organization:princeton university

Mayer, Sandberg, Slaughter: Driving Change, at a Cost - Whitney Johnson and Lisa Joy Rosner - Harvard Business Review
http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2013/04/mayer_sandberg_slaughter_drivi.html

Slaughter [Département d’Etat], Sandberg [Facebook] and Mayer [ex-Google; Yahoo] are at different stages of their careers and lives, and have very different ideas around a woman’s relationship to work and home. It’s not despite, but because of, these different stances that they are moving the conversation forward. And so often when someone is talking about one of the three on social media, at least one or both of the other are mentioned.

#femmes #féminisme ? A propos du débat “Have it all” aux Etats-unis autour des “executive women”, lancé par Slaughter.

Why Women Still Can’t Have It All http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/07/why-women-still-cant-have-it-all/309020/?single_page=true

The Rise of Executive Feminism
http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2013/03/the_rise_of_executive_feminism.html

Energy policy: Has ‘ #peak_oil ’ gone the way of the Flat Earth Society? — 03/22/2013 — www.eenews.net
http://www.eenews.net/public/energywire/2013/03/22/1

The theory was straightforward and seemed to hold with common sense: One day soon, the Earth would hit its halfway point of global oil production — its “peak” — and thereafter, it would see a steady decline. Those behind the concept called it “peak oil.”

http://www.eenews.net/assets/2013/03/22/photo_ew_01.png

(...) There’s one big problem: Those behind the theory appear to have been dead wrong, at least in terms of when the peak would hit, having not anticipated the rapid shift in technology that led to exploding oil and natural gas production in new plays and areas long since dismissed as dried up.

#énergie #pétrole

Zomia, là où l’État n’est pas - La Vie des idées
http://www.laviedesidees.fr/Zomia-la-ou-l-Etat-n-est-pas.html

Pendant deux millénaires, les hautes terres de la Zomia furent, selon James Scott, une zone-refuge pour les populations d’Asie du Sud-Est. Haut lieu de la résistance à l’État, elles seraient le miroir de notre civilisation destructrice et sûre d’elle-même. Une histoire anarchiste qui fascine et intrigue.

http://www.laviedesidees.fr/local/cache-vignettes/L200xH314/arton2238-04ee7.jpg
#anarchisme #résistance #démocratie #Asie #utopie

De l’imaginaire postsoviétique et de la colonialité globale : une perspective genrée - Terra

signalé par @cdb_77

http://www.reseau-terra.eu/article1224.html

Madina Tlostanova
De l’imaginaire postsoviétique et de la colonialité globale : une perspective genrée

Madina Tlostanova est Universitaire a Moscou, travaillant par le biais de l’Option décoloniale sur l’Asie Centrale (post)sovietique http://www.transmediale.de/node/980
(...) madina.tlostanova@gmail.com

Pendant les dernières quelques années, des chercheurs aussi bien en occident que dans le monde post-soviétique ont exprimé un intérêt incontestable en la reconceptualisation de l’héritage post-socialiste à partir de nombreuses positions y compris post-marxistes ou post-coloniales. Cependant, il n’y a pas de dialogue significatif entre la théorie postcoloniale et les discours et expériences post-communistes. Le but de cet article est de faire interagir les deux.

#ex-urss #homo-soviéticus

Using Memory Errors to Attack a Virtual Machine, de Sudhakar Govindavajhala et Andrew W. Appel (Princeton University)

Excellente recherche en #sécurité sur une machine virtuelle #Java. Les auteurs sont partis du fait qu’il y a toujours des erreurs dans le matériel (un simple rayon cosmique passant à travers la machine suffit) et que ces erreurs permettent dans certains cas de court-circuiter des mécanismes de sécurité. Par exemple, en Java, un changement d’un bit peut suffire à changer le type d’un objet et donc à permettre des opérations qui seraient normalement interdites. Cela ouvre la voie à des attaques où l’attaquant écrit un programme erroné, le fait exécuter par la machine et, dans un cas de temps en temps, réussit grâce à une erreur matérielle. Il faut être patient mais la théorie et la pratique (cf. l’article) montrent que cela marche.

Pour Java, il y a deux exploitations possibles, l’une sur une machine qu’on ne contrôle pas, par exemple un navigateur Web distant (on crée une applet, on encourage des tas de gens à l’exécuter et un certain pourcentage d’entre eux vont exécuter le code malveillant, par malchance) et l’autre sur une machine qu’on contrôle (par exemple une smartcard) ce qui est plus facile, il suffit de la chauffer pour augmenter le pourcentage d’erreurs, accélerant ainsi nettement l’attaque.

http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~sudhakar/papers/memerr.pdf

Une liberté anxiogène - La Vie des idées
http://www.laviedesidees.fr/Une-liberte-anxiogene.html

Près de deux décennies après la fin de l’apartheid, l’Afrique du Sud continue d’être marquée par une très forte ségrégation raciale. Enquêtant sur les Indiens d’Afrique du Sud, Thomas Blom explique pourquoi le maintien de frontières strictes entre les groupes constitue un élément incontournable du processus de construction identitaire de la période postapartheid.

Les Militants du Tea Party ne jouent pas seuls au bowling - La Vie des idées
http://www.laviedesidees.fr/Les-Militants-du-Tea-Party-ne.html

Fées, sorcières et baba yagas - La Vie des idées
http://www.laviedesidees.fr/Fees-sorcieres-et-baba-yagas.html

Qui croit encore aux fées au XXIe siècle ? Tout le monde apparemment… Comme les ogres, sorcières et magiciens, elles sont encore bien présentes dans les productions artistiques contemporaines, qu’elles soient destinées aux enfants ou aux adultes. Traducteur et éditeur de collections de contes de fées et de contes populaires, Jack Zipes explore ces figures dans The Irresistible Fairy Tale. The Cultural and Social History of a Genre.

Les Limites du Pouvoir Présidentiel - La Vie des idées
http://www.laviedesidees.fr/Les-Limites-du-Pouvoir.html

Lorsque Barack Obama a accédé à la présidence en janvier 2009, une majorité d’Américains a vu en lui un président de rupture. Mais l’ambition progressiste du président s’est rapidement heurtée à l’indifférence, voire l’hostilité, de l’électorat et d’une partie de la classe politique. Comment se fait-il qu’un président aussi intelligent ait eu autant de mal à faire passer son message ?

Words by the Millions, Sorted by Software - NYTimes
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/25/business/words-by-the-millions-sorted-by-software.html

computers to sift through the digital pages of books and articles and categorize the contents by subject, even when that subject isn’t stated explicitly.

#documentation #informatique #automatisation

You and Your Research
http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html

At a seminar in the Bell Communications Research Colloquia Series, Dr. Richard W. Hamming, a Professor at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California and a retired Bell Labs scientist, gave a very interesting and stimulating talk, `You and Your Research’ [...] This talk centered on Hamming’s observations and research on the question ``Why do so few scientists make significant contributions and so many are forgotten in the long run?’’ From his more than forty years of experience, thirty of which were at Bell Laboratories, he has made a number of direct observations, asked very pointed questions of scientists about what, how, and why they did things, studied the lives of great scientists and great contributions, and has done introspection and studied theories of creativity. The talk is about what he has learned in terms of the properties of the individual scientists, their abilities, traits, working habits, attitudes, and philosophy.

#science #recherche #psychologie

NaturalNode/natural
https://github.com/NaturalNode/natural

general natural language facilities for node

Je vous livre une petite traduction de ce commentaire d’Angry Arab sur les appels à armer l’opposition syrienne :
http://angryarab.blogspot.com/2012/02/western-academics-as-military-experts.html

Je veux dire : voici ce qui est sinistre dans ces appels à armer des groupes (dont certain sont des Ben Ledenites même selon les États-Unis) : pouvez-vous imaginer ces mêmes « experts » débattant dans les pages du New York Times des façons d’armer les groupes de résistants palestiniens pendant la longue succession de guerres d’agression et de massacres israéliens ? Est-ce qu’un seul d’entre eux oserait simplement suggérer que les Palestiniens soient armés de pierres et de cailloux ? Est-ce qu’ils oseraient rien que ça ? Posez la question à ceux qui débattent de telles options. Est-ce qu’ils oseraient débattre des options pour armer la résistance palestinienne ?

S. Lochlann Jain
http://www.stanford.edu/dept/anthropology/cgi-bin/web/?q=node/99

the ways in which stories get told about injuries, how they are thought to be caused, and how that matters. Figuring out the political and social significance of these stories has led to the study of law, product design, medical error, and histories of engineering, regulation, corporations, and advertising.

#santé #anthropologie #cancer

j’ai beaucoup aimé ce que j’ai lu :

2010 “Be Prepared,” in Jonathan Metzl and Anna Kirkland (eds.), Against Health, NYU Press.

2007 «Cancer Butch.» Cultural Anthropology, vol. 22(4): 501-538.

Une étude confirme un clivage croissant entre américains riches et pauvres et bizarrement les politiciens sont surtout à l’écoute des premiers

By allowing voters to choose among candidates with competing policy orientations and by providing incentives for incumbents to shape policy in the direction the public desires, elections are thought to provide the foundation that links government policy to the preferences of the governed. In this article I examine the extent to which the preference/policy link is biased toward the preferences of high-income Americans. Using an original data set of almost two thousand survey questions on proposed policy changes between 1981 and 2002, I find a moderately strong relationship between what the public wants and what the government does, albeit with a strong bias toward the status quo. But I also find that when Americans with different income levels differ in their policy preferences, actual policy outcomes strongly reflect the preferences of the most affluent but bear virtually no relationship to the preferences of poor or middle-income Americans. The vast discrepancy I find in government responsiveness to citizens with different incomes stands in stark contrast to the ideal of political equality that Americans hold dear. Although perfect political equality is an unrealistic goal, representational biases of this magnitude call into question the very democratic character of our society.

consistency versus influence
Raw correspondence between majority preferences and policy outcomes is one way to assess the relationship between preferences and policies. But consistency is a fairly crude measure that does not take into account the degree to which policy outcomes are influenced by the public’s preferences. For example, a policy change opposed by 51 percent of the public and one opposed by 99 percent of the public would both be inconsistent with public preferences, but the latter clearly represents a greater failure of policy to reflect public preferences.

More important for my purposes, raw consistency is an inappropriate measure to use in comparing democratic responsiveness across population groups. Although 59 percent of the policy changes proposed in these survey questions received majority support (among respondents expressing a preference), only 32 percent of the proposed changes actually took place (within the four-year coding window, at least).4 Consequently, if the majority of population group X prefers policy change less often than population group Y, group X will ceteris paribus have higher consistency scores. But influence over policy outcomes is reflected in the degree to which policy change is more or less likely to occur depending on whether or not members of that group support it. A group that favors only 10 percent of proposed policy changes will inevitably have a high consistency score, but if the probability of a change being implemented bears no relationship to the group’s preferences, the group cannot be said to have influence over policy outcomes. The weakness of raw consistency as a measure of policy influence is illustrated with a hypothetical example in the appendix.

...

If government policy is uniquely responsive to the preferences of affluent Americans, as the evidence above suggests, by what mechanisms do the affluent exert their influence? My data are not well suited to answering this question, and space constraints preclude even an adequate account of the possible mechanisms at work. But the most obvious source of influence over policy that distinguishes high-income Americans is money and the willingness to donate to parties, candidates, and interest organizations. For example, a study of donations to congressional candidates in 1996 finds that four-fifths of donors who gave $200 or more had incomes in the top 10 percent of all Americans (Green et al. 1998).8 Since not only the propensity to donate but also the size of donations increase with income level, this figure understates—probably to a very large degree—the extent to which political donations come from the most affluent Americans. Of course, money is not the only valued commodity in politics. Groups that can mobilize large numbers of volunteers (like labor and religious organizations) may exert a policy influence that competes with that of the affluent, at least on particular issues at particular points in time. In future research I hope to identify the issues and political conditions that are most and least conducive to the influence of the wealthy over government policy.

There has never been a democratic society in which citizens’ influence over government policy was unrelated to their financial resources. In this sense, the difference between democracy and plutocracy is one of degree. But by this same token, a government that is democratic in form but is in practice only responsive to its most affluent citizens is a democracy in name only.

Most middle-income Americans think that public officials do not care much about the preferences of “people like me.”9 Sadly, the results presented above suggest they may be right. Whether or not elected officials and other decision makers “care” about middle-class Americans, influence over actual policy outcomes appears to be reserved almost exclusively for those at the top of the income distribution.

http://poq.oxfordjournals.org/content/69/5/778.full

Le «peuple inventé» de Gingrich est, largement, une lubie tirée de From Time Immemorial. Noam Chomsky a raconté comment ce livre a été dénoncé par Normal Finkelstein comme un faux, une escroquerie.
The Fate of an Honest Intellectual, by Noam Chomsky (Excerpted from Understanding Power)
http://www.chomsky.info/books/power01.htm

I’ll tell you another, last case—and there are many others like this. Here’s a story which is really tragic. How many of you know about Joan Peters, the book by Joan Peters? There was this best-seller a few years ago [in 1984], it went through about ten printings, by a woman named Joan Peters—or at least, signed by Joan Peters—called From Time Immemorial. It was a big scholarly-looking book with lots of footnotes, which purported to show that the Palestinians were all recent immigrants [i.e. to the Jewish-settled areas of the former Palestine, during the British mandate years of 1920 to 1948]. And it was very popular—it got literally hundreds of rave reviews, and no negative reviews: the Washington Post, the New York Times, everybody was just raving about it. Here was this book which proved that there were really no Palestinians! Of course, the implicit message was, if Israel kicks them all out there’s no moral issue, because they’re just recent immigrants who came in because the Jews had built up the country. And there was all kinds of demographic analysis in it, and a big professor of demography at the University of Chicago [Philip M. Hauser] authenticated it. That was the big intellectual hit for that year: Saul Bellow, Barbara Tuchman, everybody was talking about it as the greatest thing since chocolate cake.Well, one graduate student at Princeton, a guy named Norman Finkelstein, started reading through the book. He was interested in the history of Zionism, and as he read the book he was kind of surprised by some of the things it said. He’s a very careful student, and he started checking the references—and it turned out that the whole thing was a hoax, it was completely faked: probably it had been put together by some intelligence agency or something like that. Well, Finkelstein wrote up a short paper of just preliminary findings, it was about twenty-five pages or so, and he sent it around to I think thirty people who were interested in the topic, scholars in the field and so on, saying: “Here’s what I’ve found in this book, do you think it’s worth pursuing?”

2012 - The ALAN TURING YEAR
http://www.mathcomp.leeds.ac.uk/turing2012/give-page.php?13

Endettez-vous ! Le « rêve américain » et le crédit à la consommation (La Vie des idées)
http://www.laviedesidees.fr/Endettez-vous.html

La crise que les États-Unis traversent est d’autant plus grave que ses racines sont anciennes : l’historien Louis Hyman montre comment l’endettement s’est logé au cœur du capitalisme américain au cours du XXe siècle. Plus qu’un système économique, c’est un véritable modèle de société qui s’est effondré avec la chute des subprimes. (...) Source : La Vie des idées

Attica Is All of Us : Cornel West on 40th Anniversary of Attica Prison Rebellion (Relevé sur le net)
http://www.democracynow.org/2011/9/12/attica_is_all_of_us_cornel

This week marks the 40th anniversary of another 9/11 tragedy: the Attica prison rebellion. On September 9, 1971, prisoners took over much of state prison in Attica, New York, to protest conditions at the maximum security prison. Then Governor Nelson Rockefeller ordered state police to storm the facility on the morning of September 13. Troopers shot indiscriminately more than 2,000 rounds of ammunition, killing 39 male prisoners and guards. After the shooting stopped, police beat and tortured scores of more prisoners, many of whom were seriously wounded but were initially denied medical care. After a quarter century of legal struggles, the state of New York would eventually award the surviving prisoners of Attica $12 million in damages. We play an excerpt from a September 9 commemoration at Riverside Church in New York City, “Attica Is All of Us,” featuring Cornel West, professor of religion and African American studies at Princeton University and the author of numerous books on race. “So, 40 years later, we come back to commemorate this struggle against the historical backdrop of a people who have been so terrorized and traumatized and stigmatized that we have been taught to be scared, intimidated, always afraid, distrustful of one another, and disrespectful of one another,” West says. “But the Attica rebellion was a countermove in that direction.” (...)

The economics of good looks: The line of beauty | The Economist
http://www.economist.com/node/21526782

the importance of beauty in the labour market is far more pervasive than one might think

#économie #libido #discrimination

La valeur #égalité - La Vie des idées
►http://www.laviedesidees.fr/La-valeur-egalite.html

Dans la seconde partie de l’ouvrage, Cohen entreprend de déconstruire le mythe selon lequel le droit de propriété est une liberté individuelle qui serait restreinte chaque fois que l’État institue une fiscalité à vocation redistributive ou limite d’une manière ou d’une autre l’étendue du droit que les propriétaires ont d’user de ce qui leur appartient comme ils l’entendent ou d’en tirer tous les revenus qu’ils sont capables d’en extraire sur le marché. L’institution et la garantie publique du droit de propriété sont en effet des formes de contrainte par l’État qui limitent la liberté d’action des non-propriétaires en sorte qu’une restriction du droit de propriété n’est pas une limitation de la liberté mais une redistribution de cette liberté et du pouvoir de contrainte.

Grâce à certaines de ces restrictions, une part de #liberté additionnelle est conférée aux non propriétaires par la simple limitation du pouvoir de contrainte que la propriété peut exercer sur eux. Dès lors la question est de savoir si une telle redistribution est légitime : si elle prive les propriétaires de la possibilité de faire ce qu’ils ont le droit de faire, elle ne l’est pas ; en revanche, si elle aboutit à une situation dans laquelle les non-propriétaires ont une possibilité supplémentaire de faire ce qu’ils ont le droit de faire, ou s’ils sont moins contraints de ne pas faire ce qu’ils ont le droit de faire, une telle redistribution est parfaitement légitime. La question de la liberté ne porte donc pas sur la latitude d’action (qui, selon l’orthodoxe libertarienne, ne pourrait être restreinte que si cela est nécessaire pour organiser la compossibilité des libertés) mais sur ce qu’on a le droit de faire. Si, par exemple, chacun a le droit de mener une existence décente, la restriction du droit de licenciement qui prive les employés licenciés d’un accès à une existence de ce genre n’est pas une limitation de la liberté des employeurs. Inversement, si chacun a le droit de tirer de ce qui lui appartient le revenu maximal que le marché peut lui offrir, la limitation du droit de licenciement est une entrave à la liberté puisqu’elle contraint l’employeur à ne pas agir comme il devrait avoir le droit de le faire.

La valeur #égalité

Dans la seconde partie de l’ouvrage, Cohen entreprend de déconstruire le mythe selon lequel le droit de propriété est une liberté individuelle qui serait restreinte chaque fois que l’État institue une fiscalité à vocation redistributive ou limite d’une manière ou d’une autre l’étendue du droit que les propriétaires ont d’user de ce qui leur appartient comme ils l’entendent ou d’en tirer tous les revenus qu’ils sont capables d’en extraire sur le marché. L’institution et la garantie publique du droit de propriété sont en effet des formes de contrainte par l’État qui limitent la liberté d’action des non-propriétaires en sorte qu’une restriction du droit de propriété n’est pas une limitation de la liberté mais une redistribution de cette liberté et du pouvoir de contrainte.

- La Vie des idées
►http://www.laviedesidees.fr/La-valeur-egalite.html

Anthrax Redux : Did the Feds Nab the Wrong Guy ? | Magazine
http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/03/ff_anthrax_fbi/all/1

plein de détails de laboratoire à propos de l’enquête sur les attaques au bacille du charbon en octobre 2001.

[Bruce] Ivins measured the concentration of the sample. It came out to a trillion spores per gram—three orders of magnitude more dense than anything the USAMRIID researchers had ever grown. “These are not ‘garage’ spores,” Ivins later wrote in an analysis. “Professional manufacturing techniques were used.”

http://stag.wired.com/magazine/wp-content/images/19-04/ff_anthrax_fbi3b_f.jpg
#bioterrorisme #etats-unis #recherche #bio-armement

https://qed.princeton.edu/index.php/MG

The Mapping Globalization website is intended for everyone interested in globalization. The main goal of the website is to make empirical work on globalization as widely accessible as possible.

The website offers an expanding set of resources for students, instructors, and researchers, and provides a forum for empirical research on globalization. We are especially interested in raw data and in the visualization of such data, including maps and animations.

We have adopted a comprehensive definition of globalization that is simply based on geographically expanding networks of transactions, where transactions may be of any type, and may have occurred at any time. This naturally supports a strongly historical perspective that includes trade, migration, transportation, communication, empires.

Debating #BDS At #Princeton
http://maxblumenthal.com/2010/12/debating-bds-at-princeton

The presentation by Daniel May of #J_Street was the most significant of the evening, simply because it revealed how far J Street is willing to go to stop BDS. I have nothing personal against May. In fact, I know him and like him a lot. He is a decent, enormously talented guy. But he is also an employee of J Street and that means that he had to recite the talking points that Jeremy Ben-Ami and his inner circle had crafted for him based on their own focus groups and polling.

Tragically, May’s case — and by extension, J Street’s case — against BDS boiled down to the Bible and the Holocaust: BDS undermines the 2000-year-old dream that Jews supposedly have of “returning to Israel,” he said, and it denies the persecution Jews have suffered “everywhere they went,” especially in Europe during the Holocaust. Aside from a few token nods May made to the Palestinian popular struggle (which ironically is linked the BDS movement), his case against BDS seemed contrived to trigger the most base emotional responses from Jewish-Americans, especially those who had been subjected to sustained Zionist conditioning. What that says about J Street’s long term political strategy and the case against BDS will be the subject of a much longer piece I plan to post in the coming days.