How do school actors deal with "early school leaving"? A French-German comparison about the interpretations and usages of a political watchword

This thesis questions the interpretations of a political watchword aiming at reducing « early school leaving ». This research addresses the formulation and dissemination of this problem through the analysis of French and German political programmatic at different levels of the educational governance and which give school actors a crucial responsibility in fighting it. So the second aspect of this research is to highlight the perceptions that these actors have of this responsibility through questioning their understanding of the problem, embedded in the narrative of the “knowledge society”, economically “more competitive” and socially “more cohesive”. At the edge of the year 2020 (the horizon of the Europe 2020 Strategy that continues on the former « Lisbon strategy ») this thesis discusses the influence of the European Union on shaping domestic educational agendas, from the national level to even the principals’. But more specifically, it allows to highlight the structural, institutional and individual filters through which this issue is interpreted, which lead to different interpretations of the reality and usages. How far do the school actors perceive their responsibility in fighting against “early school leaving”? How do they identify their capacity to make the difference while facing some of their students’ problems and difficulties that might influence their school trajectory negatively? Finally, how, on the whole, the school actors taken in all their diversity, tend to blame the school, the individual student and their environment or political choices for their early dropout or “negative participation”, which sometimes leads schools to exclude the troublemakers? What legitimacy does this fight have in their eyes, in the light of the historical and selective nature of the French and German educational systems, and considering recent discourses that are alarmed regarding the expansion of tertiary education? Fighting against “early school leaving” and worrying about the “invasion” of the university, this sounds at first sight strange and contradictory! This thesis tries to grasp the whys and wherefores of this political fight in the name of better “equal opportunities” in and by school by analysing the perceptions of the actors in charge of realising them

A Statistical Approach to the Alignment of fMRI Data

Multi-subject functional Magnetic Resonance Image studies are critical. The anatomical and functional structure varies across subjects, so the image alignment is necessary. We define a probabilistic model to describe functional alignment. Imposing a prior distribution, as the matrix Fisher Von Mises distribution, of the orthogonal transformation parameter, the anatomical information is embedded in the estimation of the parameters, i.e., penalizing the combination of spatially distant voxels. Real applications show an improvement in the classification and interpretability of the results compared to various functional alignment methods

A comparison of the CAR and DAGAR spatial random effects models with an application to diabetics rate estimation in Belgium

When hierarchically modelling an epidemiological phenomenon on a finite collection of sites in space, one must always take a latent spatial effect into account in order to capture the correlation structure that links the phenomenon to the territory. In this work, we compare two autoregressive spatial models that can be used for this purpose: the classical CAR model and the more recent DAGAR model. Differently from the former, the latter has a desirable property: its ρ parameter can be naturally interpreted as the average neighbor pair correlation and, in addition, this parameter can be directly estimated when the effect is modelled using a DAGAR rather than a CAR structure. As an application, we model the diabetics rate in Belgium in 2014 and show the adequacy of these models in predicting the response variable when no covariates are available

Long Waves, Depression, and Innovation: Implications for National and Regional Economic Policy

The opening sentences in the IIASA Charter speak about the problems generated by industrialization. Therefore industry, technology, and the economy have been implicitly or explicitly embodied in most of the Institute's projects. The first big IIASA research program, on energy, naturally entailed studying the impacts and dynamics of technology diffusion. This was the first research at the Institute to touch on the possible causes of long-term economic growth. Later studies of the management of innovation acknowledged the need to understand the interaction of technological with economic (and social) development beyond the frame of classical and neoclassical economics. One particular question reflected that need: How could cyclical influences be distinguished from structural ones? We tried to gain a better view by doing some case studies, which only increased our conviction that examination of these issues promised to be rewarding. The small meeting on long waves that we started to arrange eventually developed into a conference. The way the conference was organized and the cooperation it engendered further demonstrated that studies of these issues are timely. The problem that the organizers had to face was how to make maximum use of all the creative potential of the participants. It was therefore decided to arrange the conference in the following way: -- Full papers describing results of research on long waves were distributed before the conference and not read to the audience. -- Position papers on particular topics were selected before the conference so as to focus attention on the most important issues; the ensuing discussions and comments captured interesting views and ideas, reflecting the creative atmosphere of the meeting. This proceedings volume is structured accordingly: Parts I and II consist of a selection of the papers and comments on the five topics, and Part III includes further discussion by various participants. Part I starts with J. Delbeke's paper which gives an overview of the conference. This paper is particularly useful for those who are making a first acquaintance with this topic. We were also fortunate that several complete models or position papers on different long-wave schools were submitted to us. To keep the proceedings volume to a manageable and economic length, we were obliged to publish several of the papers submitted (by A. Piatier, A. Kleinknecht, J. Sterman, and J. Delbeke) separately as IIASA Collaborative Papers. We feel that this strikes a sensible middle course between the need to document the conference's work and the dictates of size and finance. The presence of leading representatives of different theories of long waves made it possible to gain first-hand insight into the state of the art, as well as to hear about the more promising directions for further research. Most meetings on long waves tend to be exclusively economy oriented, but the Siena/Florence meeting was rather different. Consistent with IIASA's interdisciplinary role, representatives of other disciplines were present and it is worth recording that researchers working in biology, demography and sociology hinted, in their contributions, at mechanisms studied in their own disciplines that could also lead to long-wave phenomena. In spite of the fact that many economists do not accept the existence of long waves as proven, the majority of scientists at the meeting did not question the existence or relevance of long-wave phenomena, irrespective of their cause. Nevertheless, it is extremely difficult to identify long-wave phenomena and several participants mentioned the problems to be expected in such investigations. IIASA and IRPET both focus on policy orientation and policy instruments. Proponents of all the theories represented were united in the idea that numerous phenomena could be better understood by applying long-wave theories. This understanding is essential for the design of optimal policies; therefore it appears that future research into long-wave issues is both desirable and necessary. We were very fortunate to have the support of our Italian hosts at an early stage in the development, preparation and organization the Conference. It is also to their credit that the meeting surpassed all expectations as far as scientific coverage of the topics and international representation was concerned, and we owe them our thanks for their warmth and generosity. Finally, the meeting in Siena and Florence was exceptional, both in that its scope was wide and that it integrated the work of researchers from East and West

The Unity of Plutarch's Work

The contributions to this volume inquire into many important issues of Plutarchean scholarship: the conditions under which Plutarch`s writings were split into two distinct corpora, his methods of work and the various authorial techniques employed, the interplay between Lives and Moralia, Plutarch and politics, Plutarch and philosophy, literary aspects of Plutarch`s œuvre, Plutarch on women, Plutarch in his epistemological and socio-historical context. The contributors offer in-sights that throw new light on Plutarch`s personality and illustrate the unity of his varied literary production

The Unity of Plutarch's Work

The contributions to this volume inquire into many important issues of Plutarchean scholarship: the conditions under which Plutarch`s writings were split into two distinct corpora, his methods of work and the various authorial techniques employed, the interplay between Lives and Moralia, Plutarch and politics, Plutarch and philosophy, literary aspects of Plutarch`s œuvre, Plutarch on women, Plutarch in his epistemological and socio-historical context. The contributors offer in-sights that throw new light on Plutarch`s personality and illustrate the unity of his varied literary production