Du lobbying pour la construction d’une infrastructure publique : Le système télégraphique dans le golfe du Saint-Laurent, 1875-1895

La notion de service public s’impose de plus en plus au Canada à partir du milieu du xixe siècle, notamment en ce qui concerne les infrastructures urbaines. Nous proposons ici une étude sur l’action d’un groupe de pression, les marchands de Québec, auprès du gouvernement fédéral dans le but d’installer un réseau télégraphique dans le golfe du Saint-Laurent. Ce projet, présenté par ses promoteurs comme un service public, prend forme à partir de 1875. Il vise, en améliorant la sécurité de la navigation dans le golfe, à favoriser la place du port de Québec comme plaque tournante du trafic commercial canadien. Cet article retrace les actions du groupe de pression en faveur de leur projet, la mise en place de ce dernier par le gouvernement ainsi qu’une analyse économique de son fonctionnement entre 1880 et 1895. Notre étude montre ainsi la distorsion existant entre l’efficacité pratiquement nulle du réseau télégraphique et l’image que s’en font les milieux d’affaires canadiens. Il s’agit d’un exemple rare d’une action de lobbying aux conséquences positives pour le Canada en général, mais négatives pour le groupe privé à l’origine du projet.Public utilities became increasingly popular in Canada from the middle of the 19th Century, especially with regards to urban infrastructures. This article examines the efforts of one pressure group, Quebec City merchants, to persuade the federal government to install a telegraph network in the Gulf of St. Lawrence. This project, which the promoters presented as a public service, began to take shape in 1875. By improving the security of shipping in the Gulf, it aimed to advance the position of the Port of Quebec as a hub for Canadian commercial traffic. The article traces the actions taken by the pressure group to promote their project, examines the government’s installation of the network and provides an economic analysis of its operations between 1880 and 1895. It shows the discrepancy between the almost complete inefficiency of the telegraph network and the image that the Canadian business community had of it. This was a rare example of a lobbying effort whose consequences were positive for Canada as a whole, but negative for the private group behind the project

Two-Sided Random Matching Markets: Ex-Ante Equivalence of the Deferred Acceptance Procedures

Stable matching in a community consisting of $N$ men and $N$ women is a classical combinatorial problem that has been the subject of intense theoretical and empirical study since its introduction in 1962 in a seminal paper by Gale and Shapley. When the input preference profile is generated from a distribution, we study the output distribution of two stable matching procedures: women-proposing-deferred-acceptance and men-proposing-deferred-acceptance. We show that the two procedures are ex-ante equivalent: that is, under certain conditions on the input distribution, their output distributions are identical. In terms of technical contributions, we generalize (to the non-uniform case) an integral formula, due to Knuth and Pittel, which gives the probability that a fixed matching is stable. Using an inclusion-exclusion principle on the set of rotations, we give a new formula which gives the probability that a fixed matching is the women/men-optimal stable matching. We show that those two probabilities are equal with an integration by substitution.Comment: Accepted for publication in the 21st ACM Conference on Economics and Computation (EC'20

Truthful Matching with Online Items and Offline Agents

We study truthful mechanisms for welfare maximization in online bipartite matching. In our (multi-parameter) setting, every buyer is associated with a (possibly private) desired set of items, and has a private value for being assigned an item in her desired set. Unlike most online matching settings, where agents arrive online, in our setting the items arrive online in an adversarial order while the buyers are present for the entire duration of the process. This poses a significant challenge to the design of truthful mechanisms, due to the ability of buyers to strategize over future rounds. We provide an almost full picture of the competitive ratios in different scenarios, including myopic vs. non-myopic agents, tardy vs. prompt payments, and private vs. public desired sets. Among other results, we identify the frontier up to which the celebrated e/(e-1) competitive ratio for the vertex-weighted online matching of Karp, Vazirani and Vazirani extends to truthful agents and online items

Construire un système réglementaire : l'état et l'industrie télégraphique au Canada, 1846-1916

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Longitudinal evaluation of cognitive functioning in young children with type 1 diabetes over 18 months

OBJECTIVE: Decrements in cognitive function may already be evident in young children with type 1 diabetes (T1D). Here we report prospectively acquired cognitive results over 18 months in a large cohort of young children with and without T1D. METHODS: 144 children with T1D (mean HbA1c: 7.9%) and 70 age-matched healthy controls (mean age both groups 8.5 years; median diabetes duration 3.9 yrs; mean age of onset 4.1 yrs) underwent neuropsychological testing at baseline and after 18-months of follow-up. We hypothesized that group differences observed at baseline would be more pronounced after 18 months, particularly in those T1D patients with greatest exposure to glycemic extremes. RESULTS: Cognitive domain scores did not differ between groups at the 18 month testing session and did not change differently between groups over the follow-up period. However, within the T1D group, a history of diabetic ketoacidosis (DKA) was correlated with lower Verbal IQ and greater hyperglycemia exposure (HbA1c area under the curve) was inversely correlated to executive functions test performance. In addition, those with a history of both types of exposure performed most poorly on measures of executive function. CONCLUSIONS: The subtle cognitive differences between T1D children and nondiabetic controls observed at baseline were not observed 18 months later. Within the T1D group, as at baseline, relationships between cognition (VIQ and executive functions) and glycemic variables (chronic hyperglycemia and DKA history) were evident. Continued longitudinal study of this T1D cohort and their carefully matched healthy comparison group is planned

Evaluation of the American-English Quality of Life in Short Stature Youth (QoLISSY) questionnaire in the United States.

BACKGROUND: The European Quality of Life in Short Stature Youth (QoLISSY) is a novel condition-specific instrument developed to assess health related quality of life (HrQoL) in children/adolescents with short stature from patient and parent perspectives. Study objective was to linguistically validate and psychometrically test the American-English version of the QoLISSY instrument. METHODS: Upon conversion of the British-English version to American-English, content validity and acceptance of the questionnaire were examined through focus group discussions with cognitive debriefing in 28 children/adolescents with growth hormone deficiency (GHD) or idiopathic short stature (ISS) and their parents. In the subsequent field test with 51 families and a re-test with 25 families the psychometric performance of the American-English version was examined and compared with the original European dataset. RESULTS: Pilot test results supported the suitability of the American-English version. Good internal consistency with Cronbach\u27s Alpha ranging from 0.84 to 0.97 and high test-re-test reliabilities were observed in the field test. The QoLISSY was able to detect significant differences according to the degree of short stature with higher HrQoL for taller children. Correlations with a generic HrQoL tool support the QoLISSY\u27s concurrent validity. The scale\u27s operating characteristics were comparable to the original European data. CONCLUSION: Results support that the QoLISSY American-English version is a psychometrically sound short stature-specific instrument to assess the patient- and parent- perceived impact of short stature. The QoLISSY instrument is fit for use in clinical studies and health services research in the American-English speaking population

Alpha Du Centaur : a prototype environment for the design of parallel regular algorithms

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