Comment dissuader les personnes de prendre le volant lorsqu'elles ne sont pas en état de conduire ?: la création d'une start-up mobile

Lorsque l’on sait, à titre d’exemple, qu’un homme sur deux, âgé entre 16 à 20 ans, avoue avoir conduit au moins une fois en état d’ébriété1 et que pas moins de 6’287 avertissements et 15’686 permis2 sont retirés chaque année dû à l’alcool, nous pouvons comprendre l’inquiétude des organismes de prévention. Sachant que ces risques sont désormais connus de tous, n’est-il pas possible de trouver des solutions alternatives ? Parallèlement, les taxis sont délaissés par les véhicules de tourisme avec chauffeurs (VTC). Ils subissent depuis deux à trois ans une baisse de 15% par année et celle-ci tend à atteindre 30% pour l’année 20163. Ces chiffres sont d’autant plus impressionnants quand on sait que L'Institut national de la statistique et des études économiques a estimé le chiffre d’affaire annuel en France de ce secteur à 3 milliards d’euros. Les taxis sont-ils donc amenés à disparaitre ou peuvent-ils se révolutionner ? Ce travail a pour objectif d’étudier la faisabilité d’offrir un nouvel outil pour lutter contre ces deux problématiques d’actualité à savoir la prévention des dangers liés à la conduite sous l’influence de l’alcool ou de drogues et le soutien envers la branches des taxis. Ce projet s’intéresse donc à la création d’une start-up économiquement viable, active aussi bien pour la prévention en amont que pour assurer la sécurité des utilisateurs souhaitant rentrer à leur domicile sans prendre le volant

Do Foreign Institutional Investors Destabilize China’s A-Share Markets?

This paper investigates the eect of foreign institutional investors on the sta- bility of Chinese stock markets. Previous literature views this investor group as destabilizing feedback traders. We use the abolition of ownership restrictions on A shares as a natural experiment. There is strong evidence that foreign in- stitutions have a stabilizing eect on Chinese stock markets and contribute to market eciency. This nding is robust across exchanges, sample periods, size quintiles and alternative model specications. By contrast, domestic investors appear to engage in positive feedback trading. Our results have important implications for market regulation.Foreign Institutional Investors, Feedback Trading, Chinese Stock Markets, Regulation, Ownership Restrictions

Of Mice Moths and Men Machines

In 1947, Grace Murray Hopper a pioneer in early computing made an unusual entry into her daily logbook: ‘Relay #70 Panel F (moth) in relay. First actual case of bug being found.' Accompanying this entry is an actual celluloid tape encrusted bug, or more specifically a moth, fastened to the page of the logbook. According to Hopper, one of the technicians in her team solved a glitch in the Harvard Mark II computer by pulling an actual insect out from between the contacts of one of its relays. Word soon went out that they had ‘debugged the machine' and the phrase quickly entered our lexicon. After languishing for years this mythic moth was eventually transported to the Smithsonian where it now lies in archival state. The moth's dynamic vitality had introduced a kind of surplus or aberrant code into the machine, which in effect pushed the machine towards a state of chaos and breakdown. Its failure to act as desired, to perform the coding sequences of its programmed history suggests that even a seemingly inert or lifeless machine can become ‘more and other than its history'. (Elizabeth Grosz, 2005) Hopper's bug is thus a material witness to the creative co-evolution of the machine with the living matter of the moth. Moreover, as a cipher for machinic defect the bug reminds us that mutations are in fact necessary for systems to change and evolve. The crisis introduced into a biological system or machine through the virulence of the bug is terminal only to the extent that it becomes the source for another kind of order, another kind of interaction. This is used as a case study to argue that chaos is not only an animating force in the constitution of new systems but is necessary for the evolution of difference

Arguments: Should Videos of Trees have Standing? An Inquiry into the Legal Rites of Unnatural Objects at the ICTY

Arguments, or the rhetorical construction of truth about historical events, have always lain at the heart of legal trials. In this sense, it is not bare facts in themselves but how they can be assembled into a coherent and convincing narrative that provides the foundation for law’s findings on the truth. However, through the course of the twentieth century, the materials upon which arguments could be built have radically altered. This chapter sets out to explore mediated evidence, the role of scientific expertise, and the ways in which they combine to create new legal assemblages. More specifically, it considers how visual media, especially videos and photographs, are increasingly engaged in the construction of the arguments that legal practitioners deploy and that courts are called upon to adjudicate. As visual images proliferate in courts, visual rhetoric and visual argumentation unfold alongside the traditional rhetoric of words alone (Sherwin 2007). This broadening of the rhetorical spectrum within legal practice calls for new forms of expertise and eloquence based on an expanded capacity to decode, in order to meaningfully examine, visual evidence and visual advocacy

Entangled Matters: Analogue Futures & Political Pasts

Theorised as an "ontology of the output" my research project conceptually repurposes media machines in order to activate new or alternate entanglements between historical media artefacts and events. Although the particular circumstances that produced these materials may have changed, the project asks why these analogue media artefacts might still be a matter of concern. What is their relevance for problematizing debates within media philosophy today and by extension the politics that underscore the operations of the digital? Does the analogue as I intuit have the capacity to release history and propose alternate pathways through mediatic time? Case Studies: ARCHIVAL FUTURES considers the missing or 'silent' erasure of 18-'12 minutes in Watergate Tape No. 342 (1972). TELE-TRANSMISSIONS explores the 14-minute audio transmission produced by the Muirhead K220 Picture Transmitter to relay the image of napalm victim Kim Phuc from Saigon to Tokyo (June 8 1972). RADIOLOGICAL EVENTS examines thirty-three seconds of irradiated film shot at Chernobyl Reactor Unit 4 by the late Soviet filmmaker Vladimir Shevchenko (April 26 1986). This research turns upon a reconsideration of the ontological temporalities of media matter; a concern both in and with time which acknowledges that each of the now historic machinic artefacts and related case studies have always-already been entangled with the present and coming events of the future. The thesis project as such performs itself as a kind of "tape cutup" that reorganises and consequently troubles the historical record by bringing ostensibly unrelated events into creative juxtaposition with one another. Recording asserts temporality; it is the formal means by which time is engineered, how it is both retroactively repotentialised and prospectively activated. Recording in effect produces a saturated ontology of time in which the reverberations of past, present, and future elide to become enfolded within the temporal vectors of the artefact

Stock Return Seasonalities and Investor Structure: Evidence from China’s B-Share Markets

This paper investigates whether seasonalities in daily stock returns are related to the trading behavior of individual and institutional investors. The change in the investor structure of B-share markets in Shanghai and Shenzhen after the abolition of ownership restrictions in 2001 provides a unique testing environ- ment. We show that day-of-the-week eects are attenuated after the market entrance of Chinese individual investors who had previously not been allowed to trade in B-shares. Our empirical results suggest that institutional rather than individual investors are a main driving force behind such anomalies. In addi- tion, we nd evidence of reduced index return autocorrelation and US spillover eects in the post-liberalization period.Institutional Investors, Individual Investors, Stock Return Seasonalities, Chinese Stock Markets, GARCH Model

Singing Ice: Ladakhi folk songs about mountains, glaciers, rivers, and steams

This song book emerges out of an encounter with Morup Namgyal in Leh, Ladkah, a well-known folk singer whose music practice has contributed to the revival of Ladakhi and Tibetan cultural traditions. Also known as the “Song Collector” Morup Namgyal has been saving and singing traditional folk songs that reflect the changing environmental conditions of Himalayan mountains and its peoples. After listening to his many stories some of which were accompanied by his plaintive singing, he opened up his archive to us—a handwritten folio of songs now long forgotten that are stored on faded scraps of paper gathered while travelling throughout the region in the 1960s. These songs and their chronicles of environmental change are fated to disappear like the glaciers that Mr. Namgyal sings about in his soulful words of mourning and loss

Material Witness: Media, Forensics, Evidence

In this book, Susan Schuppli introduces a new operative concept: material witness, an exploration of the evidential role of matter as both registering external events and exposing the practices and procedures that enable matter to bear witness. Organized in the format of a trial, Material Witness moves through a series of cases that provide insight into the ways in which materials become contested agents of dispute around which stake holders gather. These cases include an extraordinary videotape documenting the massacre at Izbica, Kosovo, used as war crimes evidence against Slobodan Milošević; the telephonic transmission of an iconic photograph of a South Vietnamese girl fleeing an accidental napalm attack; radioactive contamination discovered in Canada's coastal waters five years after the accident at Fukushima Daiichi; and the ecological media or “disaster film” produced by the Deep Water Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Each highlights the degree to which a rearrangement of matter exposes the contingency of witnessing, raising questions about what can be known in relationship to that which is seen or sensed, about who or what is able to bestow meaning onto things, and about whose stories will be heeded or dismissed. An artist-researcher, Schuppli offers an analysis that merges her creative sensibility with a forensic imagination rich in technical detail. Her goal is to relink the material world and its affordances with the aesthetic, the juridical, and the political

A Framework for Assessing the Suitability of Different Species as Companion Animals

Municipal regulations and humane movement policies often restrict or discourage the use of \u27exotic\u27 species as companion animals. However, confusion arises because the term \u27exotic\u27 is used in various ways, and because classifying species as exotic or non-exotic does not satisfactorily distinguish suitable from unsuitable companion animals. Even among commonly kept species, some appear to be much more suitable than others. Instead, decisions about suitable companion animal species need to be based on a number of relevant issues. As ethical criteria, we considered that keeping a companion animal should not jeopardize - and ideally should enhance - its welfare, as well as that of its owner; and that keeping a companion animal should not incur any appreciable harm or risk of harm to the community or the environment. These criteria then served as the basis for identifying and organizing the various concerns that may arise over keeping a species for companionship. Concerns include how the animals are procured and transported, how well their needs can be met in captivity, whether the animal poses any danger to others, and whether the animal might cause environmental damage. These concerns were organized into a checklist of questions that form a basis for assigning species to five proposed categories reflecting their suitability as companion animals. This assessment framework could be used in creating policy or regulations, and to create educational and decision-making tools for pet retailers, animal adoption workers, and potential owners, to help prevent animals from being placed in unsuitable circumstances

Attitudes of Canadian Beef Producers Toward Animal Welfare

Commercial beef production in western Canada involves raising cows and calves on large tracts of grassland, plus grain-based ‘finishing’ of animals in outdoor feedlots. This study used open-ended, semi-structured interviews to explore views on animal welfare of 23 commercial beef producers in this system. Although wary of the term ‘animal welfare’, participants understood the concept to encompass three well-known elements: (i) basic animal health and body condition; (ii) affective states (comfort, contentment, freedom from hunger or thirst); and (iii) the ability to live a ‘natural’ life. Participants attached importance to protecting animals from natural hardships (extreme weather, predators), yet many regarded some degree of natural challenge as acceptable or even positive. Quiet rumination was uniformly regarded as indicating contentment. Avoiding ‘stress’ was seen as a central goal, to be achieved especially by skilful handling and good facilities. Invasive procedures (branding, castration, de-horning) were recognised as painful but were accepted because they were seen as: (i) necessary for regulatory or management reasons; (ii) satisfactory trade-offs to prevent worse welfare problems such as aggression; or (iii) sufficiently short-term to be relatively unimportant. Other issues — including poor facilities, rough or excessive handling, poor nutrition, and failure to protect health — were regarded as more serious welfare concerns. While feeling constrained by low profits, participants saw good welfare as crucial to profitability. Participants uniformly expressed an ethic of care, enjoyment of working with animals, and varying degrees of willingness to sacrifice personal comfort for animal well-being. We argue that animal welfare policy and advocacy are likely to be more successful in engaging producers if they acknowledge and address producers’ views on animal welfare