Diversity of employment contracts and use of the law

From the construction of a French data base of 309 employment contracts, we analyse current practices in firms, their manpower management methods and their use of the law in the drafting of employment contracts. We present a typology of ‘employment contracts' based on different indicators characterising the terms of the employment relationship (flexibility, employee's subordination to the firm, employee's individual accountability, appropriation of immaterial asserts) Our observations show that the contractual framework and the legal guarantees that it offers are still used relatively infrequently and concern certain types of employment relationship. In conclusion, we give some insights on the French reforms concerning labour contract legislation.labour legislation; employment contract; employee's subordination; individual accountability; flexibility

Polynomial kernels for Proper Interval Completion and related problems

Given a graph G = (V,E) and a positive integer k, the Proper Interval Completion problem asks whether there exists a set F of at most k pairs of (V \times V)\E such that the graph H = (V,E \cup F) is a proper interval graph. The Proper Interval Completion problem finds applications in molecular biology and genomic research. First announced by Kaplan, Tarjan and Shamir in FOCS '94, this problem is known to be FPT, but no polynomial kernel was known to exist. We settle this question by proving that Proper Interval Completion admits a kernel with at most O(k^5) vertices. Moreover, we prove that a related problem, the so-called Bipartite Chain Deletion problem, admits a kernel with at most O(k^2) vertices, completing a previous result of Guo

Relating broadcast independence and independence

An independent broadcast on a connected graph $G$ is a function $f:V(G)\to \mathbb{N}_0$ such that, for every vertex $x$ of $G$, the value $f(x)$ is at most the eccentricity of $x$ in $G$, and $f(x)>0$ implies that $f(y)=0$ for every vertex $y$ of $G$ within distance at most $f(x)$ from $x$. The broadcast independence number $\alpha_b(G)$ of $G$ is the largest weight $\sum\limits_{x\in V(G)}f(x)$ of an independent broadcast $f$ on $G$. Clearly, $\alpha_b(G)$ is at least the independence number $\alpha(G)$ for every connected graph $G$. Our main result implies $\alpha_b(G)\leq 4\alpha(G)$. We prove a tight inequality and characterize all extremal graphs

Exponential Domination in Subcubic Graphs

As a natural variant of domination in graphs, Dankelmann et al. [Domination with exponential decay, Discrete Math. 309 (2009) 5877-5883] introduce exponential domination, where vertices are considered to have some dominating power that decreases exponentially with the distance, and the dominated vertices have to accumulate a sufficient amount of this power emanating from the dominating vertices. More precisely, if $S$ is a set of vertices of a graph $G$, then $S$ is an exponential dominating set of $G$ if $\sum\limits_{v\in S}\left(\frac{1}{2}\right)^{{\rm dist}_{(G,S)}(u,v)-1}\geq 1$ for every vertex $u$ in $V(G)\setminus S$, where ${\rm dist}_{(G,S)}(u,v)$ is the distance between $u\in V(G)\setminus S$ and $v\in S$ in the graph $G-(S\setminus \{ v\})$. The exponential domination number $\gamma_e(G)$ of $G$ is the minimum order of an exponential dominating set of $G$. In the present paper we study exponential domination in subcubic graphs. Our results are as follows: If $G$ is a connected subcubic graph of order $n(G)$, then $$\frac{n(G)}{6\log_2(n(G)+2)+4}\leq \gamma_e(G)\leq \frac{1}{3}(n(G)+2).$$ For every $\epsilon>0$, there is some $g$ such that $\gamma_e(G)\leq \epsilon n(G)$ for every cubic graph $G$ of girth at least $g$. For every $0<\alpha<\frac{2}{3\ln(2)}$, there are infinitely many cubic graphs $G$ with $\gamma_e(G)\leq \frac{3n(G)}{\ln(n(G))^{\alpha}}$. If $T$ is a subcubic tree, then $\gamma_e(T)\geq \frac{1}{6}(n(T)+2).$ For a given subcubic tree, $\gamma_e(T)$ can be determined in polynomial time. The minimum exponential dominating set problem is APX-hard for subcubic graphs

Two floor building needing eight colors

Motivated by frequency assignment in office blocks, we study the chromatic number of the adjacency graph of $3$-dimensional parallelepiped arrangements. In the case each parallelepiped is within one floor, a direct application of the Four-Colour Theorem yields that the adjacency graph has chromatic number at most $8$. We provide an example of such an arrangement needing exactly $8$ colours. We also discuss bounds on the chromatic number of the adjacency graph of general arrangements of $3$-dimensional parallelepipeds according to geometrical measures of the parallelepipeds (side length, total surface or volume)