Pragmatic Epistemic Justification and F. Gonseth"s Idoneism

What is knowledge ? How can knowledge be distinguished from simple opinion or belief ? Are we able to insure ourselves against error ? This is the kind of questions that Socrates asks the young Theaitetes. During the dialogue, several successive definitions are proposed, the last one being that knowledge is true belief followed by its justification

Fiscal Federalism and Public Service Provision in Canada

This paper provides a general overview of the allocation of revenues and expenditures across levels of governments in Canada and discusses how public services in specific areas are financed and delivered. In doing so, the paper draws attention to a number of important characteristics of the Canadian federation and of its evolution in the post-war period as well as in recent years. In particular, the discussion highlights the relatively high and increasing degree of decentralization of the Canadian federation, reflected through the rising importance of provincial revenues and expenditures in the last five decades and the recent devolution of some provincial responsibilities to local governments, among other things. The discussion also illustrates the significant overlap of taxation powers and expenditure responsibilities across the three levels of government. The paper is divided into five sections. The first section briefly describes the constitutional allocation of responsibilities of each level of government. The second section looks at some of the trends in the revenues and expenditures by levels of government, as well as intergovernmental transfers in the post-war period. In the third section, the sources of revenues are examined. The fourth section describes the allocation of expenditures in each area and discusses how some of the main public services are financed and delivered. The last section further examines the role of municipal governments by briefly discussing the budgetary process at the municipal level and by providing a succinct overview of the recent devolution of provincial responsibilities to municipalities in Ontario.revenues, expenditures, public services, municipal governments

Semiparametric Fixed-Effects Estimator

This paper describes the Stata implementation of Baltagi and Li's (2002) series estimator of partially linear panel data models with fixed effects. After a brief description of the estimator itself, we describe the new command xtsemipar. We then simulate data to show that this estimator performs better than a fixed effect estimator if the relationship between two variables is unknown or quite complex.xtsemipar, Semiparametric estimations

Towards Consistency Management for a Business-Driven Development of SOA

The usage of the Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) along with the Business Process Management has emerged as a valuable solution for the complex (business process driven) system engineering. With a Model Driven Engineering where the business process models drive the supporting service component architectures, less effort is gone into the Business/IT alignment during the initial development activities, and the IT developers can rapidly proceed with the SOA implementation. However, the difference between the design principles of the emerging domainspecific languages imposes serious challenges in the following re-design phases. Moreover, enabling evolutions on the business process models while keeping them synchronized with the underlying software architecture models is of high relevance to the key elements of any Business Driven Development (BDD). Given a business process update, this paper introduces an incremental model transformation approach that propagates this update to the related service component configurations. It, therefore, supports the change propagation among heterogenous domainspecific languages, e.g., the BPMN and the SCA. As a major contribution, our approach makes model transformation more tractable to reconfigure system architecture without disrupting its structural consistency. We propose a synchronizer that provides the BPMN-to-SCA model synchronization with the help of the conditional graph rewriting

Efficacy and Pertinence 01 Heat Treatments against Monilia Decay in Commerciai Condition

Post-harvest decay can lead to very important damages on stone fruits. especially in the Rhone valley. Hot water treatments are known to be efficient against many fruit pathogens including monilia, but industriai application remains difficult, since it can present some risks according to fruit maturity, thermostat accuracy of the engine We went on trying this alternative on peach decay, by testing a prototype lend by Xeda, in a professional station. Several parameters were to be evaluated : temperature and length of treatment, relation between both, container emptying, application of treatment period At the sa me time, we intended to assess eugenol (essenti al oil of clover) efficacy when added in hot water, for different concentrations, up to phytotoxicity

A damage model with non-convex free energy for quasi-brittle materials

A state coupling between the hydrostatic (volumetric) and deviatoric parts of the free energy is introduced in a damage mechanics model relevant for the quasi-brittle materials. It is shown that it describes the large dilatancy of concrete under compression and the different localization angles and damage levels in tension and compression. A simple isotropic description is used, although similar ideas can be extended to anisotropic damage. The model is identified with respect to tensile and compression tests and validated on bi-compression and bi-tension. Fully written in three dimensions under the framework of thermodynamics of irreversible processes, it allows further developments within a finite element code

Role-Playing Game and Learning for Young People About Sustainable Development Stakes: An Experiment in Transferring and Adapting Interdisciplinary Scientific Knowledge

The study refers to the interactions between socio-economic and natural dynamics in an island biosphere reserve by using companion modelling. This approach provides scientific results and involves interdisciplinarity. In the second phase of the study, we transferred knowledge by adapting the main research output, a role-playing game, to young people. Our goal was to introduce interactions between social and ecological systems, coastal dynamics and integrated management. Adapting the game required close collaboration between the scientists and educators in order to transform both its substance and form and to run it with an easy-to-handle ergonomic platform.Children Education, Multi-Agent Environment, Role-Playing Game

BUILT UTOPIAS IN THE COUNTRYSIDE: THE RURAL AND THE MODERN IN FRANCO’S SPAIN

Anchored by Hüppauf and Umbach’s notion of Vernacular Modernism and focusing on architecture and urbanism during Franco’s dictatorship from 1939 to 1975, this thesis challenges the hegemonic and Northern-oriented narrative of urban modernity. It develops arguments about the reciprocal influences between the urban and the rural that characterize Spanish modernity, and analyzes the intense architectural and urban debates that resulted from the crisis of 1898, as they focused on the importance of vernacular architecture, in particular the Mediterranean one, in the definition of an “other modernity.†This search culminated before 1936 with the “Lessons of Ibiza,†and was revived at the beginning of the 1950s, when architects like Coderch, Fisac, Bohigas, and the cosigners of the Manifiesto de la Alhambra brought back the discourse of the modern vernacular as a politically acceptable form of Spanish modernity, and extended its field of application from the individual house and the rural architecture to the urban conditions, including social and middle-class housing. The core of the dissertation addresses the 20th century phenomenon of the modern agricultural village as built emergence of a rural paradigm of modernity in parallel or alternative to the metropolitan condition. In doing so, it interrogates the question of tradition, modernity, and national identity in urban form between the 1920s and the 1960s. Regarding Spain, it studies the actuation of the two Institutes that were created to implement the Francoist policy of post-war reconstruction and interior colonization—the Dirección General de Regiones Devastadas, and the Instituto Nacional de Colonización. It examines the ideological, political, urban, and architectural principles of Franco’s reconstruction of the devastated countryside, as well as his grand “hydro-social dream†of modernization of the countryside. It analyzes their role in national-building policies in liaison with the early 20th-century Regenerationist Movement of Joaquín Costa, the first works of hydraulic infrastructure under Primo de Rivera, and the aborted agrarian reform of the Second Republic. Inspired by the Zionist colonization of Palestine and Mussolini’s reclaiming of the Pontine Marshes, Falangist planners developed a national strategy of “interior colonization†that, along with the reclamation and irrigation of extensive and unproductive river basins, entailed the construction of three hundred modern villages or pueblos between 1940 and 1971. Each village was designed as a “rural utopia,†centered on a plaza mayor and the church, which embodied the political ideal of civil life under the nationalcatholic regime and evolved from a traditional town design in the 1940s to an increasingly abstract and modern vision, anchored on the concept of the “Heart of the City†after 1952. The program was an important catalyst for the development of Spanish modern architecture after the first period of autarchy and an effective incubator for a new generation of architects, including Alejandro de la Sota, José Luis Fernández del Amo, and others. Between tradition and modernity, these architects reinvented the pueblos as platforms of urban and architectonic experimentation in their search for a depurated rural vernacular and a modern urban form. Whereas abstraction was the primary design tool that Fernández del Amo deployed to the limits of the continuity of urban form, de la Sota reversed the fundamental reference to the countryside that characterizes Spanish surrealism to bring surrealism within the process of rural modernization in Franco’s Spain