Femmes et politiques familiales entre l’ambivalence et l’implication

Les années 80 ont vu l'implantation d'une politique familiale par le gouvernement du Québec. Tant dans les discours que dans les faits, cette politique a oscillé entre une politique familiale, une politique nataliste et une politique de population. Déjà réservés face aux institutions traditionnelles de la famille et de la maternité, les groupes de femmes et les féministes se sont montrées ambivalentes face à de telles politiques : la crainte d'être piégées et ramenées en arrière explique cette attitude, Mais c'est la volonté de diffuser leur point de vue et de promouvoir la défense de leurs intérêts qui ont tout de même incité les femmes à s'impliquer dans ces débats. L'article se termine en proposant des principes qui devraient guider une politique familiale sensible aux intérêts des femmes.The eighties mark the Québec government's setting up of a family policy. But all the facts indicate that this policy wavered between a family policy, a birth policy and a population policy. Women's groups and feminists, already reticent in dealing with traditional family and maternity institutions, were possessed with somewhat of an ambivalent attitude towards these policies mostly because of their fear of being trapped and undermined. All in all, it's the will to disseminate their point of view and to defend their interests that motivated women to get involved in these debates. The article concludes by advancing principles that should promote a family policy that is more sensitive to women's interests

ART2 et apprentissage de séquences de mots : l'ordre compte

ISBN : 978-2-9532965-0-1Un réseau Adaptive Resonance Theory a été utilisé pour simuler l'apprentissage des formes orthographiques des mots vus par les enfants. Il a été démontré qu'une modélisation par carte auto-organisatrice permet de rendre compte des performances de l'enfant si on conserve les probabilités d'apparition des mots de la base d'apprentissage. Nous montrons dans cet article avec ART2, que l'ordre d'apparition des mots joue aussi un rôle significatif dans la discrimination des mots plus ou moins orthographiquement voisins. Il en découle une hypothése de construction de corpus favorable é l'apprentissage de la lecture de ce type de mots

A parallelizable augmented Lagrangian method applied to large-scale non-convex-constrained optimization problems

We contribute improvements to a Lagrangian dual solution approach applied to large-scale optimization problems whose objective functions are convex, continuously differentiable and possibly nonlinear, while the non-relaxed constraint set is compact but not necessarily convex. Such problems arise, for example, in the split-variable deterministic reformulation of stochastic mixed-integer optimization problems. We adapt the augmented Lagrangian method framework to address the presence of nonconvexity in the non-relaxed constraint set and to enable efficient parallelization. The development of our approach is most naturally compared with the development of proximal bundle methods and especially with their use of serious step conditions. However, deviations from these developments allow for an improvement in efficiency with which parallelization can be utilized. Pivotal in our modification to the augmented Lagrangian method is an integration of the simplicial decomposition method and the nonlinear block Gauss-Seidel method. An adaptation of a serious step condition associated with proximal bundle methods allows for the approximation tolerance to be automatically adjusted. Under mild conditions optimal dual convergence is proven, and we report computational results on test instances from the stochastic optimization literature. We demonstrate improvement in parallel speedup over a baseline parallel approach

Thermo-mechanical analysis of dental silicone polymers

Soft lining materials are used to replace the inner surface of a conventional complete denture, especially for weak elderly patients, with delicate health who cannot tolerate the hard acrylic denture base. Most of these patients have fragile supporting mucosa, excessive residual ridge resorption, particularly on the mandibular arch. The application of a soft liner to the mandibular denture allows absorbing impact forces during mastication and relieving oral mucosa. Actually, the silicone rubbers constitute the main family of commercialised soft lining materials. This study was conducted to understand the relationships between the mechanical properties and the physical structure of polysiloxanes. For this purpose, a series of polysiloxanes of various chemical compositions have been investigated. The evolution of their physical structure as a function of temperature has been followed by differential scanning calorimetry (DSC). In order to facilitate comparisons, the mechanical modulus has been analysed upon the same heating rate using dynamic mechanical analysis (DMA). Polysiloxanes actually commercialised as soft denture liners are three-dimensional networks: the flexibility of chains allows a crystalline organisation in an amorphous phase leading to the low value of the shear modulus. The dynamic mechanical analysis shows that they are used in the rubbery state. So, polysiloxanes have steady mechanical properties during physiological utilisation