The Web 2.0, with online social technologies such as social networking services, blogs, wikis, or microbloging, has brought the vision of the Internet as a social landscape in which people are engaged in a multitude of social activities. This editorial of the special issue ‘Social Web and Identity’ discusses the importance of identity in the context of the Social Web, introducing the different papers of this special issue and the different aspects associated to these online identities. The topics covered in (...) this issue include how people define their identity in blogs and what is the articulation between online and offline identities in these systems. It also presents an article studying the privacy issues in online social networks and more specifically how these risks are perceived and how people can control their identity in this context. The next article compares privacy in two different categories of social systems (social network and collaborative workspace). Finally, another article discusses to what extent the current legislation, such the data protection regulations directive 95/46/EC, is providing the right instrument for dealing with privacy issues. (shrink)

"Based on the reading of the only twelfth-century manuscript of the Enigma extant, Charleville MS. 114, and an examination of the fifteenth-century manuscript Uppsala C. 79." Revision of the editor's thesis, Catholic University of America, 1971, presented under title: The enigma fidei of William of Saint Thierry, a translation and commentary. Bibliography: p. 119-120.

This volume focuses on the role language plays at all levels of the argumentation process. It explores the effects that specific linguistic choices may have in the production and the reception of arguments and in doing so, it moves beyond the first, necessary, descriptive stance provided by current literature on the topic. Each chapter provides an original take illuminating one or more of the following three issues: the range of linguistic resources language users draw on as they argue; how cognitive (...) processes of meaning construction may influence argumentative practices; and which discursive devices can be used to fulfil a number of argumentative goals. The volume includes theoretical and empirical or applied stances, providing the reader both with state-of-the-art reflections on the relationship between argumentation and language, and with concrete examples of how this relationship plays out in naturally occurring argumentative practices, such as classroom interaction, and political, parliamentary or journalistic discourse. This is a very original, timely and welcome contribution to the study of argumentation conducted with the tools of the language sciences. The collection of papers relevantly tackles key linguistic, discursive and cognitive aspects of argumentative practices whose treatment is underrepresented in mainstream argumentation studies by offering new and exciting linguistically-grounded theoretical accounts. As such, the volume testifies both to the vigour of the linguistic current within the discipline and to the high standards of scholarly commitment and quality that the younger generation is pushing forward. Without question, this book marks an important milestone in the relationships between linguistics and argumentation theory. Christian Plantin, Professor Emeritus. (shrink)

The critique of the dogmatism of a-priorism from the Popperians suffered from the fact that Popper, too, was moving towards a certain dogmatic derivation. According to the a-priorists, in wanting to protect himself from any would-be-critics who would argue against the dogmatism of his approach, Popper left his philosophical foundation free to the critics. In fighting against German essentialism, he found himself in a position that necessitated the abandonment of either his presupposed anti-essentialism, or his critique of the positivists. Popper's (...) success stems less from his ability to rally the anti-historicist positivists towards the search for scientific foundations, than the fact that he was one of the greatest, if not the greatest, theoreticians of the scientific method, and critic of ideological simplicity. (shrink)

Pauchant's book emerges from a forum on International Management, Ethics, and Spirituality, the first of its kind to be held at an internationally recognized business school, and represents the thinking of six CEOs and six scholars of ethics and spirituality from Australia, Canada, the United States, and Switzerland.

Fifty years after his death, the thought of the French scientist and Jesuit Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881–1955) continues to inspire new ways of understanding humanity’s future. Trained as a paleontologist and philosopher, Teilhard was an innovative synthesizer of science and religion, developing an idea of evolution as an unfolding of material and mental worlds into an integrated, holistic universe at what he called the Omega Point. His books, such as the bestselling The Phenomenon of Man, have influenced generations of (...) ecologists, environmentalists, planners, and others concerned with the fate of the earth.This book brings together original essays by leading experts who reflect on Teilhard’s legacy for today’s globalized world. They explore such topics as: the idea of God and the person; quantum reality and Teilhard’s vision; spiritual resources for the future; politics and economics; and a charter for co-evolution. (shrink)

Thierry Meynard examines how the Jesuits in China came to understand the Confucian tradition, and how they offered the first complete translation of the Lunyu in the West, in the Confucius Sinarum Philosophus.

Formal topology aims at developing general topology in intuitionistic and predicative mathematics. Many classical results of general topology have been already brought into the realm of constructive mathematics by using formal topology and also new light on basic topological notions was gained with this approach which allows distinction which are not expressible in classical topology. Here we give a systematic exposition of one of the main tools in formal topology: inductive generation. In fact, many formal topologies can be presented in (...) a predicative way by an inductive generation and thus their properties can be proved inductively. We show however that some natural complete Heyting algebra cannot be inductively defined. (shrink)

Valorising the biocultural heritage of common goods could enable peasant farmers to achieve socially and economically inclusive sustainability. Increasingly appreciated by consumers, peasant heritage products offer small farmers promising opportunities for economic, social and territorial development. Identifying the obstacles and levers of this complex, multi-scale and multi-stakeholder objective requires an integrative framework. We applied the panarchy conceptual framework to two cases of participatory research with small quinoa producers: a local fair in Chile and quinoa export production in Bolivia. In both (...) cases, the “commoning” process was crucial both to bring stakeholders together inside their communities and to gain outside recognition for their production and thus achieve social and economic inclusion. Despite the differences in scale, the local fair and the export market shared a similar marketing strategy based on short value chains promoting quality products with high identity value. In these dynamics of biocultural heritage valorisation, the panarchical approach revealed the central place as well as the vulnerability of the community territory. As a place of both anchoring and opening, the community territory is the privileged space where autonomous and consensual control over the governance of common biocultural resources can be exercised. (shrink)

Presenting a series of historical portraits of Bantu, Thierry Secretan recounts his investigation into the compounds that housed the black labor of the gold mines of the Rand, around Johannesburg. The use of a « pass » to control the black miners prefigured the apartheid system. From 1904 to 1939,Alfred Martin Duggan-Cronin, an Irish guard at one of the compounds, began to photograph the different kind of people doing the hard labor in the mines. The results were some 7200 (...) exposures and working prints, on 13 /18 cm negatives. Hundreds of enlargements were exhibited from 1925 onward in a gallery in his own home in Kimberley. These photographs were rediscovered in 1998 by Thierry Secretan, who is still attempting to save them front slow destruction: they constitute an extraordinary catalogue of the Bantu cultures. (shrink)

Entre 1909 et 1913 le physicien Jakob Kunz proposa une théorie de l’effet photoélectrique fondée sur l’idée que la lumière est constituée de puises électromagnétiques, ainsi que l’avait proposé J.J. Thomson. L’histoire de cette théorie est résumée ici en examinant plus particulièrement la façon dont Kunz exploita ses résultats expérimentaux à l’aide d’une analyse a posteriori de ses données.

The present paper examines how discursive representations and emotive constructions underpin an argumentative dynamic that emerges from apparently non-argumentative statements, like those found in newspaper headlines. Our data comes from Greek broadsheet newspapers in the polarized context of the Greek crisis. First, we outline an analytic synergy that scrutinizes representational meaning and the semiotization of emotions in headlines. We then move towards the reconstruction of the inferential passage, contained in the headlines, that unites the implicit standpoint with its supporting argument.

“Religion” is usually thought of as a Western concept that has penetrated into China in the modern era. This paper, however, argues that the modern concept of religion was in fact shaped through the mutual exchange between the West and China. Three moments of this exchange are examined: the late-Ming and early-Qing periods, when Western missionaries discovered in China a reality that compelled them to invent the term of “civil religion”; the Enlightenment in Europe, which seized and transformed the new (...) concept; finally, the end of Qing dynasty and Republican era in China, when the concept of religion was re-introduced. This historical enquiry may help us to examine critically the boundaries usually fixed between the secular and the religious. (shrink)

The way in which securities are traded is very different from the idealized picture of a frictionless and self-equilibrating market offered by the typical finance textbook. Market Liquidity offers a more accurate and authoritative take on liquidity and price discovery. The authors start from the assumption that not everyone is present at all times simultaneously on the market, and that even the limited number of participants who are have quite diverse information about the security's fundamentals. As a result, the order (...) flow is a complex mix of information and noise, and a consensus price only emerges gradually over time as the trading process evolves and the participants interpret the actions of other traders. Thus a security's actual transaction price may deviate from its fundamental value, as it would be assessed by a fully informed set of investors. This book takes these deviations seriously, and explains why and how they emerge in the trading process and are eventually eliminated. The authors draw on a vast body of theoretical insights and empirical findings on security price formation that have accumulated in the last thirty years, and have come to form a well-defined field within financial economics known as 'market microstructure.' Focusing on liquidity and price discovery, they analyze the tension between the two, pointing out that when price-relevant information reaches the market through trading pressure rather than through a public announcement, liquidity suffers. The book also confronts many puzzling phenomena in securities markets and uses the analytical tools and empirical methods of market microstructure to understand them. These include issues such as why liquidity changes over time, why large trades move prices up or down, and why these price changes are subsequently reversed, why we see concentration of securities trading, why some traders willingly disclose their intended trades while others hide them, and why we observe temporary deviations from arbitrage prices. (shrink)

The popularity of alliances in business has exploded over the past few years along with an increasing interest in the role of trust in economic transactions. This paper details the nature of alliances and the crucial role played by trust in creating and managing alliances. Evidence of the emergence of trust are further given within the context of alliances established by small and medium-sized Swiss enterprises where both planning and mutual trust constitute essential ingredients.

In the wake of recent attempts at alternate history, this paper suggests several avenues for a pluralistic approach to Charles Darwin and his role in the history of evolutionary theory. We examine in what sense Darwin could be described as a major driver of theoretical change in the history of biology. First, this paper examines how Darwin influenced the future of biological science: not merely by stating the fact of evolution or by bringing evidence for it; but by discovering natural (...) selection, and giving it pre-eminence over any other mechanism for evolution; and also by proposing a masterful and quite unique synthesis of many scientific fields. Contrasting Darwin’s views with those of A.R. Wallace, I conclude that “natural selection” is clearly an original contribution, that it had no forerunners or co-discoverers, and could barely have appeared after Darwin conceived of it. This specificity of Darwin’s contribution is an invitation to be strongly presentist and to adopt only weak counter-factuals. In contrast, there are possible ways to use strong counter-factuals as attempts to “pluralize” the history of biological theory: i.e. imagine new possible avenues for the development of evolutionary biology. The idea that evolution was a theory “in the air” suggests that evolutionary theory could have developed in a world without Darwin, especially if we accept to delete not only “Darwin” but “England”. France and Germany are examined as possible countries where evolutionary ideas would have thrived even with no contribution from the English scientists. Finally, the paper suggests another counter-factual hypothesis: deleting not Darwin and his Origin but the Darwin Industry itself. This may allow us to read the Origin of Species with fresh eyes and to discover Darwin’s life-long interest in variation and its laws, as many of his early readers did. (shrink)

Le premier site naturel de compensation français a été inauguré le 11 mai 2009 sur le site d’un verger abandonné dans la plaine de Crau. Cette opération avait notamment pour objectif d’expérimenter le premier mécanisme d’offre de compensation français via la réhabilitation d’une végétation herbacée permettant le retour des oiseaux steppiques emblématiques de cet espace. Impliqués dans le comité local de pilotage, des écologues ont conseillé les techniques de réhabilitation et expertisé leurs effets sur la biodiversité tout en réalisant des (...) recherches expérimentales pour étendre la restauration à la végétation et à certains groupes d’insectes. Après 7 années de suivis, les résultats montrent que la réhabilitation a bien permis la création d’une végétation favorable au retour de l’avifaune steppique mais le succès des expérimentations de restauration ne peut pas encore être définitivement prédit sur le long terme. Ces résultats soulignent les difficultés scientifiques et techniques de la restauration et limitent donc le mécanisme de compensation à la réhabilitation de certaines composantes ou fonctions. The first French ecological offset area was inaugurated on May 11th 2009 at the site of an abandoned orchard in the Crau plain. One of the objectives of this intervention was to test the first French mitigation bank rehabilitating the herbaceous vegetation in order to encourage the return of steppe birds emblematic of this area. The ecologists involved in the local steering committee proposed rehabilitation techniques and assessed their impact on biodiversity while at the same time carrying out experimental research designed to extend the restoration process to plant communities and some groups of insects. The results of various studies showed that the rehabilitation scheme led to the development of a plant community favorable to the return of steppe birds. However, the long-term results of the restoration experiments cannot be definitively predicted. Thus, these results highlight the scientific and technical difficulties facing the restoration process and hence restrict the compensation mechanism to the rehabilitation of some of their components or functions. (shrink)

This book undertakes a critical survey of art history across Europe, examining the recent conceptual and methodological concerns informing the discipline as well as the political, social and ideological factors that have shaped its development in specific national contexts.

This revised 2nd edition of Engineering Risk Management presents engineering aspects of risk management. After an introduction to potential risks the authors presents management principles, risk diagnostics, analysis and treatments followed by examples of practical implementation in chemistry, physics and emerging technologies such as nanoparticles.

This study analysed mountain guides’ representations of environmental responsibility and explored the paradox that these professionals face: using nature as a source of income while trying to preserve it. The study was mainly guided by the philosophical literature on this topic and made use of the concepts of sustainable development and nature. This exploratory work therefore contributes to the new field of environmental social psychology. Semi-structured interviews were conducted and the qualitative analysis showed that mountain guides have a very sensitive (...) and contemplative approach to moral aspects of our relationship with nature, which they try to transmit to their clients. They believe that this is a way to educate people about sustainable development, but this term emerged as quite vague for them, and they expressed the opinion that it might hide other concerns, such as to make translating it into moral conduct a difficult matter and to compromise their identity as moral actors. (shrink)

In this interview, Anne Fagot-Largeault discusses with Thierry Bardini her recollections of the life and work of French philosopher Gilbert Simondon. The discussion covers Simondon’s theory of individuation and considers its influences on contemporary thinkers such as Gilles Deleuze and François Laruelle. Fagot-Largeault situates Simondon’s thinking within the broader context of 20th-century biological research and the development of life sciences. Informed by her personal association and experiences working with Simondon, her reminiscences shed light on the unique character of Simondon (...) as a person and as a thinker. (shrink)