Ma trousse de deuil

Des fragments de mon vécu autour de trois morts récentes : celle de mon père, de ma belle-mère, d'une amie très proche. Ces fragments de vécu ont éclairé et fortement inspiré le film que j'ai réalisé en 1981, Les Traces d'un Homme. Un film sur la mort d'un homme de cinquante-sept ans, atteint d'un cancer terminal. Cette combinaison d'événements vécus douloureusement et les imprévisibles démarches du film m'ont permis de constituer ma trousse de deuil... une série de petites découvertes modestes, d'exercices simples, de remises en question, qui me permettront de supporter les deuils qui s'en viennent inexorablement. À une savante thèse sur la mort, j'ai préféré partager... ma trousse de deuil!The fragments of my experience of three recent deaths : those of my father, of my mother-in-law, of a very close friend. These fragments of experience enlightened and strongly inspired the film that I directed in 1981 : The Traces of a Man. A film about the death of a 57 year old man stricken with terminal cancer. This combination of painfully experienced events, and the unpredictable steps in the film, allowed me to constitute my mourning package... a series of modest little discoveries, of simple exercices, of questionings, which will permit me to support the mourning which are inexorably coming. I preferred the sharing of my mourning package, to a learned thesis on death

The Crux of the Matter: Ratings and Credit Risk Valuation at the heart of the Structured Finance Crisis

The 2007/2008 global credit crisis was born out of opaque securitization transactions. Introducing structured products risk estimation techniques shows how the most basic investment analysis could not be done without detailed and updated knowledge on the assets of the pool. Access to such details was crucial for investors to perform an autonomous valuation, the lack of which led to a pervading acceptance of ratings at face value. The crisis brought numerous delusions to naïve users of these privately issued opinions. Coming back to the central role that investor played during the previous speculative episode and introducing a theoretical discussion on the dynamics of market finance, it is shown that trusting market discipline and due diligence was bound to end up being misguiding. Given that unprecedented rating volatility brought a share of the blame game to rating firms, strategies that would aim at securing an informed use of ratings are finally outlined.financial crisis, credit risk, rating agencies

A Kinetic Model of the Muscular Contraction

In this article, we build a self consistent mean field deterministic model for the muscular contraction. The two main variables are the number of free myosin heads and the number of myosin heads attached to the actin, just after attachment. The model is natural in the sense that it respects the physico-chemical natural constraints. We calculate the stationary state, prove that it is stable and calculate the efficiency

Robustness and Randomness

Robustness problems of computational geometry algorithms is a topic that has been subject to intensive research efforts from both computer science and mathematics communities. Robustness problems are caused by the lack of precision in computations involving floating-point instead of real numbers. This paper reviews methods dealing with robustness and inaccuracy problems. It discussed approaches based on exact arithmetic, interval arithmetic and probabilistic methods. The paper investigates the possibility to use randomness at certain levels of reasoning to make geometric constructions more robust