Changing nature and sustainability of the industrial district model : the case of Technic Valley in France

This paper examines the impact of contemporary pressures on industrial districts and analyses the changes that are taking place in an industrial district confronted with disembedding and globalization. We discuss the following questions: what are the processes and consequences of disembedding for the changing shape and form of inter-firm trust, contract and network forms? Is there an evolution in subcontracting and trade interdependency? What is the role of institutional infrastructures? We performed a longitudinal qualitative study using a number of different data sources to analyse the evolution of one French industrial district, particularly how new pressures of internationalization and disembedding work to reconfigure inter-firm relations in this district. While the recent literature is dominated by notions about industrial districts that concern only the trend towards increased competition or disembeddedness, this article shows that there is no unilinear trend. In contrast with the findings of certain recent studies, we argue that economic logic does not fully account for recent developments since the adjustment that are being made by the district are characterized rather by re-embeddedness, increased cooperation and institutionalization.industrial district, globalization, economic sociology

Short-term memory effects of an auditory biofeedback on isometric force control: Is there a differential effect as a function of transition trials?

The aim of the present study was to investigate memory effects, force accuracy, and variability during constant isometric force at different force levels, using auditory biofeedback. Two types of transition trials were used: a biofeedback-no biofeedback transition trial and a no biofeedback-biofeedback transition trial. The auditory biofeedback produced a low- or high-pitched sound when participants produced an isometric force lower or higher than required, respectively. To achieve this goal, 16 participants were asked to produce and maintain two different isometric forces (30$\pm$5% and 90N$\pm$5%) during 25s. Constant error and standard deviation of the isometric force were calculated. While accuracy and variability of the isometric force varied according to the transition trial, a drift of the force appeared in the no biofeedback condition. This result suggested that the degradation of information about force output in the no biofeedback condition was provided by a leaky memory buffer which was mainly dependent on the sense of effort. Because this drift remained constant whatever the transition used, this memory buffer seemed to be independent of short-term memory processes.Comment: Human Movement Science (2011) epub ahead of prin

Paramètres de détermination de la stabilité des déchets. Comparaison de différents modes de gestion des déchets non dangereux

National audienceLes déchets non dangereux, déchets ménagers et déchets industriels banals, sont généralement incinérés ou enfouis en centres de stockage anciennement dits de " classe II ". La gestion de ces centres de stockage répond à des critères très précis, tant au cours de l'exploitation qu'après l'arrêt de celle-ci. En particulier, un suivi des sites fermés est imposé pendant 30 ans, période pendant laquelle la matière organique, contenue dans les déchets, produit par dégradation biologique d'importantes quantités de biogaz et des lixiviats chargés. A côté de ce mode de stockage " classique ", il est apparu depuis quelques années des modes de gestion différents, qui visent à limiter les émissions gazeuses et liquides des déchets enfouis. Il s'agit d'une part, du fonctionnement de CSD en casiers de type bioréacteur, et d'autre part de l'enfouissement de déchets pré-traités biologiquement. A ces nouveaux modes de gestion s'ajoutent le tri en amont avec les collectes sélectives, et un traitement mécanique plus ou moins poussé avant le traitement biologique, permettant de diminuer la part de produits recyclables ou inertes, de rendre plus accessible la matière organique contenue dans les déchets, et d'homogénéiser la matrice

Structural Agnostic Modeling: Adversarial Learning of Causal Graphs

A new causal discovery method, Structural Agnostic Modeling (SAM), is presented in this paper. Leveraging both conditional independencies and distributional asymmetries in the data, SAM aims at recovering full causal models from continuous observational data along a multivariate non-parametric setting. The approach is based on a game between $d$ players estimating each variable distribution conditionally to the others as a neural net, and an adversary aimed at discriminating the overall joint conditional distribution, and that of the original data. An original learning criterion combining distribution estimation, sparsity and acyclicity constraints is used to enforce the end-to-end optimization of the graph structure and parameters through stochastic gradient descent. Besides the theoretical analysis of the approach in the large sample limit, SAM is extensively experimentally validated on synthetic and real data

Risk assessment and comparison of short-term and long-term emissions for different treatment and disposal phases of MSW

International audienceA research program including a comparison between short term and long term emissions of MSW landfill started in 2006. The goal of that program was to access the human health chronic risk of three different waste disposal processes (anaerobic with/without leachate recirculation, with/without aerobic pretreatment) and to provide new criteria for the disposal site. A methodological approach using both calibration of the short term fluxes by in situ measurements and the prediction of long term fluxes by the use of exponential decreasing functions was explored. The identification of contaminant species was made by qualitative and quantitative concentration measurements done in a first stage on the landfill gas, and the collection of chemical leachate load measurements. At this stage of the study, the work did not show specific chemical contaminant species for the different waste disposal