Gender Leadership Imbalance in Sport Organizations in Latin America

The purpose of the study was to examine gender imbalance at the leadership level of sport administration at National Olympic Committees (NOC), National Paralympic Committees (NPC), and National Sport Organizations (NSF) of countries members of the Pan American Sports Organization (PASO). Specifically, this study examined how social and human capital, socio-cultural aspects of each country, and power-based discourses affect the advancement of women’s careers at the micro, meso, and macro levels of analysis. A total of 12 participants were selected to participate in this study. Participants were all female sport administrators holding the position of president, vice-president, or secretary-general of a NOC, NPC, or NSF representing sport organizations in seven countries. The majority were married, were former athletes, self-described as white, of European descent, and being of middle and upper-class. All 12 participants have undergraduate level degrees and most of them hold master’s degrees. Semi-structured interviews were used to examine how similar experiences defined the careers of women in the sport industry, with thematic analysis and a Feminist Critical approach being used as the primary method for data analysis. Findings of this investigation show that participation barriers that prevent women’s access to sport leadership roles are more prevalent at the meso-level, being influenced by both endemic sexist discourses of the sport culture as a male-dominated industry and by the socio-cultural factors that prevail in the region. Results also revealed that social class and status provide not only women with better education opportunities but also access to advance a career in sport. Thus, lack of training in sport administration and command of the English language are perceived as barriers that primarily affect women minorities. Participants prefer the merits of the female leader instead of filling quotas. Finally, participants perceived that despite the effects of the machista culture in most Latin American sport organizations, a generational change is occurring in the leadership of these organizations. The new generation of sport leaders seems to be more empathetic and show more positive attitudes toward women leading sport organizations

Experimentation and political science : six applications

Thèse numérisée par la Division de la gestion de documents et des archives de l'Université de Montréal

The Evolution and Development of Inequity Aversion

Humans show such strong sensitivity to whether resources are distributed fairly that they sacrifice personal gain to avoid distributional inequity. This inequity aversion plays an important role in guiding human social decision-making and appears to be ubiquitous across human populations. However, we currently do not understand whether or how inequity aversion evolved over the course of human evolution or how it develops in children.Human Evolutionary Biolog

EUROPEAN CONFERENCE ON QUEUEING THEORY 2016

International audienceThis booklet contains the proceedings of the second European Conference in Queueing Theory (ECQT) that was held from the 18th to the 20th of July 2016 at the engineering school ENSEEIHT, Toulouse, France. ECQT is a biannual event where scientists and technicians in queueing theory and related areas get together to promote research, encourage interaction and exchange ideas. The spirit of the conference is to be a queueing event organized from within Europe, but open to participants from all over the world. The technical program of the 2016 edition consisted of 112 presentations organized in 29 sessions covering all trends in queueing theory, including the development of the theory, methodology advances, computational aspects and applications. Another exciting feature of ECQT2016 was the institution of the Takács Award for outstanding PhD thesis on "Queueing Theory and its Applications"

Perspektiven von Mensch-Hund-Interaktionen

In comparative psychology we draw inferences about the evolution of cognition by investigating the similarities and differences between human and non-human animals. I am especially interested in which cognitive skills have evolved in different species that allow them to be optimally adapted to their environment. Dogs, due to their high sociality and the fact that they were subject to a special domestication process, represent a highly promising model to investigate social cognition from a comparative perspective. Studying dog cognition not only sheds light on the question on what skills humans share with other animal species, but also what kind of selection pressures lead to human-like skills. Dogs are not simply pets that live in the human environment, but they also form a close relationship to humans and cooperate with them. Thus, studying dogs living in that special niche will not only inform us about their cognitive skills but might also help us to better understand the selection pressures that led to the unique cognition of humans. The aim of this habilitation thesis is to characterize the dog-human relationship taking diverse perspectives on dog cognition and the dog-human bond. During their long domestication process, dogs have evolved special cognitive skills that help them to function effectively in human societies. In this thesis, I present experimental evidence for these skills and I suggest that the skills have evolved in a domain-specific manner, independently from each other. Dogs show outstanding cognitive skills in the domain of (1.) communication, (2.) perspective taking, (3.) cooperation and (4.) olfaction processing, but perform poorly or average in other domains such as (5.) metacognition and (6.) behavioral matching. Regarding (1.) communication I present experimental evidence that dogs without special training are able to successfully show a human a hidden object and that this showing behavior in dogs is a means to communicate the location of that hidden object. I argue that successful communication between dog and humans in general is the consequence of four preconditions in dogs: (i) they are extremely attentive and interested in what humans are doing, (ii) they have excellent learning abilities, (iii) they are able to read subtle cues of human behavior and (iv) they have extensive experience with different communicative situations. Furthermore, I present an experiment about (2.) perspective taking – defined as the ability to assess what others can perceive. Here I found that dogs are able conceal auditory but not visual information from humans when they approach forbidden food. Taken together with findings from previous studies, I conclude that dogs use certain strategies when they assess what a human can and cannot perceive. I studied (3.) cooperation both within dogs and between dogs and humans. Within dogs I used a problem-solving paradigm that involved aspects of a hunting-like situation. I compared the performances of dogs with those of wolves. My results suggest that the abilities needed to coordinate their actions were already present in the dog-wolf ancestor. Dogs and wolves may show similar cooperative skills when cooperating with their conspecifics, but dogs might cooperate better with humans than wolves do, as it is likely that during the domestication process dogs have been selected to cooperate specifically with humans. Consequently, I investigated the cognitive and motivational skills required for a dog to support a human. From the results I conclude that dogs display a number of prosocial behaviors towards a human when they are able to infer the goal of the human and when they understand how to fullfill it. In contrast to communicative, cooperative and perspective taking skills, (4.) the special olfactory skills of dogs probably did not evolve during domestication, but could be one of the reasons why dogs were domesticated. Here I present evidence that dogs can use olfactory information in an adaptable way: Dogs were presented with a violation-of-expectation paradigm in which they could track the odor trail of one target, but at the end of the trail, they found another target. I found that they are able to represent what they smell—that is, when they follow a trail they have an expectation of something or someone at the end of the trail. Thus, not only is dogs’ sense of smell itself quite outstanding, but so are also their related cognitive skills. In contrast, in their (5.) metacognitive skills and in (6.) behavioral matching, dogs do not show unique skills but perform similarly to other social mammals. Regarding (5.) metacognition I investigated whether dogs were sensitive to the information that they themselves had or had not acquired. I found that dogs seek additional information in uncertain situations, but their behavior in these situations is less flexible compared to great apes or human children. Finally, I did not find evidence for (6.) behavioral matching, ie. whether dogs develop an increased affiliation towards a human who mimics them. Dogs in my study showed no increased preference for one of two human experimenter who matched the dogs’ walk. In this thesis I present a view on dog cognition that differentiates individual cognitive skills, pointing out how exactly they are adapted to their special human environment. Thus, I emphasize the unique closeness of the dog-human relationship. I also point out where current findings are incomplete or show limits of their paradigms and call for further research. Firstly, I criticize the fact that most data on dogs’ understanding of their social and physical environment is based on performance in the visual or sometimes in the auditory modality. As dogs’ olfaction is their most relevant sense, I therefore call for more dog studies that are based on olfaction. Secondly, regarding the dog-human relationship, there are many open questions that have not yet been considered well enough: for example, whether dogs are capable of skills like empathy, the human perspective on dogs, and cultural differences in dog-human interactions. Thirdly, to better understand the dog-human bond it is crucial to further investigate when, where and how domestication started. This is also needed in order to understand why dogs were domesticated and what made and makes them valuable for humans. To answer the above mentioned questions, an interdisciplinary approach is crucial, in which scientists from the fields of archaeology, linguistics, paleoclimatology, genetics, anatomy, ethology, psychology, sociology, and anthropology work together

Report on blockchain technology & legitimacy

This report synthesizes the insights explored within the ERC BlockchainGov reading group on “Legitimacy in Blockchain,” taking place bi-weekly from July 2021 until June 2022. The report investigates the role of legitimacy in blockchain systems from descriptive, conceptual, and normative perspectives. It summarizes the discussions and provides recommendations concerning the role of legitimacy in blockchain systems drawing from the talks held by the reading group. The organizers of the reading group are part of several initiatives, including a five-year-long (2021-2026), EU-funded (ERC grant of €2M) on ‘Blockchain Gov’ at the CNRS (France)/EUI (Italy), a Future Fellowship project funded by the Australian Research Council on ‘Cooperation through Code’ at RMIT (Australia) and the Coalition of Automated Legal Applications (CO-ALA). The “Legitimacy in Blockchain” report is one of a series that includes the “Blockchain Technology, Trust, and Confidence” report (De Filippi et al., 2022) and “Blockchain Technology & Polycentric Gover-nance” report (De Filippi et al., forthcoming)

Ideal of the Imitatio Christi in chivalric works in Late Medieval England: a case study

Christians have pursued the ideal of the imitatio Christi since the early days of the Christian church. There are two intertwined traditions within this ideal: the imitation of Christ’s divinity and humanity, which correspond to qualities that are conventionally regarded as “active” and “passive” in general. It is the latter tradition which emphasizes humility and humbleness that modern people are more exposed to, and their familiarity has had the effect of rather distorting modern critical responses to the late medieval discourses of religious chivalry. The attitudes towards violence are illustrative of the tensions between these two traditions that can be traced back to the Bible itself. These tensions were deeply felt by medieval authors when they wrote about chivalric virtues, particularly because using violence is at the very centre of a knightly life. My thesis surveys some of the representative voices on chivalry in late medieval England in order to get a rounded view of whether and how knights were expected to imitate Christ in that period. These texts include the model chivalric romance Le Morte d’Arthur, Langland’s Piers Plowman in which he works with romance traditions when portraying ideal knights, St. Bernard’s crusade propaganda that is illustrative of a special way in which religious and military ideals are fused, two chivalric manuals that offer both theoretical and practical advice to knights, emphasizing the use of force and the value of prowess, Pizan’s treatise examining the role of knights in an ideal medieval body politic and one of the rare female voices on the topic of chivalry in the medieval period, and finally, Caxton’s dedications to his chivalric publications, which show the knightly elements that were likely to be the most attractive to his contemporaries. My examination shows a far more complex picture than I expected. It is not surprising to see that authors working within the romance tradition are more likely to idealize and spiritualize chivalric behaviour than authors writing chivalric manuals. Their views on notions such as prowess, penance, honour, violence, and wealth, all integral parts of a knightly life, are often in stark contrast to each other. However, none of the texts I examine presents a “pure” form of chivalry or the imitatio, but both traditions are often intermingled: the pacifist knight Conscience sees Christ vanquishing forces of evil as a valiant warrior, and the highly pragmatic Charny does not forget to remind his fellow knights of their religious obligations. With the use of force often being a necessity in maintaining peace and order in real life, the authors struggle to reconcile this necessity with Christian doctrines of love and peace. Such efforts to integrate the contradictory, as we will see, frequently fail. Instead of calling the authors of the chivalric works with mostly secular tones “negligent of their religious duties,” or those of works containing notions that entirely conflict with modern morals “deviating from true Christianity,” I argue that the ideal of the imitatio should not be seen as a fixed set of ideas. Rather, an author tends to choose the elements, all of which are supported by the Bible and its subsequent interpretations, that best suit his or her purposes. It is by practices such as avoiding judging the past by our own standards that our understanding of history progresses by combining knowledge of the past with that of the present. With the historicist belief that both literary and non-literary texts reflect the past, I hope this study might shed some light on the complex and sometimes paradoxical attitudes towards chivalry and religion in late medieval England

The development of an instrument to measure individual dispositions towards rules and principles; with implications for financial regulation

The main focus of this PhD project is the development and validation of a psychometric instrument for the measurement of individual dispositions towards rules and principles. Literature review and focus groups were used to generate insights into the reasons why individuals prefer rules and principles. On the basis of that review, an initial item pool was created covering the conceptual space of dispositions towards rules and principles. The final instrument consists of 10 items, 5 items each for the rules and principles subscales. The psychometric analysis suggested that it is valid and reliable. The instrument has sound predictive power and was able to significantly predict individuals’ behavioral intentions in relation to rules and principles across contexts. I found there were gender and ethnic differences in the relationship between dispositions towards rules and principles scores and behavioural intentions. This PhD is relevant to an emerging literature in behavioural accounting research that examines how practitioners’ personal characteristics and styles affect financial reporting practice

Seeing affect: knowledge infrastructures in facial expression recognition systems

Efforts to process and simulate human affect have come to occupy a prominent role in Human-Computer Interaction as well as developments in machine learning systems. Affective computing applications promise to decode human affective experience and provide objective insights into usersʼ affective behaviors, ranging from frustration and boredom to states of clinical relevance such as depression and anxiety. While these projects are often grounded in psychological theories that have been contested both within scholarly and public domains, practitioners have remained largely agnostic to this debate, focusing instead on the development of either applicable technical systems or advancements of the fieldʼs state of the art. I take this controversy as an entry point to investigate the tensions related to the classification of affective behaviors and how practitioners validate these classification choices. This work offers an empirical examination of the discursive and material repertoires ‒ the infrastructures of knowledge ‒ that affective computing practitioners mobilize to legitimize and validate their practice. I build on feminist studies of science and technology to interrogate and challenge the claims of objectivity on which affective computing applications rest. By looking at research practices and commercial developments of Facial Expression Recognition (FER) systems, the findings unpack the interplay of knowledge, vision, and power underpinning the development of machine learning applications of affective computing. The thesis begins with an analysis of historical efforts to quantify affective behaviors and how these are reflected in modern affective computing practice. Here, three main themes emerge that will guide and orient the empirical findings: 1) the role that framings of science and scientific practice play in constructing affective behaviors as “objective” scientific facts, 2) the role of human interpretation and mediation required to make sense of affective data, and 3) the prescriptive and performative dimensions of these quantification efforts. This analysis forms the historical backdrop for the empirical core of the thesis: semi-structured interviews with affective computing practitioners across the academic and industry sectors, including the data annotators labelling the modelsʼ training datasets. My findings reveal the discursive and material strategies that participants adopt to validate affective classification, including forms of boundary work to establish credibility as well as the local and contingent work of human interpretation and standardization involved in the process of making sense of affective data. Here, I show how, despite their professed agnosticism, practitioners must make normative choices in order to ʻseeʼ (and teach machines how to see) affect. I apply the notion of knowledge infrastructures to conceptualize the scaffolding of data practices, norms and routines, psychological theories, and historical and epistemological assumptions that shape practitionersʼ vision and inform FER design. Finally, I return to the problem of agnosticism and its socio-ethical relevance to the broader field of machine learning. Here, I argue that agnosticism can make it difficult to locate the technologyʼs historical and epistemological lineages and, therefore, obscure accountability. I conclude by arguing that both policy and practice would benefit from a nuanced examination of the plurality of visions and forms of knowledge involved in the automation of affect