The MetaCapitalism Cult.

Qu’il s’agisse de notre vie professionnelle ou de notre vie personnelle, la promesse d’immortalité exerce le même pouvoir de séduction. La promesse de salut délivrée à l’entreprise ne diffère guère de la promesse faite aux êtres humains. Cet idéal de salut, qui a exercé sa fascination sur toutes les époques, les religions ont promis de le réaliser. Les entreprises de conseil s’inscrivent dans la même logique, dans la mesure où elles constituent, pour les entreprises, l’équivalent contemporain d’une expérience religieuse. Les prophètes du conseil s’emploient à générer ce genre de sentiments en utilisant tout un vocabulaire symbolique tel que « reconfiguration des processus », « meilleures pratiques », etc, dans un rituel baptisé MétaCapitalisme, impliquant une communauté de croyants, en l’occurrence leurs clients. Ce rituel, par le biais du Culte du conseil, a des conséquences qui vont bien au-delà des seules entreprises clientes et affectent de manière importante de nombreux groupes de personnes et d’institutions dans notre société devenue globale. Ce constat justifie de procéder à un examen critique de ses mérites. Notre recherche explore la performance du MétaCapitalisme, un terme forgé par le géant du conseil, Price Waterhouse Coopers (PWC), pour décrire sa vision de la « nouvelle économie », qui traite de l’utilisation des e-markets, des échanges en ligne et des communautés d’affaires en réseau, et a eu pour effet de démultiplier l’impact des développements technologiques et des principales améliorations de la vie des affaires issues des années 1990. Le MétaCapitalisme peut être appréhendé en analysant la conversion des leaders du MétaCapitalisme au modèle prôné. Notre étude, en appliquant des techniques de régression à un certain nombre d’indicateurs clés, identifie les tendances relatives à la performance de ces leaders et les compare avec les tendances observées pour les 100 premières entreprises du groupe Fortune. Il en ressort que les entreprises du MétaCapitalisme ont été incapables de maintenir la transformation apparemment brillante qu’elles avaient opérée en 1999 et que sur de nombreux points, les tendances présentent des retournements imprévus par rapport au maintien de la structure idéale du MétaCapitalisme. Une évaluation critique de ces observations est effectuée de manière à valider la possibilité de généralisation du modèle, afin d’être en mesure d’éviter une expérimentation sociale continue et préjudiciable. En conclusion, la stratégie du MétaCapitalisme présente d’indéniables similitudes avec les cultes religieux, ce qui amène à la question suivante : le MétaCapitalisme aura-t-il le même destin que la plupart de ces cultes, à savoir, le désenchantement est lié à des espérances déçues ?

Extremal Events in a Bank Operational Losses

Operational losses are true dangers for banks since their maximal values to signal default are difficult to predict. This risky situation is unlike default risk whose maximum values are limited by the amount of credit granted. For example, our data from a very large US bank show that this bank could suffer, on average, more than four major losses a year. This bank had seven losses exceeding hundreds of millions of dollars over its 52 documented losses of more than $1 million during the 1994-2004 period. The tail of the loss distribution (a Pareto distribution without expectation whose characteristic exponent is 0.95 ? ? ? 1) shows that this bank can fear extreme operational losses ranging from$1 billion to $11 billion, at probabilities situated respectively between 1$350 M and close to $1 billion.Bank operational loss, value at risk, Pareto distribution, insurance premium, extremal event

Galectins as New Prognostic Markers and Potential Therapeutic Targets for Advanced Prostate Cancers

A better understanding of multimolecular interactions involved in tumor dissemination is required to identify new effective therapies for advanced prostate cancer (PCa). Several groups investigated protein-glycan interactions as critical factors for crosstalk between prostate tumors and their microenvironment. This review both discusses whether the “galectin-signature” might serve as a reliable biomarker for the identification of patients with high risk of metastasis and assesses the galectin-glycan lattices as potential novel targets for anticancer therapies. The ultimate goal of this review is to convey how basic findings related to galectins could be in turn translated into clinical settings for patients with advanced PCa.Fil: Laderach, Diego Jose. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Oficina de Coordinación Administrativa Ciudad Universitaria. Instituto de Química Biológica de la Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales. Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales. Instituto de Química Biológica de la Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales; ArgentinaFil: Gentilini, Lucas Daniel. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Oficina de Coordinación Administrativa Ciudad Universitaria. Instituto de Química Biológica de la Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales. Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales. Instituto de Química Biológica de la Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales; ArgentinaFil: Jaworski, Felipe Martín. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Oficina de Coordinación Administrativa Ciudad Universitaria. Instituto de Química Biológica de la Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales. Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales. Instituto de Química Biológica de la Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales; ArgentinaFil: Compagno, Daniel Georges. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Oficina de Coordinación Administrativa Ciudad Universitaria. Instituto de Química Biológica de la Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales. Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales. Instituto de Química Biológica de la Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales; Argentin

Keyframe-based monocular SLAM: design, survey, and future directions

Extensive research in the field of monocular SLAM for the past fifteen years has yielded workable systems that found their way into various applications in robotics and augmented reality. Although filter-based monocular SLAM systems were common at some time, the more efficient keyframe-based solutions are becoming the de facto methodology for building a monocular SLAM system. The objective of this paper is threefold: first, the paper serves as a guideline for people seeking to design their own monocular SLAM according to specific environmental constraints. Second, it presents a survey that covers the various keyframe-based monocular SLAM systems in the literature, detailing the components of their implementation, and critically assessing the specific strategies made in each proposed solution. Third, the paper provides insight into the direction of future research in this field, to address the major limitations still facing monocular SLAM; namely, in the issues of illumination changes, initialization, highly dynamic motion, poorly textured scenes, repetitive textures, map maintenance, and failure recovery

Integration of Oscillatory and Subanalytic Functions

We prove the stability under integration and under Fourier transform of a concrete class of functions containing all globally subanalytic functions and their complex exponentials. This paper extends the investigation started in [J.-M. Lion, J.-P. Rolin: "Volumes, feuilles de Rolle de feuilletages analytiques et th\'eor\`eme de Wilkie" Ann. Fac. Sci. Toulouse Math. (6) 7 (1998), no. 1, 93-112] and [R. Cluckers, D. J. Miller: "Stability under integration of sums of products of real globally subanalytic functions and their logarithms" Duke Math. J. 156 (2011), no. 2, 311-348] to an enriched framework including oscillatory functions. It provides a new example of fruitful interaction between analysis and singularity theory.Comment: Final version. Accepted for publication in Duke Math. Journal. Changes in proofs: from Section 6 to the end, we now use the theory of continuously uniformly distributed modulo 1 functions that provides a uniform technical point of view in the proofs of limit statement

Intermediate range order in (Fe,Al) silicate network glasses: a neutron diffraction and EPSR modeling investigation

The local structural environment and the spatial distribution of iron and aluminum ions in sodosilicate glasses with composition NaFexAl1-xSi2O6 (x = 1, 0.8, 0.5 and 0) is studied by high-resolution neutron diffraction combined with structural modeling using the Empirical Potential Structure Refinement (EPSR) code. This work gives evidence of differences in the structural behavior of Al3+ and Fe3+, which are both often considered to act as network formers in charge-balanced compositions. The short-range environment and the structural role of the two cations are not composition dependent, and hence the structure of intermediate glasses can then be seen as a mixture of the structures of the two end-members. All Al3+ is 4-coordinated for a distance d[4]Al3+-O=1.76$\pm$0.01{\AA}. The high-resolution neutron data allows deciphering between two populations of Fe. The majority of Fe3+ is 4-coordinated (d[4]Fe3+-O=1.87$\pm$0.01{\AA}) while the remaining Fe3+ and all Fe2+ (~12% of total Fe) are 5-coordinated (d[5]Fe-O=2.01$\pm$0.01{\AA}). Both AlO4 and FeO4 are randomly distributed and connected with the silicate network in which they share corners with SiO4 tetrahedra, in agreement with a network-forming role of those species. On the contrary FeO5 tends to form clusters and to share edges with each other. 5-coordinated Fe is interpreted as network modifier and it turns out that, even if this coordination number is rare in crystals, it is more common in glasses in which they can have a key role on physical properties