Cases to Include Labour Standards in Trade Agreements.

Le niveau des normes de travail influence le commerce international.International trade is concerned by the level of labour standards.labour standards; WTO; Organisation mondiale du commerce; OMC;

Trade and democracy. An empirical investigation..

Democracy; trade policy; trade openness;

Les démocraties sont-elles plus ouvertes à l'échange ?.

Tandis que l’influence de la démocratie sur la croissance est discutée, celle de l’ouverture commerciale est maintenant avérée. Ces conclusions conduisent à s’interroger sur l’existence d’une relation entre la démocratie et l’ouverture, d’autant plus que les arguments théoriques avancés, comme l’observation des expériences individuelles nationales, ne permet- tent pas de trancher ce débat. Pour y répondre, l’article propose une analyse économétrique de l’impact d’un indicateur de démocratisation sur le degré d’ouverture commerciale et démontre l’existence d’une relation convexe entre ces deux variables. Ce résultat permet de discuter les arguments de l’économie politique, accrédite la thèse du gradualisme et éclaire les interactions existantes entre ouverture, croissance et démocratie.Whereas the influence of democracy on economic growth has still to be proved, trade openness’ is now recognised. Therefore, it may be wondered if there exists a relation between democracy and openness. Neither theoretical arguments nor individual national experiences permit to conclude. To answer this question, an econometrical study on the influence of democratisation on trade openness is proposed. We find a convex relation between these two variables. Thanks to this result, the arguments given by the political economy can be discussed, the gradualism theory is strengthened and the interaction between democracy, growth and openness is getting clearer.Démocratie; Democracy; Ouverture commerciale; Trade Openness;

La clause sociale dans les traités commerciaux.

Mondialisation; Droit du travail; Accords commerciaux;

Impact of ATCO Training and Expertise on Dynamic Spatial Abilities

Dynamic spatial ability is supposed to be involved in a critical process of air traffic controllers, namely conflict detection. The present paper aims at testing whether dynamic spatial ability improves with air traffic control training and/or experience. We designed a laboratory task to assess the performance in predicting if two moving disks would collide or not. We conducted a crosssectional study with four groups of participants : ATCO trainees at the beginning (N=129), middle (N=80) or end of training (N=66) and experienced ATCOs (N=14). Results suggested on one hand that air traffic control training leads to a decrease in the number of extremely high proportions of undetected collisions from the middle of the training. On the other hand, air traffic control operational experience leads to a decrease in the number of extremely high proportions of falsely detected collisions

A preliminary assessment of the influence of adjacent land-use on growth-form composition of vegetation in small Newfoundland basin bogs

Anthropogenic land-use in wetland-adjacent landscapes has been demonstrated to alter wetland ecology in several ways, including changes to vegetation composition. However, comparatively little of this kind of research has been dedicated to bog wetlands specifically. The purpose of this study was to examine if vegetation growth-form composition in small basin bogs is influenced by different types of adjacent land-use throughout the St. John’s region of Newfoundland, Canada. The results provide evidence that overall vegetation composition in small basin bogs are different depending on adjacent land-use (pasture, urban, or natural) and graminoid growth-form vegetation specifically decreases in bogs next to pasture land-use. Additional studies of a similar nature, particularly those implementing remote sensing methods, may provide further evidence to strengthen this relationship in the future

Smooth critical points of planar harmonic mappings

Lyzzaik studied the local properties of light harmonic mappings. More precisely, he classified their critical points and accordingly studied their topological and geometrical behaviour. One aim of our work is to shed some light on the case of smooth critical points, thanks to miscellaneous numerical invariants. Inspired by many computations, and with a crucial use of Milnor fibration theory, we get a fundamental and quite unexpected relation between three of these invariants. In the final part of the work we offer some examples providing significant differences between our harmonic setting and the real analytic one

EEG-based cognitive control behaviour assessment: an ecological study with professional air traffic controllers

Several models defining different types of cognitive human behaviour are available. For this work, we have selected the Skill, Rule and Knowledge (SRK) model proposed by Rasmussen in 1983. This model is currently broadly used in safety critical domains, such as the aviation. Nowadays, there are no tools able to assess at which level of cognitive control the operator is dealing with the considered task, that is if he/she is performing the task as an automated routine (skill level), as procedures-based activity (rule level), or as a problem-solving process (knowledge level). Several studies tried to model the SRK behaviours from a Human Factor perspective. Despite such studies, there are no evidences in which such behaviours have been evaluated from a neurophysiological point of view, for example, by considering brain activity variations across the different SRK levels. Therefore, the proposed study aimed to investigate the use of neurophysiological signals to assess the cognitive control behaviours accordingly to the SRK taxonomy. The results of the study, performed on 37 professional Air Traffic Controllers, demonstrated that specific brain features could characterize and discriminate the different SRK levels, therefore enabling an objective assessment of the degree of cognitive control behaviours in realistic setting

Mapping diversity indices: not a trivial issue

Mapping diversity indices, that is estimating values in all locations of a given area from some sampled locations, is central to numerous research and applied fields in ecology. Two approaches are used to map diversity indices without including abiotic or biotic variables: (i) the indirect approach, which consists in estimating each individual species distribution over the area, then stacking the distributions of all species to estimate and map a posteriori the diversity index, (ii) the direct approach, which relies on computing a diversity index in each sampled locations and then to interpolate these values to all locations of the studied area for mapping. For both approaches, we document drawbacks from theoretical and practical viewpoints and argue about the need for adequate interpolation methods. First, we point out that the indirect approach is problematic because of the high proportion of rare species in natural communities. This leads to zero-inflated distributions, which cannot be interpolated using standard statistical approaches. Secondly, the direct approach is inaccurate because diversity indices are not spatially additive, that is the diversity of a studied area (e.g. region) is not the sum of the local diversities. Therefore, the arithmetic variance and some of its derivatives, such as the variogram, are not appropriate to ecologically measure variation in diversity indices. For the direct approach, we propose to consider the -diversity, which quantifies diversity variations between locations, by the mean of a -gram within the interpolation procedure. We applied this method, as well as the traditional interpolation methods for comparison purposes on different faunistic and floristic data sets collected from scientific surveys. We considered two common diversity indices, the species richness and the Rao\u27s quadratic entropy, knowing that the above issues are true for complementary species diversity indices as well as those dealing with other biodiversity levels such as genetic diversity. We conclude that none of the approaches provided an accurate mapping of diversity indices and that further methodological developments are still needed. We finally discuss lines of research that may resolve this key issue, dealing with conditional simulations and models taking into account biotic and abiotic explanatory variables

Investigation of passive and active silica-tin oxide nanostructured optical fibers fabricated by " inverse dip-coating " and " powder in tube " method based on the chemical sol-gel process and laser emission

International audienceThis paper presents a study of original nanostructured optical fibers based on the SiO 2-SnO 2-(Yb 3+) system. Two different processes have been developed and compared: the sol-gel chemical method associated to the " inverse dip-coating " (IDC) and the " powder in tube " (PIT) process. The microstructural and optical properties of the fibers are studied according to the concentration of SnO 2. X-Ray Diffraction as well as Transmission Electron Microscopy studies show that SnO 2 crystallizes into the cassiterite phase as nanoparticles with a diameter ranging from 4 to 50 nm as a function of tin oxide concentration. A comparative study highlights a better conservation of SnO 2 into the fiber core with the PIT approach according to the refractive index profile and X-Ray analysis measurement. The attenuation evaluated by the classic cutback method gives respectively values higher than 3 dB/m and 0.2 dB/m in the visible (VIS) and infrared (IR) range for the PIT fiber whereas background losses reach 0.5 dB/m in the VIS range for IDC fibers. The introduction of ytterbium ions into the core of PIT fibers, directly in the first chemical step, leads to a laser emission (between 1050 and 1100 nm) according to the fiber length under 850 nm wavelength pumping. Luminescence studies have demonstrated the influence of the tin oxide nanostructure on the rare earth optical properties especially by the modification of the absorption (850 to 1000 nm) and emission (950 to 1100 nm) by discretization of the bands, as well as on the IR emission lifetime evaluated to 10 µs