The Aachen Mutual Defence Clause: A Closer Look at the Franco-German Treat. Egmont Security Policy Brief No. 105

On 22 January 2019, Emmanuel Macron and Angela Merkel signed a new treaty on “Franco-German cooperation and integration” in Aachen. Complementing the 1963 Elysée Treaty which symbolized the reconciliation between Germany and France in the post-war period, the Aachen Treaty aims to further strengthen the ties between the two countries in the domains of economy, culture, administration, environment, diplomacy and defence. Although the Treaty has been criticised for its lack of ambition, a closer reading of its text reveals some hidden gems, including its mutual defence clause. What does this new clause mean for the Franco-German tandem and for collective defence in Europe

Theatre Women and Cultural Diplomacy in the Transatlantic Anglophone World (1752-1807)

Anglophone theatre provided a solid cultural bridge between Britain and America and served as an influential, informative, and accessible mode of social, political and cultural exchange transported throughout the eighteenth-century transatlantic world. Unlike works focusing on colonial American restrictions on theater, or examining its subsequent role in constructing American nationhood and identity, I explore how theatre served to both cultivate and challenge transatlantic connections. I show that actresses and women playwrights played a distinctive role in this process; they exercised agency in helping shape Anglo identity, influenced the formation of the cult of celebrity, challenged physical gendered spaces and normative social behavior, and entered intellectual landscapes culturally, socially, and politically informed. Most scholarship examining Anglophone theatre isolates performances and plays by their location, genre, performer/author, or role. However, looking through the lens of the greater transatlantic world makes clear the contributions of Anglophone theatre women and reveals their influence on cultural and diplomatic exchange. By innovatively bringing together stories of actresses and women playwrights, and by examining their experiences and works as microhistories, I show that women both knowingly and inadvertently became instrumental as cultural diplomats who helped solidify connections between Britain and America, palliate the political differences of the period, and engage audiences in national identity conversations. Theater Women and Cultural Diplomacy creatively adopts a long-durée framework and incorporates diplomatic, cultural, and social history; theatre and performance studies; literary theory; biography; and gender studies to suggest how women provided critical cultural cohesion as well as social and political civic awareness. The interconnectedness of Anglo theatre includes conversations about materiality and immateriality, presence and absence, performance, publication, and circulation; gender and identity, intercolonial challenges and nationhood. While the bulk of my thesis focuses on the later eighteenth century, my analysis begins in 1660 when women first legally participated in British theatre and continues through the end of the eighteenth century when Anglophone theatre women contribute to both a new “American” voice and British identity. As early celebrities, actresses and women playwrights used theatre to challenge social norms and gender normativity, offer ways of reimagining women in a changed world, and effect cultural diplomacy. They would do so with exceptional poise, perseverance, and perceptiveness all in the face of three significant revolutions: the American Revolution, the French Revolution, and the Haitian Revolution

A knowledge acquisition assistant for the expert system shell Nexpert-Object

This study addresses the problems of knowledge acquisition in expert system development examines programs whose goal is to solve part of these problems. Among them are knowledge acquisition tools, which provide the knowledge engineer with a set of Artificial Intelligence primitives, knowledge acquisition aids, which offer to the knowledge engineer a guidance in knowledge elicitation, and finally, automated systems, which try to replace the human interviewer with a machine interface. We propose an alternative technique to these approaches: an interactive syntactic analyzer of an emerging knowledge base written with the expert system shell called Nexpert Object. This program intends to help the knowledge engineer during the editing of a knowledge base, both from a knowledge engineering and a knowledge representation point of view. The implementation is a Desk Accessory written in C, running on Macintosh concurrently with Nexpert Object

" La prise en charge des proverbes en discours "

Disponible sur http://www.paremia.org/wp-content/uploads/14.FOURNET.pdfInternational audienc

The Portrayal of Science and Religion in James Hilton’s Lost Horizon and Walter Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz

In their fictional works, James Hilton and Walter Miller draw the readers’ attention to the negative impacts of scientific and technological developments on human civilization and the environment. They portray that Science and technology have become a tool in the hands of world powers for destructing humanity and the natural world. In James Hilton’s Lost Horizon and Walter Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz, science and technology are seen accountable for the nuclear wars that caused the annihilation of humanity and the natural world. The novels proclaim that scientists and educated people are a part of nowadays' problems as they are misrepresented by politicians. Thus, in Miller’s novel a worldwide effort begins to kill the scientists and burn all the books and other materials containing scientific knowledge. Nevertheless, a group of monks and religious men preserve the relics of the world’s scientific knowledge in the hope that one day humankind will be ready to use them decently. Moreover, both novels portray religion as an emblem of peace, rebirth, and survival of humanity; it helps science and humanity to recover and survive. This article discusses the role of science and religion as depicted in Lost Horizon and A Canticle for Leibowitz

Foreign Military Sales: A historical review of Argentina\u27s purchases

Since June 1986 the Argentina Air Force maintains at WPAFB Ohio a procurement office to obtain defense articles under the Foreign Military Sales system. The aim of this thesis is to provide an historical review (1994-2012) of the procurement under FMS and bring some visibility about the procedures and get some managing indicators. The analysis considered three different aspects: the characteristics of the acquisition processes, the time in the procurement system and the relationships between independent variables and the acquisition time through a multivariate linear regression model. The results of the analyses are as follows: the USAF Services has the shortest procurement time, 78% of all acquisition processes initiated resulted in a 92% of fill rate; 68% of all acquisitions were considered Standard; and for both Standard and Non Standard the acquisition median delivery time was around a year. Also, neither the type of the defense article, type of procurements or the U.S. Service supplier influenced the pipeline time. Only the country priority showed a slight degree of linear association with time. The multivariate regression model had an R2 equal to 0.169, showing a weak linear association between variables