Construction d'un problème public autour du dopage et reconnaissance d'une spécialité médicale

The formation of a professional specialty — sports medicine — is described with emphasis on how drug abuse has become a public issue. This notion's itinerary is traced between 1955 and 1999 so as to show how doctors with different profiles and activities successively raised the issue of “doping”. The objectives of medicine, as it was being applied to sports, gradually changed. At the start, the intention was to cure, a view that celebrated the virtues of practicing a sport and it condemned using drugs. A new field of medical competence was opened with the “biological preparation of performances”, which, though presented as an alternative to using drugs, blurred the boundaries with doping. Medical positions became polarized: on the one side, a science of training took shape around the physiology of physical efforts, which made it possible to intensify activities while optimizing them thanks to rest periods; and on the other side, clinicians who, in closer contact with the everyday life of players, both understood the requirements ensuing from a continuous renewal of performances and tended to favor taking “products” for “curative” purposes. Sports medicine was legitimated as a medical specialty on two grounds: the one, obvious, sets doping at odds with health; and the other, aberrant from the viewpoint of health but nonetheless accepted, associates intensive sports with health.     

Le contrôle du travail par les ouvriers : analyses à partir d'observations participantes

The sociology and anthropology of labor have long drawn attention to the ways employees exercise control over the work process, including in contexts where strong orders are given. The control of work is, in fact, an aspect of how participation and involvement in a collective organization are managed. Workers try to manage their participation (always collective but to varying degrees) in a firm in order to make work a gratifying or at least bearable experience. This involves at least three sorts of interventions linked to practical interests: managing relations with colleagues; managing the execution of tasks and activities; and managing relations with the staff. Focusing on the actor's viewpoint and objectives, this research based on participant observation examines how workers try to act so as to facilitate their activities in the short or middle run. Their efforts sometimes correspond to what the hierarchy expects but, at other times, to a form of rebellion.     

Polynomially solvable cases of the constant rank unconstrained quadratic 0-1 programming problem

In this paper we consider the constant rank unconstrained quadratic 0-1 optimization problem, CR-QP01 for short. This problem consists in minimizing the quadratic function 〈x, Ax〉 + 〈c, x〉 over the set {0,1} ⁿ where c is a vector in ℝ ⁿ and A is a symmetric real n × n matrix of constant rank r. We first present a pseudo-polynomial algorithm for solving the problem CR-QP01, which is known to be NP-hard already for r = 1. We then derive two new classes of special cases of the CR-QP01 which can be solved in polynomial time. These classes result from further restrictions on the matrix A. Finally we compare our algorithm with the algorithm of Allemand et al. (2001) for the CR-QP01 with negative semidefinite A and extend the range of applicability of the latter algorithm. It turns out that neither of the two algorithms dominates the other with respect to the class of instances which can be solved in polynomial time.     

Promoting Resilient Livelihoods through Adaptive Social Protection: Lessons from 124 programmes in South Asia

Adaptive Social Protection refers to efforts to integrate social protection (SP), disaster risk reduction (DRR) and climate change adaptation (CCA), the need for which is increasingly recognised by practitioners and academics. Relying on 124 agricultural programmes implemented in five countries in Asia, this article considers how these elements are being brought together, and explores the potential gains of these linkages. It shows that full integration is still relatively limited but that, when it occurs, it helps to shift the time horizon beyond short‐term interventions aimed at supporting peoples' coping strategies and/or graduation objectives, towards longer‐term interventions that can help promote transformation towards climate and disaster resilient livelihood options.     

The Sex Ratio Transition in Asia

This article adopts a comparative perspective to review the recent increase in the sex ratio at birth (SRB) across Asia. It first describes and compares the most recent birth statistics in Asia in order to identify commonalities in the gradual rise of SRBs observed from Armenia to South Korea. This comparison provides the basis for identifying specific transition patterns in the changes in SRBs. Their recent rise is then interpreted in a social and historical framework borrowed from fertility decline and based on three preconditions: access to sex‐selection technology, preference for male births, and pressure from low fertility. On a broader plane, the process of growing imbalances in the sex composition of the population gives rise to a tragedy of the commons. This article indicates the factors that appear most likely to trigger a turnaround in this transitional demographic situation and to facilitate a return to biologically normal sex ratios in the future.     

The Gaussian rank correlation estimator: robustness properties

The Gaussian rank correlation equals the usual correlation coefficient computed from the normal scores of the data. Although its influence function is unbounded, it still has attractive robustness properties. In particular, its breakdown point is above 12%. Moreover, the estimator is consistent and asymptotically efficient at the normal distribution. The correlation matrix obtained from pairwise Gaussian rank correlations is always positive semidefinite, and very easy to compute, also in high dimensions. We compare the properties of the Gaussian rank correlation with the popular Kendall and Spearman correlation measures. A simulation study confirms the good efficiency and robustness properties of the Gaussian rank correlation. In the empirical application, we show how it can be used for multivariate outlier detection based on robust principal component analysis.     

Optimizing the Staffing and Routing of Small‐Size Hierarchical Call Centers

Multiple‐skill call centers propagate rapidly with the development of telecommunications. An abundance of literature has already been published on call centers. Here, we want to focus on centers that would typically occur in business‐to‐business environments; these are call centers that handle many types of calls but where the arrival rate for each type is low. To find an optimal configuration, the integrality of the decision variables is a much more important issue than for larger call centers. The present paper proposes an approach that uses elements of combinatorial optimization to find optimal configurations. We develop an approximation method for the evaluation of the service performance. Next, we search for the minimum‐cost configuration subject to service‐level constraints using a branch‐and‐bound algorithm. What is at stake is to find the right balance between gains resulting from the economies of scale of pooling and the higher cost or cross‐trained agents. The article shows that in most cases this method significantly decreases the staffing cost compared with configurations with only cross‐trained or dedicated operators.     

Alignments with non-overlapping moves,inversions and tandem duplications in <Emphasis Type="Italic">O</Emphasis>(<Emphasis Type="Italic">n</Emphasis><Superscript>4</Superscript>) time

Sequence alignment is a central problem in bioinformatics. The classical dynamic programming algorithm aligns two sequences by optimizing over possible insertions, deletions and substitutions. However, other evolutionary events can be observed, such as inversions, tandem duplications or moves (transpositions). It has been established that the extension of the problem to move operations is NP-complete. Previous work has shown that an extension restricted to non-overlapping inversions can be solved in O(n ³) with a restricted scoring scheme. In this paper, we show that the alignment problem extended to non-overlapping moves can be solved in O(n ⁵) for general scoring schemes, O(n ⁴log n) for concave scoring schemes and O(n ⁴) for restricted scoring schemes. Furthermore, we show that the alignment problem extended to non-overlapping moves, inversions and tandem duplications can be solved with the same time complexities. Finally, an example of an alignment with non-overlapping moves is provided. A preliminary version of this paper appeared in the Proceedings of COCOON 2007, LNCS, vol. 4598, pp. 151–164.     

Nonparametric Wavelet Regression Based on Biased Data

The estimation of the regression function in the biased nonparametric regression model is investigated. We propose and develop a new wavelet-based methodology for this problem. In particular, an adaptive hard thresholding wavelet estimator is constructed. Under mild assumptions on the model, we prove that it enjoys powerful mean integrated squared error properties over Besov balls.     

Efficient MCMC sampling in dynamic mixture models

We show how to improve the efficiency of Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) simulations in dynamic mixture models by block-sampling the discrete latent variables. Two algorithms are proposed: the first is a multi-move extension of the single-move Gibbs sampler devised by Gerlach, Carter and Kohn (in J. Am. Stat. Assoc. 95, 819–828, 2000); the second is an adaptive Metropolis-Hastings scheme that performs well even when the number of discrete states is large. Three empirical examples illustrate the gain in efficiency achieved. We also show that visual inspection of sample partial autocorrelations of the discrete latent variables helps anticipating whether blocking can be effective.