, adsorbed atoms or molecules). We present studies on monolayer graphene, twisted or Bernal bilayer graphene, carbon nanotubes, monolayer and multilayer black phosphorene, and monolayer TMDs. A recent result is the discovery that the selective functionalization of a Bernal bilayer graphene sublattice leads to a metallic or insulating behavior depending on the functionalized sublattice type. This result, which seems to be confirmed by very recent experimental measurements, suggests that functionalization can be a key parameter to control the electronic properties of two-dimensional materials

Modeling of nonlinear viscoelasticity and stress softening in soft tissues

International audienceThis paper deals with the mechanical behavior of soft living tissues under load-unload and relaxation cyclic strains. It proposes a thermodynamic model formulated within the Generalized Standard Materials framework that incorporates both Mullins’ effect and viscoelasticity, integrating the history dependent behavior of the material under finite strain. A key innovation lies in the use of a common softening function to modulate both the hyperelastic and viscous components, capturing history-dependent behavior more accurately. Viscous parameters are adjusted based on the loading history via the maximum strain invariant. Numerical implementation is validated against uniaxial tensile tests on porcine perineal tissues and a global Sobol sensitivity analysis confirms that elastic, viscous, and Mullins-related parameters are identifiable from different phases of the loading protocol. This model provides a unified, thermodynamical consistent tool for simulating soft tissue mechanics

Back to the ground. Knowledge, Politics and Practices of remaking Earth Strata

International audienceSoils and the underground have long been viewed, and tapped into, as mere reservoirs of organic and mineral resources, or a taken-for-granted site where societies could permanently bury a range of unwanted waste and residues – ranging from domestic and nuclear wastes to CO2 surplus (Kearnes and Rickards, 2017). Contrasting with this focus on soil and the underground, this book aims to produce empirical, critical, and speculative insights into the rise of alternative experimentations, projects and initiatives aiming to reconstitute, replenish, regenerate and care for Earth strata at various levels. While experts are warning that soil degradation rates are accelerating and threatening to bypass several of the Earth boundaries (Steffen, 2015), soils and the underground are also increasingly being reinvested in a number of collective projects and speculative initiatives aiming to foster ways out of the current fossil fuel economy and the associated ecological and climate crisis. This volume thus addresses the joint becoming of soils and the underground by considering how a range of contemporary initiatives and experimentations are fostering new collectives, practices and sensitivities that bring a fresh look on soil, land and underground-based promises of sustainability and transition. This book takes its inspiration from social sciences and humanities scholarship that develop critical and political accounts of the unacknowledged presence of soils and the underground in social existence (Puig de la Bellacasa; Donovan and Bobette; Krzywoszynska ; Clark). Scholarship in the social sciences and humanities therefore increasingly pays attention to soils not only as a surface and background for human existence but also as a tridimensional ecosystem and volume with its own biogeochemical animacy and physical liveliness (Elden,2013; Adey, 2013; Clark, 2013, 2016 ; Bridge, 2013; Kama and Kuchler, 2019; Billé, 2020). This reframing of the ground’s relations to social life has led to the emergence of two distinct sets of literature. On the one hand, the underground and deeper layers of subsoi have fostered a quite abundant literature, inspired by Foucauldian approaches and political ecology (Kinchy et al., 2018; Bobbette and Donovan, 2019), that unpacked the role of knowledge discourses and instruments in assembling underground resources and materialities; on the other hand, recent writing in the environmental humanities started focusing on the living soils – i.e. the fertile layers of soils where plants grow – in an attempt to enrich social sciences understanding of our interconnectedness with belowground living beings and ecologies (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2019 ; Salazar et al., 2020). However these two bodies of literature have seldom encountered and discussed each other. This book aims to open up a space for a dialog and cross-fertilisation between both strands of literature. More than an addition of perspectives, the book invites to elaborate new transversal lines of research that bring altogether hybrid processes and entities usually kept separated. The introduction sets the stage for a collective inquiry in which interdisciplinary and creative research plays a lead role.This book builds on this scholarship but also takes a different path and develops a different story. We aim instead to experiment with thinking in terms of de-stratification issues and processes, and re-stratification efforts and initiatives aiming to regenerate, reshape and replenish the Earth strata, as various communities and groups attempt to put carbon back into the ground, to remediate pollution by various means, or to re-fertilise soils. Following Deleuze and Guattari (1980), and Nigel Clark’s recent writings, we start from the observation of a deeply ‘de-stratified’ Earth as soils and subsoil have been disturbed and ‘turned inside out for centuries and millennia’ (Clark and Szerzynski, 2021). If a ‘stratum’ is a political articulation between a state of nature and a state of the social and the economy, emerging strata pave the way for studying a diversity of processes of rearticulating Earth. If followed attentively, these processes of stratification and de-stratification may open up new ecological loops from which new collectives, practices and sensitivities emerge. New questions emerge from these transitory ways of living on and with a de-stratified Earth: What does it mean to live on a de-stratified Earth? How do people negotiate their ordinary attachments to a turbulent Earth? How can we deal with what melts, flows, breaks away, accumulates, contaminates? These questions will be tackled through a various set of methodologies from ethnographic case studies, the history of geology and the soil science, the sociology of expertise, but also the visual arts and science-fiction literature. Doing so, we aim to understand how soils and the underground come to be known, sensed, felt, assembled, managed and inhabited not only in terms of taken-for-granted reservoirs of mineral and organic resources, but also in terms of various emerging practices, collectives and sensitivities aiming to regenerate and reconstitute Earth strata in a time of climate and ecological crisis. These emerging socialities, practices and sensitivities contribute to the composition of new ‘Gaïan collectives’ (Krzywoszynska, 2021) and ‘Earthly multitudes’ (Clark and Szerszynski, 2020) whose analysis will constitute an original contribution of this book

Whistled Languages and Whistled Speech

International audienceWhistled languages are secondary speech codes based on whistles anchored to, and derived from, a spoken language thanks to a relation of acoustic iconicity. Whistled languages essentially consist of a complementary/auxiliary modality of speech mostly used for distance communication that is mainly used in language communities maintaining a traditional lifestyle. Indeed, whistles propagate well in natural surroundings. This special speech practice is often called ‘whistled speech’ because its productions maintain and augment some acoustical features of spoken speech while degrading others, to adapt spoken sentences into a simple melodic line modulated in amplitude and frequency

Les controverses mémorielles autour de l’héritage du fascisme et l’identité de l’extrême droite en Italie (fin XXe-début XXIe siècle)

International audienc

Intangible value and risks, Regulation requirements, valuation practices and ways forward a better risk awareness within valuation reports

International audienc