Tolérance et « minorité » à l’âge des Lumières

La notion de minorité, élément incontournable de toute réflexion sur les sociétés contemporaines, continue d'être présentée en France comme typiquement " anglo-saxonne ". C'est oublier qu'avant d'être occultée par la Révolution française, elle s'était introduite dans la pensée des Lumières à la faveur du combat pour la tolérance. Voltaire joue ici un rôle particulièrement important. Son traité sur la tolérance fait émerger la catégorie de minorité : 1- par retournement des logiques comptables mises en place par les pamphlétaires catholiques pour minimiser le coût de l'éradication des hérétiques ; 2- par identification avec la situation minoritaire, identification cultivée par la Philosophie à travers diverses figures emblématiques (Hypathie, les Guèbres, les " Welches qui ne sont pas welches ").The concept of minority, an unavoidable part of any reflexion on contemporary society, is still considered typically "anglo-saxon" in France. But such an idea overlooks the fact that it was the struggle for tolerance that introduced the concept into Enlightenment thought, before it was occulted by the French Revolution. Voltaire plays a particularly important role in this respect. It was his Treaty on Tolerance which produced the category of minority : first, by upturning the accountant's logic used by Catholic pamphleteers to minimize the costs of eradicating heretics ; second, by identifying with the minoritary situation - a Philosophy - rooted identification made by means of a number of emblematic figures (Hypathie, the Guèbres, the "'Welches' who are not Welch")

Liquid-liquid mass transfer with simultaneous chemical reaction

Imperial Users onl

COOPERATIVE FORMATION AND FINANCIAL CONTRACTING IN AGRICULTURAL MARKETS

We use historical variation in the market share of agricultural cooperatives to examine the nature of the cooperative firm. Our data include the share of sectoral output accounted for by cooperative firms across 15 commodity sectors during the period 1930-2002. We test a simple financial contracting model where the cooperative firm is viewed as a particular implementation of "monitored credit" (or "informed intermediation"). Controlling for sectoral and year effects, we find support for the main prediction of our model with a positive and statistically significant relationship between cooperative market share and real annual lending rates.Agribusiness,

Problem-Solving Knowledge Mining from Users’\ud Actions in an Intelligent Tutoring System

In an intelligent tutoring system (ITS), the domain expert should provide\ud relevant domain knowledge to the tutor so that it will be able to guide the\ud learner during problem solving. However, in several domains, this knowledge is\ud not predetermined and should be captured or learned from expert users as well as\ud intermediate and novice users. Our hypothesis is that, knowledge discovery (KD)\ud techniques can help to build this domain intelligence in ITS. This paper proposes\ud a framework to capture problem-solving knowledge using a promising approach\ud of data and knowledge discovery based on a combination of sequential pattern\ud mining and association rules discovery techniques. The framework has been implemented\ud and is used to discover new meta knowledge and rules in a given domain\ud which then extend domain knowledge and serve as problem space allowing\ud the intelligent tutoring system to guide learners in problem-solving situations.\ud Preliminary experiments have been conducted using the framework as an alternative\ud to a path-planning problem solver in CanadarmTutor

On the weighted enumeration of alternating sign matrices and descending plane partitions

We prove a conjecture of Mills, Robbins and Rumsey [Alternating sign matrices and descending plane partitions, J. Combin. Theory Ser. A 34 (1983), 340-359] that, for any n, k, m and p, the number of nxn alternating sign matrices (ASMs) for which the 1 of the first row is in column k+1 and there are exactly m -1's and m+p inversions is equal to the number of descending plane partitions (DPPs) for which each part is at most n and there are exactly k parts equal to n, m special parts and p nonspecial parts. The proof involves expressing the associated generating functions for ASMs and DPPs with fixed n as determinants of nxn matrices, and using elementary transformations to show that these determinants are equal. The determinants themselves are obtained by standard methods: for ASMs this involves using the Izergin-Korepin formula for the partition function of the six-vertex model with domain-wall boundary conditions, together with a bijection between ASMs and configurations of this model, and for DPPs it involves using the Lindstrom-Gessel-Viennot theorem, together with a bijection between DPPs and certain sets of nonintersecting lattice paths.Comment: v2: published versio