Les figures de la gestion du changement sociotechnique

Computers and software occupy an ever bigger place in an organization’s activities. Studying the social dynamics of their uses has thus become a major preoccupation for the social sciences. An overview of recent studies, in particular “structurationist” research, on this subject is presented; and a federative model, suggested. This archetypical model corresponds to three stylized situations of sociotechnical change (a neutral, regenerated and disturbed archetype) that, in some cases, can be aligned to reconstitute “appropriative trajectories”. This theoretical framework is applied to various sorts of information technology, in particular: enterprise resource planning (ERP) software, intranets and electronic messaging systems. Beyond merely understanding the social dynamics, the effort is made to link appropriative trajectories with the “logics of control” specific to them. The latter correspond to figures of management (the channel, facilitator and catalyst), which are described.     

Le travail des experts : analyse d'un dispositif d'évaluation des risques alimentaires

Following several crises, the French Food Safety Agency was set up in 1999 to solicit scientific opinions as part of assessments of health-related risks. The principle was retained to avoid a conflict of professional and economic interests in making assessments. Observations of how a committee of experts on prions operated has shown that its judgement is the outcome of a variety of resources and procedures (involvement in quite contextualized technical studies, a sharing of tasks with the agency's personnel, etc.). The actual work of the experts involved taking into account both the requirement of legitimation and a concern for examining the case presented and answering the questions that were set.     

Comment apprécier une politique policière ? : Le premier ministère Sarkozy (7 mai 2002-30 mars 2004)

How to assess the effects of the policy of Nicolas Sarkozy, Home Secretary in France from May 2002 to March 2004? An analysis of the statistics and, in particular, of the way they were construed reveals that the results were ambiguous, because law enforcement was centered on the state's duty to enforce the law while police services were being asked to show a decrease in delinquency so as to prove that the new policy was effective. On the other hand, an analysis of polls about how public opinion felt about law and order indicates that the minister's tough talk was effective to a degree, especially when feelings of insecurity were strongly politicized prior to presidential elections in April 2002. This analysis sheds light on the distance between the practical and purely political effectiveness of a policy of law and order.     

Block empirical likelihood for longitudinal partially linear regression models

The authors propose a block empirical likelihood procedure to accommodate the within‐group correlation in longitudinal partially linear regression models. This leads them to prove a nonparametric version of the Wilks theorem. In comparison with normal approximations, their method does not require a consistent estimator for the asymptotic covariance matrix, which makes it easier to conduct inference on the parametric component of the model. An application to a longitudinal study on fluctuations of progesterone level in a menstrual cycle is used to illustrate the procedure developed here.     

Brualdi定理的一个推广

本文将Brualdi定理推广到分块矩阵上,得到了新的谱包含域。     

REMARKS ON OPTIMAL INFERENCE FOR MARKOV BRANCHING PROCESSES: A SEQUENTIAL APPROACH

Use of a suitable stopping rule yields exact uniformly most powerful tests and minimum variance unbiased estimators of various parameters of a Markov branching model with or without immigration. The population model discussed includes the pure birth, simple epidemic, immigration-death, M/M/ 1 queue, linear birth-death and a branching diffusion process, among others, as special cases.     

A general guideline for management of risk from carcinogens

A simple relationship is formulated that helps to discriminate between acceptable and unacceptable individual lifetime risks (RL) to populations that are exposed to chemical carcinogens. The relationship is an empirical one and is developed using objective risk data as well as subjective risk levels that have found substantial acceptance among those concerned with carcinogenic risk assessment issues. The expression sets acceptable levels of lifetime carcinogenic risk and is a function of the total population exposed to the carcinogen. Its use in risk assessment and risk management provides guidance in distinguishing those carcinogens that should be regulated because of the health hazard they pose from those whose regulation may not be needed.     

STEIN'S METHOD AND THE BERRY-ESSÉEN THEOREM

Stein's method is used to prove the Lindeberg-Feller theorem and a generalization of the Berry-Esséen theorem. The arguments involve only manipulation of probability inequalities, and form an attractive alternative to the less direct Fourier-analytic methods which are traditionally employed.     

On uniform approximation of Poisson variates by normal ones

In this paper the accuracy of the normal approximation to the Poisson is treated from the viewpoint of direct approximation of Poisson variables by normal ones. The conclusions that are derived on the accuracy of this approximation lead (among others) to very useful results on confidence limits for the mean of a linear combination of independent Poisson variables; these latter are employed in precise determination of the composition of a mixture of radioactive isotopes by means of a scintillation counter.     

Coherency conditions for finite exchangeable inference

Summary We idenify the invertible coherent functional relation between an array of asserted conditional probabilities and the probability distribution for the sum of events that are regarded exchangeably, in the regular case thatP(N _N+1 |S _N =a) ∈ (0, 1) for everya=0, 1, ...,N. The result is used to construct a useful algebraic and geometrical representation of all coherent inferences in the regular case, including those that are nonlinear in the sum of the conditioning events. The special case in which conditional probabilities mimic observed frequencies within (0, 1) receives an exact solution, which allows an easy interpretation of its surprising consequences. Finally, we introduce a new direction in research on prior opinion assessment that this approach, inverse to the usual one, suggests.