Making Sense of the Anti-Same-Sex-Marriage Movement in France

This article examines the political style and rhetoric of the Manif pour tous (MPT), the main organization opposing same-sex marriage in France, from summer 2013 to the present. It exposes how the MPT\u27s style and rhetoric differ from those of their American counterparts, and what this tells us about the different strategies of political movements in France and the United States generally. It is based on an analysis of the language used by activists whom I interviewed in 2014 and 2015 and on a discourse analysis of the MPT’s website, Facebook page, Twitter feed, and press releases since 2013. This analysis of the distinctive features of the MPT brings to light underlying concerns about French identity in the face of globalization. In other words, for the MPT and its members, what is at stake is not just same-sex marriage but the very definition of Frenchness

The Cultural Tastes of Bourgeois Pre-adolescents in France: Cultural Omnivorousness as a New Form of Cultural Capital

This is an ethnographic study of the reception of popular culture (music, films, and television) among bourgeois, Parisian children between the ages of 7 and 12. Pierre Bourdieu’s idea of social distinction has been used as a model to describe the tastes of the French bourgeoisie since the 1970s, though some sociologists, such as Joël Zaffran and Marie-Laure Pouchadon, have argued that its usefulness in recent decades has waned. In this article, I argue that the notion of social distinction is just as useful now as it was in the 1970s, but that based on the tastes of these young, bourgeois informants, the criteria for what constitutes cultural capital, an essential ingredient for social distinction, have changed. This study supports the notion that the distinction between high and low culture, which used to be central to achieving social distinction, has been supplanted by a new criterion for social distinction that relies on “cultural omnivorousness.” These children’s parents already exhibited some signs of valuing culturally omnivorous tastes and were the first generation to do so. The fact that an appreciation for cultural omnivorousness has been transmitted from bourgeois parents to these pre-adolescent children is a sign that this means of achieving social distinction has gone from a probationary, exploratory phase to a more stable and lasting one. Ceci est une étude ethnographique de la réception de la culture populaire (musique, cinéma, et télévision) chez des enfants bourgeois parisiens âgés de 7 à 12 ans. Depuis les années 1970, le concept de Pierre Bourdieu de la distinction sociale sert à décrire les goûts de la bourgeoisie française, bien que certains sociologues, tels que Joël Zaffran et Marie-Laure Pouchadon prétendent que son utilité a diminué au cours des dernières décennies. Dans cet article, je soutiens l’idée que la notion de la distinction sociale est aussi utile maintenant qu’elle n’a été dans les années 1970, mais les goûts de ces jeunes informateurs bourgeois indiquent que les critères qui déterminent ce qui constitue le capital culturel, un ingrédient essential de la distinction sociale, ont changé. Cette étude soutient la notion que la distinction entre la culture avec un grand C et la culture populaire, qui autrefois était centrale à l’acquisition de la distinction sociale, a été supplantée par un nouveau critère pour la distinction sociale qui dépend d’une consomption culturelle omnivore. Les parents de ces enfants ont déjà présenté des signes de valoriser des goûts culturellement omnivores et ont été la première génération à le faire. Le fait que l’appréciation d’une consomption culturelle omnivore a été transmise des parents bourgeois à ces enfants pré-adolescents est un signe que ce moyen d’acquérir de la distinction sociale est passé d’une phase exploratoire potentiellement temporaire à une phase plus stable et durable

Range Resolution Improvement of Eyesafe Ladar Testbed (ELT) Measurements Using Sparse Signal Deconvolution

The Eyesafe Ladar Test-bed (ELT) is a experimental ladar system with the capability of digitizing return laser pulse waveforms at 2 GHz. These waveforms can then be exploited o-line in the laboratory to develop signal processing techniques for noise reduction, range resolution improvement, and range discrimination between two surfaces of similar range interrogated by a single laser pulse. This paper presents the results of experiments with new deconvolution algorithms with the hoped for gains of improving the range discrimination of the ladar system. The sparsity of ladar returns is exploited to solve the deconvolution problem in two steps. The rst step is to estimate a point target response using a database of measured calibration data. This basic target response is used to construct a dictionary of target responses with dierent delays/ranges. Using this dictionary ladar returns from a wide variety of surface congurations can be synthesized by taking linear combinations. A sparse linear combination matches the physical reality that ladar returns consist of the overlapping of only a few pulses. The dictionary construction process is a pre-processing step that is performed only once. The deconvolution step is performed by minimizing the error between the measured ladar return and the dictionary model while constraining the coecient vector to be sparse. Other constraints such as the non-negativity of the coecients are also applied. The results of the proposed technique are presented in the paper and are shown to compare favorably with previously investigated deconvolution techniques

RESPONSIVE URBANISM: Sustainable Development Strategies for Small Communities with an Inter-Cultural Focus

This essay explores the development of a landscape design method referred to as Responsive Urbanism, the intention of which is to reverse the negative effects of globalization currently reordering the physical and social fabric of small communities. Responsive Urbanism utilizes a landscape based framework and systems focus that emphasizes the following series of disciplines (1) ecological networks in the natural world, (2) fabric of the built environment, (3) dynamics between land and transportation, and (4) socially networked decision making. The method also integrates community design events and cross-cultural collaboration, and concludes with multi-scaled design development that makes ecological integrity and urban landscapes the centerpiece of creating revitalizing building forms and constructed landscapes. This design method, utilized in a pilot project that spanned two years and involved more than 60 students from the University of Wisconsin- Milwaukee (UWM) in Milwaukee, WI and the Technical University of Graz (TUG) in Graz, Austria, compared two communities of similar size and importance, the village of Mukwonago, Wisconsin in the United States and city of Radstadt, Austria. The project demonstrated that through structured analysis and disciplined project development communities can develop new tools to harness the increasing complexity, intensity, and global span of networks and realize the potentials of globalism’s universality, while simultaneously capturing the value of the singular and the local. A reordering of the physical and social fabric of community on a global scale is underway influencing the development of new design theories and methods to address the negative effects of this spatial transformation. In the last decade of the 20th century over 50% of the global population lived in urban settlements as compared to less than 3% at the end of the 19th century. Global urbanization has been described as the extension of capitalism and the advancement of a system of nation states as instruments of influence in the global marketplace. Although there are competing schools of thought about the reasons behind the increasing scale and pace of urbanization, significant agreement exists that patterns of finance linked to the increasing speed of transportation, communication and organizational technology are the major drivers transforming the physical landscape and global settlement patterns (Clark, 1997). While the emergence of “global cities” or global concentrations, linked to direct investments in core economies of developing nations, is taking place the spatial transformations observed in small communities within developed nations is more commonly that of dispersal and disruption. Two such small communities, one in the United States and the other in Austria, will demonstrate the challenges smaller settlements face when it comes to managing local economic pressures that have become intertwined with global networks. The same “trans-nationalization of production” that results in global brands and production patterns linked to global business structure is increasing the scale and pace of transformation as well as adding complexity to community building dynamics. The inability of small communities to make sense of these changeable, invisible and far reaching relationships is increasingly creating ecologically and urbanistically compromised building forms and landscapes. Responsive Urbanism posits that global and local dynamics can be understood through the alternative and inclusive framework of landscape, and demonstrated through visual argumentation (Waldheim, 2006). The method utilizes a systems focus and emphasizes the following series of disciplines: ecological networks in the natural world, fabric of the built environment, dynamics between land and transportation, and socially networked decision making. The method also integrates community design events and cross-cultural collaboration. Responsive Urbanism makes ecological integrity and urban landscapes visible through multi-scaled design development. Regional ecological corridors, local water and vegetation systems, and building scale energy and environmental strategies are depicted and integrated as essential components of each project. This process gives small communities tools to create new forms of urban spatiality (Sassen, 2003) that harness potentials of globalism’s universality, while simultaneously capturing the value of the singular and the local (Tzonis and Lefaivre, 2003). In this pilot project, two communities of similar size and importance have been compared, the city of Radstadt, Austria and the village of Mukwonago, Wisconsin in the USA. Both municipalities occupy a comparable position within their respective regions, and in their relationship to proximate urban agglomerations. Radstadt is located approximately 70 km/44 mi southeast from the provincial capital of Salzburg, which has a population of around 150,000 (210,000 metro. area). Mukwonago is situated around 60 km/38 mi southwest of Milwaukee, a city of approximately 600,000 (1.7 million metro. area). Radstadt is surrounded by five small communities and is conceived of a central recreation and nature zone; Mukwonago is also surrounded by five communities and has historically drawn recreation seekers from as far away as Chicago (145 km/90 mi) to visit its numerous woodlands and lakes

People Matching for Transportation Planning Using Texel Camera Data for Sequential Estimation

This paper addresses automatic people matching in the dynamic setting of public transportation, such as a bus, as people enter and then at some later time exit from a doorway. Matching a person entering to the same person exiting at a later time provides accurate information about individual riders, such as how long a person is on a bus and the associated stops the person uses. At a higher level, matching exits to previous entry events provides information about the distribution of traffic flow across the whole transportation system. The proposed techniques may be applied at any gateway where the flow of human traffic is to be analyzed. For the purpose of associating entry and exit events, a trellis optimization algorithm is used for sequence estimation, based on multiple texel camera measurements. Since the number of states in the trellis exponentially grows with the number of persons currently on the bus, a beam search pruning technique is employed to manage the computational and memory load. Experimental results using real texel camera measurements show 96% matching accuracy for 68 people exiting a bus in a randomized order. In a bus route simulation where a true traffic flow distribution is used to randomly draw entry and exit events for simulated riders, the proposed sequence estimation algorithm produces an estimated traffic flow distribution, which provides an excellent match to the true distribution

A Computational Pipeline for the Development of Multi-Marker Bio-Signature Panels and Ensemble Classifiers

BACKGROUND:Biomarker panels derived separately from genomic and proteomic data and with a variety of computational methods have demonstrated promising classification performance in various diseases. An open question is how to create effective proteo-genomic panels. The framework of ensemble classifiers has been applied successfully in various analytical domains to combine classifiers so that the performance of the ensemble exceeds the performance of individual classifiers. Using blood-based diagnosis of acute renal allograft rejection as a case study, we address the following question in this paper: Can acute rejection classification performance be improved by combining individual genomic and proteomic classifiers in an ensemble?RESULTS:The first part of the paper presents a computational biomarker development pipeline for genomic and proteomic data. The pipeline begins with data acquisition (e.g., from bio-samples to microarray data), quality control, statistical analysis and mining of the data, and finally various forms of validation. The pipeline ensures that the various classifiers to be combined later in an ensemble are diverse and adequate for clinical use. Five mRNA genomic and five proteomic classifiers were developed independently using single time-point blood samples from 11 acute-rejection and 22 non-rejection renal transplant patients. The second part of the paper examines five ensembles ranging in size from two to 10 individual classifiers. Performance of ensembles is characterized by area under the curve (AUC), sensitivity, and specificity, as derived from the probability of acute rejection for individual classifiers in the ensemble in combination with one of two aggregation methods: (1) Average Probability or (2) Vote Threshold. One ensemble demonstrated superior performance and was able to improve sensitivity and AUC beyond the best values observed for any of the individual classifiers in the ensemble, while staying within the range of observed specificity. The Vote Threshold aggregation method achieved improved sensitivity for all 5 ensembles, but typically at the cost of decreased specificity.CONCLUSION:Proteo-genomic biomarker ensemble classifiers show promise in the diagnosis of acute renal allograft rejection and can improve classification performance beyond that of individual genomic or proteomic classifiers alone. Validation of our results in an international multicenter study is currently underway

The Law of Society: Governance Through Contract

This paper focuses on contract law as a central field in contemporary regulatory practice. In recent years, governance by contract has emerged as the central concept in the context of domestic privatization, domestic and transnational commercial relations and law-and-development projects. Meanwhile, as a result of the neo-formalist attack on contract law, governance of contract through contract adjudication, consumer protection law and judicial intervention into private law relations has come under severe pressure. Building on early historical critique of the formalist foundations of an allegedly private law of the market, the paper assesses the current justifications for contractual governance and posits that only an expanded legal realist perspective can adequately explain the complex nature of contractual agreements in contemporary practice. The paper argues for an understanding of contracts as complex societal arrangements that visibilize and negotiate conflicting rationalities and interests. Institutionally, contractual governance has been unfolding in a complex, historically grown and ideologically continually contested regulatory field. Governance through contract, then, denotes a wide field of conflicting concepts, ideas and symbols, that are themselves deeply entrenched in theories of society, market and the state. From this perspective, we are well advised to study contracts in their socio-economic, historical and cultural context. A careful reading of scholars such as Henry Sumner Maine, Morris Cohen, Robert Hale, Karl Llewellyn, Stewart Macaulay and Ian Macneil offers a deeper understanding of the institutional and normative dimensions of contractual governance. Their analysis is particularly helpful in assessing currently ongoing shifts away from a welfare state based regulation (governance) of contractual relations. Such shifts are occurring on two levels. First, they take place against the backdrop of a neo-liberal critique of government interference into allegedly private relations. Secondly, the increasingly influential return to formalism in contract law, which privileges a functionalist, purportedly technical and autonomous design and execution of contractual agreements over the view of regulated contracts, is linked to a particular concept of sovereignty. The ensuing revival of freedom of contract occurs in remarkable neglect of the experiences of welfare state adjudication of private law adjudication and a continuing contestation of the political in private relationships. The paper takes up the Legal Realists\u27 search for the \u27basis of contract\u27, but seeks to redirect the focus from the traditional perspective on state vs. market to a disembedded understanding of contractual governance as delineating multipolar and multirational regulatory regimes. Where Globalization has led to a fragmentation, disembeddedness and transnationalization of contexts and, thus, has been challenging traditional understanding of embeddedness, the task should no longer be to try applying a largely nation-state oriented Legal Realist perspective and critique to the sphere of contemporary contractual governance, but - rather - to translate its aims into a more reflexive set of instruments of legal critique. Even if Globalization has led to a dramatic denationalization of many regulatory fields and functions, it is still not clear, whether and how Globalization replaces, complements or aggravates transformations of societal governance, with and through contract