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No full textInternational audienceMany popular internet platforms use so-called collaborative filtering systems to give personalized recommendations to their users, based on other users who provided similar ratings for some items. We propose a novel approach to such recommendation systems by viewing a recommendation as a way to extend an agent's expressed preferences, which are typically incomplete, through some aggregate of other agents' expressed preferences. These extension and aggregation requirements are expressed by an Acceptance and a Pareto principle, respectively. We characterize the recommendation systems satisfying these two principles and contrast them with collaborative filtering systems, which typically violate the Pareto principle
Second-order homogenization of periodic Schrödinger operators with highly oscillating potentials
No full textInternational audienceWe consider the homogenization at second-order in of -periodic Schrödinger operators with rapidly oscillating potentials of the form on , where is a Bravais lattice of , is -periodic, is -periodic, and . We treat both the linear equation with fixed right-hand side and the eigenvalue problem, as well as the case of physical observables such as the integrated density of states. We illustrate numerically that these corrections to the homogenized solution can significantly improve the first-order ones, even when is not small
Tensions and Proximities in teaching-learning activities: Case study of a teacher’s implementation of tablet-based lessons
No full textInternational audienc
Searching for a Master Plan: An Overview of the Art of Living Foundation and an Excursion into Its Social Initiatives
No full textThe Art of Living Foundation is a religious NGO that began in India in 1981 and has grown a wide international following since. The organization offers yogic breathing courses and conducts a number of social initiatives in India and elsewhere. Despite the considerable size of the Art of Living Foundation, this religious NGO remains elusive in academic literature. Throughout this thesis, I reveal what can be learned about the organization according to previous research, as well as my own three months of field work in Delhi and Bangalore. While trying to paint an overall picture of the Art of Living Foundation, it becomes clear that it resembles a network more than a singular entity. In addition to this conclusion, I explore the contradictions between spirituality, social responsibility, and private profit, and how participants of the Art of Living Foundation seek to negate these conflicts both philosophically and practically throughout Art of Living courses and social initiatives
Bodies, “Love” and Kidneys: The Regulation of Living Donor Donation in India and its Social Repercussions
No full textOrgan transplantation touches upon existential questions of life and death, the self and the other, and the gift and the commodity. It uniquely challenges social norms and ideas and necessitates a close analysis of cultural concepts and differences. In India, the regulation of organ donation has led to social repercussions and consequences that highlight Indian approaches to these existential questions of life, death, bodies, and social relations.
The concept of brain death was introduced into the Indian legal and medical systems in 1994 with the Transplantation of Human Organs Act (THOA, 1994). The major aims of THOA were the regulation of living donor donations to prevent illegal markets and to increase deceased donations as a solution for organ scarcity.
Organ donations, while usually beneficial to the individuals who receive them, raise several ethical concerns about social justice and equality, such as where organs come from and to whom the organs should be given, as well as the concept of distributive justice. It also highlights how biomedical technologies are adapted and understood differently in diverse cultural settings, especially those that touch upon sensitive and significant topics such as death and body ownership. This thesis will analyze how THOA and its regulations pertaining to human organs have changed and shaped Indian societal norms. It will analyze how Hindu concepts of death relate and connect to transplantation and show attempts at reconciliation and integration of transplantation into Hindu belief, but also friction between the understanding of death as a process and the instantaneous “declaration” of brain death. The complexities of organ transplantation in India extend to the ethical dimension of gendered donations, in which women are far more often the donors than the recipients, but also to the logistical and bureaucratic shortcomings of the Indian medical system
Meditation in Prison: Rehabilitating Prisoners from India to Bangladesh
No full textPrisoner rehabilitation plays an essential role in the process of reforming the correctional systems and surrounding societies in order to respect inmates’ basic needs and rights and to reduce crime. This study focuses on the psychospiritual aspects of prisoner rehabilitation. It investigates the reasons and modalities, difficulties and developments regarding the introduction of meditation to Bangladeshi prisons, influenced by the Indian context. By combining literature, data analysis, fieldwork experience, and anthropological discussion, this research explores different understandings of meditation in prison, ranging from a form of self-discipline to a therapy for mental healing from the illness of crime. Many local NGOs promote different reform measures with the aim of developing prisoners’ awareness of themselves, of their individual and social skills, as wells as of laws, rights and health issues. Lack of awareness turns out to be a common element understood as a cause of criminality. Therefore, an increased awareness and a mindset change of people inside and outside the prisons would help develop the process of self-rehabilitation and other-acceptance by positively affecting individual and social health. Analyzing and sharing evolving perceptions of meditation in prison might contribute to sensitize local authorities and organizations towards innovative policies and collaborations to reduce crime and recidivism, to improve prisoners’ living conditions, and to raise awareness
Topological defects in lattice models and affine Temperley-Lieb algebra
No full textInternational audienceThis paper is the first in a series where we attempt to define defects in critical lattice models that give rise to conformal field theory topological defects in the continuum limit. We focus mostly on models based on the Temperley-Lieb algebra, with future applications to restricted solid-on-solid (also called anyonic chains) models, as well as non-unitary models like percolation or self-avoiding walks. Our approach is essentially algebraic and focusses on the defects from two points of view: the "crossed channel" where the defect is seen as an operator acting on the Hilbert space of the models, and the "direct channel" where it corresponds to a modification of the basic Hamiltonian with some sort of impurity. Algebraic characterizations and constructions are proposed in both points of view. In the crossed channel, this leads us to new results about the center of the affine Temperley-Lieb algebra; in particular we find there a special basis with non-negative integer structure constants that are interpreted as fusion rules of defects. In the direct channel, meanwhile, this leads to the introduction of fusion products and fusion quotients, with interesting algebraic properties that allow to describe representations content of the lattice model with a defect, and to describe its spectrum
Extitutional Theory: Modeling Structured Social Dynamics Beyond Institutions
No full textInternational audienceInteraction among individuals underlies all social processes. Underpinning the emergence of complexsocial organisations is the ability for individuals to influence one another, either directly, through peerpressure and social reinforcement, or indirectly, through the establishment of larger social structures,such as communities, families, companies, governments, and many other types of institutions. Severaltheoretical frameworks have been developed in a variety of disciplines to understand how individualsorganise themselves into these social structures and how these social structures in turn contribute toshaping individual attitudes, infrastructures, tools, behaviours, ideas and beliefs. The concept ofinstitutions is particularly central to most theoretical frameworks in the field of organisational andgovernance theory. While some of these frameworks focus on the structural properties of social groupsthat support or reinforce intended social interactions, others focus on social environments and culturalphenomena as a means to investigate how culture affects social dynamics and individual practices in thecontext of interactive and relational social structures. Yet, while most of these frameworks do recognizethe interplay that subsists between the structural elements and the cultural components of these socialgroups, they often assimilate both of these components into a monolithic framework ofanalysis—thereby limiting the opportunity to distinguish between the different logics that animate eachof these components. In this paper, we introduce an integrated theoretical framework to analyse theinterplay between formalized social structures composed of codified roles and rules which are commonlydescribed as “institutions'', and the more latent interpersonal relationships that shape and animate theseinstitutions—we introduce the notion of “extitutions'' to describe the latter. The main contribution ofthis paper is to provide an ontological framework to characterize the reciprocal interactions between theextitutional and institutional aspects of social groups, explicitly disentangling their respective influencesin order to better comprehend the operations and dynamic evolution of these groups. The paper buildsupon neo-structural sociology to elaborate a comprehensive framework of analysis for advancing theformalisation of both institutional and extitutional dynamics and how they affect or influence each otherover time from a multi-faceted and multi-layered network standpoint
