"So-called influencers": Stancetaking and (de)legitimation in mediatized discourse about social media influencers

As contemporary wordsmiths and new-generation copywriters, Social Media Influencers (henceforth SMIs) are inherently germane to critical sociolinguistics. Interested in wider cultural discourses about contemporary forms of ‘independent’ language work, this paper examines English-language news media representations of SMIs. The empirical focus of my analysis is a dataset of 143 news stories collected from major ‘broadsheet’ newspapers and LexisNexis. Specifically, I identify two contradictory stances – celebration and derision – by which SMIs are popularly framed. It is in this way, and following van Leeuwen (2007), that their cultural status and work is (de)legitimized. Using the legitimation tactics of theoretical rationalisation and mythopoesis, celebratory stances in my data construct SMIs as a perfect fit for today’s ideal of entrepreneurial success – as ambitious, self-optimizing and risk-taking individuals – ultimately contributing to the recasting of independent and sometimes precarious employment as aspirational ‘entrepreneurship’. Conversely, derisory stances built on the legitimation tactics of moral evaluation and authorisation lament their lack of work ethic as well as their interloping into industries that do not want them. Thus, the news media appear to both applaud SMIs for their entrepreneurial careers and be vested in sanctioning them for foregoing gatekeepers by not following traditional career paths to stable employment. Ironically, and perhaps even hypocritically, the latter are precisely the kind of employment that are increasingly difficult for many young people to access while the former still prerequisite considerable privilege to be able to pursue

Les évaluations des impacts sur l'environnement en période de conflits armés

Cet essai a pour but de proposer une grille d’analyse des données relevées lors d’une évaluation des impacts sur l’environnement en période de conflits armés. Le rôle de l’outil développé est d’aboutir à des recommandations qui visent à bonifier le processus d’évaluation susmentionné. À cet effet, deux cas d’étude sont traités : le Soudan pour une situation de conflit en cours, et la Sierra Leone pour une situation post-conflit. Un détour par les liens entre guerre et environnement d’une part, et le contexte juridique international d’autre part, vient compléter la réflexion et orienter les conclusions

Utilisation d'une grille polaire adaptative pour la construction d'un modèle articulatoire de la langue

National audienceThe construction of articulatory models from medical images of the vocal tract, especially X-ray images, re lies on the application of an articulatory grid before deriving deformation modes via some factor analysis method. One difficulty faced with the classical semi-polar grid is that some tongue contours do not intersect the grid what gives rise to incomplete input vectors, and consequently poor tongue modeling in the front part of the mouth cavity which plays an important role in the articulation of many consonants. First, this paper describes preparation of data, i.e. drawing or tracking articulator contours, compensation of head movements and the construction of the adaptive polar grid. Then, the results of the principal component analysis are presented and compared with those obtained with the semi-polar grid

Approche d'évaluation de la durabilité des systemes guidée par la pensée cycle de vie : application à l'agroindustrie oléicole

À l'heure où toute décision stratégique doit être conforme aux principes de la durabilité, l'évaluation des conséquences environnementales, économiques et sociales d'un choix d'ingénierie s'avère nécessaire. Parmi les outils d'évaluation des systèmes et de leurs conséquences, l'analyse de cycle de vie (ACV) dérivée de la pensée cycle de vie s'est imposée comme la méthode la plus adaptée à un tel niveau de décision. Historiquement focalisée sur les impacts environnementaux, l'ACV a naturellement étendue son champ d'évaluation aux aspects économiques, sociaux et d'ingénierie pour devenir une analyse de la durabilité (AdCV) des systèmes. L'AdCV est ainsi en train d'émerger et nécessite des propositions d'améliorations méthodologiques et des applications concrètes pour devenir robuste et applicable. Cette étude présente l'évaluation de la durabilité d'un système dans le contexte de l'agro-industrie oléicole. À cet effet, elle propose une approche intégrée d’évaluation de la durabilité basée sur l’AdCV couplée à la modélisation des processus et des procédés et, l'analyse multicritère pour l'aide à la décision. Une première partie traite des concepts de durabilité, d'ingénierie et d'agro-industrie oléicole à travers une analyse de la littérature scientifique. Dans la deuxième partie, l'approche d'évaluation de la durabilité proposée est décrite, formalisée et implémentée dans la solution logicielle « EcOlive » à l'aide d'outils empruntés à la modélisation des systèmes. Enfin, la troisième partie présente les résultats de l’application de l’approche à l’agro-industrie oléicole en s’appuyant sur un ensemble de données terrain récoltées dans le cadre du projet européen OiLCA. ABSTRACT : Nowadays, any strategic decision must be in accordance with the sustainability principles. Therefore, companies need to evaluate the consequences of their activities and products onto environment, economy and society. Life cycle assessment (LCA) from Life cycle thinking (LCT) is one of the major environmental impact evaluation methods for product, process or service and the trends is to integrate economic and social aspects to become a life cycle sustainability assessment (LCSA). However, LCSA is still in its infancy and needs methodological proposals to be applicable. This study presents sustainability assessment in the olive oil agro-industrial context. In doing so, a systemic approach based on the coupling between LCSA, enterprise modeling, chemical process modeling and multicriteria analysis is proposed. The approach is then validated by the development of the software solution “ Ecolive ” for sustainability assessment of olive oil production. This application relies on field data collected under the European OiLCA project

Liver resection and transplantation for intrahepatic cholangiocarcinoma

The incidence of intrahepatic cholangiocarcinoma (iCCA) is increasing worldwide. Although several advances have been made in the past decades to better understand this complex malignancy and to develop new treatment strategies, the prognosis of iCCA remains dismal. Liver resection (LR) is the mainstay of treatment but only a minority of patients are amenable to surgery. In most cases, patients with iCCA will require a major hepatectomy for complete resection of the tumour. This may be contraindicated or increase the surgical burden in patients with chronic liver disease and small remnant liver volume. Lymphadenectomy with a minimal harvest of 6 lymph nodes is considered adequate, as microscopic nodal metastases have been shown in more than 40% of patients. Current 5-year overall survival following LR is in the range of 25%\u201340%. For locally advanced disease not amenable to upfront LR, neoadjuvant locoregional therapies may be used with the aim of converting these patients to resectability or even to transplantation in well-selected cases. Recent studies have shown that liver transplantation (LT) might be a treatment option for patients with unresectable very-early iCCA (i.e. 642 cm), with survival outcomes comparable to those of hepatocellular carcinoma. In patients with unresectable, advanced tumours, confined to the liver who achieve sustained response to neoadjuvant treatment, LT may be considered an option within prospective protocols. The role of adjuvant therapies in iCCA is still under debate. Herein, we review the recent advances in the surgical treatment of iCCA and examine its correlation with locoregional therapies, adjuvant and neo-adjuvant strategies

A curvilinear tongue articulatory model

International audienceThe construction of articulatory models from medical images of the vocal tract, especially X-ray images, relies on the application of an articulatory grid before deriving deformation modes via some factor analysis method. One difficulty faced with the classical semi-polar grid is that some tongue contours do not intersect the grid giving rise to incomplete input vectors, and consequently poor tongue modeling in the front part of the mouth cavity which plays an important role in the articulation of many consonants. First, this paper describes preparation of data, i.e. drawing or tracking articulator contours, compensation for head movements. Then it presents two coordinate systems used to represent and model tongue contours. The first is an adaptive polar grid whose center is a landmark attached to the mandible and the second consists of using curvilinear coordinates. Both offer the advantage of capturing the forward movement of the tongue apex better than other models. Furthermore, the curvilinear model enables any tongue shape, particularly those presenting a sublingual cavity, to be modeled correctly

Adaptation of cepstral coefficients for acoustic-to-articulatory inversion

International audienceAcoustic-to-articulatory inversion of speech signals via an analysis-by-synthesis method requires the comparison of natural and synthetic speech spectra either indirectly via formant frequencies, or directly via cepstral coefficients. This paper investigates several strategies of cepstral adaptation (affine transformation of cepstral coefficients, bilinear or piecewise linear frequency warping) when X-ray images of the speaker's vocal tract are available. These images enable the articulatory synthesis of a speech signal which fits the natural signal at best. It is thus possible to investigate the behavior of several cepstral adaptation procedures in order to select the best method, i.e. that which minimizes the deviation between synthetic and natural spectra. Our results show that the affine cepstral adaptation tends to flatten the spectral peaks, i.e. formants. Frequency warping techniques are thus more efficient all the more they can be supplemented by taking into account the spectral tilt

Acoustic-to-articulatory inversion by analysis-by-synthesis using cepstral coefficients

International audienceThis paper deals with acoustic to articulatory inversion of speech by using an analysis by synthesis approach. We used old X-ray films of one speaker to (i) the develop a linear articulatory model presenting a small geometric mismatch with the subject's vocal tract mid sagittal images (ii) and design an adaptation procedure of cepstral vectors used as input data. The adaptation exploits the bilinear transform to warp the frequency scale in order to compensate for deviation between synthetic and natural speech. This enables the comparison of natural speech against synthetic speech without using cepstral liftering. A codebook is used to represent the forward articulatory to acoustic mapping and we designed a loose matching algorithm using spectral peaks to access it. This algorithm, based on dynamic programming, allows some peaks in either synthetic spectra (stored in the codebook) or natural spectra (to be inverted) to be omitted. Quadratic programming is used to improve the acoustic proximity near each good candidate found during codebook exploration. The inversion has been tested on speech signals corresponding to the X-ray films. It achieves a very good geometric precision of 1.5 mm over the whole tongue shape unlike similar works evaluating the error at 3 or 4 points corresponding to sensors located at the front of the tongue

Construction and evaluation of an articulatory model of the vocal tract

International audienceArticulatory models of the vocal tract play an important role in the investigation of relations between the geometry of the vocal tract and its acoustic properties. This paper presents the construction and the evaluation of an articulatory model from a corpus of X-ray and MRI images, which approximates lateral vocal tract shapes of vowels and consonants with a very good precision. First, this paper describes the coordinate system used to represent the tongue contour and the strategy employed to find the deformation modes. Then, a speaker adaptation procedure is presented and the adapted model is evaluated on a second database of X-ray images. This evaluation shows that the model approximates tongue shapes with a very good precision. Finally, a centerline algorithm, i.e. an algorithm used to decompose the vocal tract in a sequence of elementary tubes, is presented