Combatting disability discrimination: a comparison of France and Great Britain

This article examines disabled people’s employment in Great Britain and France. Although both countries have poor rates of employment for disabled people compared to non-disabled people, Great Britain’s disabled people’s employment rate is lower than France’s. Possible explanations include weak enforcement mechanisms in Great Britain, British judicial resistance, the lack of an institutional role for British trade unions resulting in an implementation gap and the proactive form of French law, a quota-levy scheme, which has no British parallel. The conclusions suggest which of these explanations are the most plausible and propose that Great Britain considers adopting some French provisions, thus tempering Britain’s voluntarist approach

Big Data, Biomedical Research, and Ethics Review: New Challenges for IRBs

The increased use of big data in the medical field has shifted the way in which biomedical research is designed and carried out. The novelty of techniques and methods brought by big data research brings new challenges to institutional review boards (IRBs). Yet it is unclear if IRBs should be the responsible oversight bodies for big data research and, if so, which criteria they should use. A large but heterogenous set of ethics guidelines and normative responses have emerged to address these issues. In this study, we conducted a scoping review of soft-law documents and guidelines with the aim of assessing ongoing normative efforts that are proliferating in this domain. We also synthesize a set of recurrent guidelines that could work as a baseline to create a harmonized process for big data research ethics. © 2020 by The Hastings Center. All rights reserved.ISSN:2578-236

Assessing the impact of telework enhancing policies for reducing car emissions: Exploring calculation methods for data-missing urban areas: Example of a medium-sized European city (Besançon, France)

International audienceTeleworking has been identified as a potential key lever for reducing air pollution. Yet, evaluating the atmospheric outcomes of teleworking enhancing policies remains difficult, especially when official databases on telework, household equipment and car emissions are incomplete or nonexistent. Here we propose several techniques to efficiently assess the impact of an increase in teleworking rates, and to explore the resulting bias, in a typical medium-sized European metropolitan area where few data are available: Besançon, France. Population and cartographical data are introduced in an individual-based daily mobility simulation model. We then calculate the resulting emissions for twenty atmospheric pollutants, using three different methodologies that aim to compensate, with different precision levels, for the lack of accurate information regarding vehicle fleets. Our results confirms the efficiency of telework for reducing emissions, with an average reduction of −0.42% in emission for an increase of 1% in teleworking rate. The precision level of data used strongly impacts the estimated quantity of air pollutant emissions (up to a factor ten). Failing to correctly account for inequalities in teleworking rate and equipment between socio-occupational categories introduces strong bias in the results which may degrade the correct evaluation of environmental benefits of teleworking enhancing planning policies