Consumption over the Life Cycle: Facts for France

This paper uses repeated cross-sections of the INSEE Household Budget Survey to estimate life cycle profiles of consumption, controlling for cohort and time effects. We construct age profiles for total and nondurable consumption as well as expenditure patterns for consumer durables. We find significant humps over the life cycle for total, nondurable, and durable expenditures. Changes in household size account for about one half of these humps.Consumption, Life Cycle, Durables, Non-Durables

Why archaeology, in all of its components, is a social science

It is often said that archaeology lies at the interface between the natural and social sciences, as demonstrated by its range of publications, the distribution of its research teams, and its varied theoretical propositions. By re-examining these theoretical propositions and suggesting a new object for this science, it becomes possible to find a unity and uniqueness specific to archaeology. Based on the idea of the aggregate, and then exploring the minimalist ontology of the philosopher F. Wolff (things, events, people), it is suggested that what is being referred to is a world at our own scale and within our own semantic field, but which is designed using concepts developed by the other social sciences. While the use of analyses (physico-chemical, biological) is increasingly common, these are not the determining aspect of archaeological discourse, which cannot present its constituent parts independently of all points of view, unlike the natural sciences

Archéologie et incertitude

National audienceQue pouvons-nous établir avec certitude lorsque nous faisons de l’archéologie et quel est le périmètre de cette pratique de nos jours ? En nous restreignant à l’opération de démontage d’agrégats d’un type particulier présents dans le sous-sol – ce que l’on appelle couramment des « sites archéologiques » –, on peut scinder la première interrogation en deux questions : d’une ontologie de la substance (« qu’y-a-t-il ici ? »), on embraye vers une ontologie du temps (« que s’est-il passé ici ? »), laquelle doit également supposer des individus et des collectifs susceptibles d’actions, ceux-ci et celles-là demeurant largement indéfinies. Outre le caractère lacunaire des données archéologiques, il faut également compter sur le découplage entre l’espace et le temps, source de nombreuses indéterminations. En dépit de ces incertitudes, une « bonne fouille ne saurait mentir » car aucun point de vue ne se manifeste dans un agrégat, à la différence des textes et des images principalement étudiés par les historiens

Why archaeology, in all of its components, is a social science

It is often said that archaeology lies at the interface between the natural and social sciences, as demonstrated by its range of publications, the distribution of its research teams, and its varied theoretical propositions. By re-examining these theoretical propositions and suggesting a new object for this science, it becomes possible to find a unity and uniqueness specific to archaeology. Based on the idea of the aggregate, and then exploring the minimalist ontology of the philosopher F. Wolff (things, events, people), it is suggested that what is being referred to is a world at our own scale and within our own semantic field, but which is designed using concepts developed by the other social sciences. While the use of analyses (physico-chemical, biological) is increasingly common, these are not the determining aspect of archaeological discourse, which cannot present its constituent parts independently of all points of view, unlike the natural sciences

Parameterized Construction of Program Representations for Sparse Dataflow Analyses

Data-flow analyses usually associate information with control flow regions. Informally, if these regions are too small, like a point between two consecutive statements, we call the analysis dense. On the other hand, if these regions include many such points, then we call it sparse. This paper presents a systematic method to build program representations that support sparse analyses. To pave the way to this framework we clarify the bibliography about well-known intermediate program representations. We show that our approach, up to parameter choice, subsumes many of these representations, such as the SSA, SSI and e-SSA forms. In particular, our algorithms are faster, simpler and more frugal than the previous techniques used to construct SSI - Static Single Information - form programs. We produce intermediate representations isomorphic to Choi et al.'s Sparse Evaluation Graphs (SEG) for the family of data-flow problems that can be partitioned per variables. However, contrary to SEGs, we can handle - sparsely - problems that are not in this family