Un soir de juin, dans le paisible village de Champfort, Nicole Gachet, accompagnatrice sociale à l’association Avenir de Soi, met fin à ses jours dans des conditions aussi atroces qu’étranges, sous les yeux de son conjoint. Frappée par un mal que personne n’a su diagnostiquer, elle emporte le secret de sa chute avec sa disparition. Huit ans plus tard, au lendemain de la Toussaint, le lieutenant de Gendarmerie André Gavois et son adjointe Chloé Moquet apprennent que la sépulture de Nicole Gachet a été profanée. Les soupçons se posent tout d’abord sur la petite délinquance du coin mais le caractère monstrueux et quasi-mystique de la profanation ouvre une piste autrement plus complexe et laisse deviner les contours d’une secte qui installerait insidieusement son influence dans la région. Pierre-Olivier Lacroix est né en 1974 à Dijon. Après avoir été formateur dans le secteur social, il exerce aujourd’hui le métier de libraire au sein d’une grande enseigne. Karmas est son troisième roman, le premier publié aux éditions Le mot et le reste.
The extraordinary rags-to-riches tale of Olivier Baussan and the roadside soap stand that became L’Occitane, one of the world’s most successful purveyors of natural fragrances. Founded in 1976 by Olivier Baussan, the now world-renowned fragrance company L’Occitane, “a woman of Provence” in Old French, was inspired by the essences of lavender and honeysuckle, rosemary, sage, and thyme indigenous to his childhood home in the south of France. In fact, it had been since the mid-1950s that Provence had been working its magic on the Baussan family, who left their urban life for a farm in Ganagobie when their son Olivier was only six months old. Blessed with a wonderfully acute sense of smell, Olivier eventually grew up to realize that he’d been born to distill and disseminate the many and varied perfumes of the region. His epiphany came when, at twenty-two, he found an abandoned still on the side of the road and bought it for a song. Using the countryside’s natural ingredients, he began manufacturing shampoos, colognes, bath essences, and soaps. Starting with five employees—including Olivier’s wife and mother-in-law—his fledgling company grew into a major business. Today, with hundreds of stores and thousands of employees worldwide, L’Occitane ranks as one of the world’s most successful businesses—encapsulating a bit of paradise.
Developing applications for the Android mobile operating system can seem daunting, particularly if it requires learning a new programming language: Kotlin, now Androidâ??s officialdevelopment language. With this practical book, Android developers will learn how to make the transition from Java to Kotlin, including how Kotlin provides a true advantage for gaining control over asynchronous computations. Authors Pierre-Olivier Laurence, Amanda Hinchman-Dominguez, G. Blake Meike, and Mike Dunn explore implementations of the most common tasks in native Android development, and show you how Kotlin can help you solve concurrency problems. With a focus on structured concurrency, a new asynchronous programming paradigm, this book will guide you through one of Kotlin's most powerful constructs, coroutines. Learn about Kotlin essentials and the Kotlin Collections Framework Explore Android fundamentals: the operating system and the application container and its components Learn about thread safety and how to handle concurrency Write sequential, asynchronous work at a low cost Examine structured concurrency with coroutines, and learn how channels make coroutines communicate Learn how to use flows for asynchronous data processing Understand performance considerations using Android profiling tools Use performance optimizations to trim resource consumption
Epistemology, Fieldwork, and Anthropology provides a systematic examination of the empirical foundations of interpretations and grounded theories in anthropology. Olivier de Sardan explores the nature of the links between observed reality and the data produced during fieldwork, and between the data gathered and final interpretative statements. Olivier de Sardan's research asks how anthropologists develop a 'policy of fieldwork', what the advantages and limits of observation are, and if the dangers of over-interpretation and scientific ideologies be minimized. Exploring the space between epistemology and methodology, the book critically juxtaposes Anglo and Francophone writings about fieldwork, plausible interpretations, emicity, reflexivity, comparison, and scientific rigor.
This didactic book presents the main elements of acoustics, aeroacoustics and vibrations. Illustrated with numerous concrete examples linked to solid and fluid continua, Acoustics, Aeroacoustics and Vibrations proposes a selection of applications encountered in the three fields, whether in room acoustics, transport, energy production systems or environmental problems. Theoretical approaches enable us to analyze the different processes in play. Typical results, mostly from numerical simulations, are used to illustrate the main phenomena (fluid acoustics, radiation, diffraction, vibroacoustics, etc.).
This report presents a set of concrete proposals of increasing ambition for the reform of the international monetary system. The proposals aim at improving the international provision of liquidity in order to limit the effects of individual and systemic crises and decrease their frequency. The recommendations outlined in this report include: / Develop alternatives to US Treasuries as the dominant reserve asset, including the issuance of mutually guaranteed European bonds and (in the more distant future) the development of a yuan bond market. / Make permanent the temporary swap agreements that were put in place between central banks during the crisis. Establish a starshaped structure of swap lines centred on the IMF. / Strengthen and expand existing IMF liquidity facilities. On the funding side, expand the IMF's existing financing mechanisms and allow the IMF to borrow directly on the markets. / Establish a foreign exchange reserve pooling mechanism with the IMF, providing participating countries with access to additional liquidity and, incidentally, allowing reserves to be recycled into productive investments.To limit moral hazard, the report proposes the setting up of specific surveillance indicators to monitor international funding risks associated with increased insurance provision. The report discusses the role of the special drawing rights (SDRs) and the prospects for turning this unit of account into a true international currency, arguing that it would not solve the fundamental problems of the international monetary system. The report also reviews the conditions under which emerging market economies may use temporary capital controls to counteract excessive and volatile capital flows. The potential for negative externalities requires mutual monitoring and international cooperation in terms of financial regulation and suggests that the mandate of the IMF should be extended to the financial account.
Most trade is invoiced in very few currencies. Despite this, the Mundell-Fleming benchmark and its variants focus on pricing in the producer’s currency or in local currency. We model instead a ‘dominant currency paradigm’ for small open economies characterized by three features: pricing in a dominant currency; pricing complementarities, and imported input use in production. Under this paradigm: (a) the terms-of-trade is stable; (b) dominant currency exchange rate pass-through into export and import prices is high regardless of destination or origin of goods; (c) exchange rate pass-through of non-dominant currencies is small; (d) expenditure switching occurs mostly via imports, driven by the dollar exchange rate while exports respond weakly, if at all; (e) strengthening of the dominant currency relative to non-dominant ones can negatively impact global trade; (f) optimal monetary policy targets deviations from the law of one price arising from dominant currency fluctuations, in addition to the inflation and output gap. Using data from Colombia we document strong support for the dominant currency paradigm.
The surge in energy prices in 2022 has been a defining factor behind the increase in euro area inflation. We assess the impact of “unconventional fiscal policy,” defined as the set of fiscal measures, possibly expansionary, motivated by a desire to mute the effects of the increase in energy prices and to lower inflation. Overall, we find that these unconventional measures reduced euro area inflation by 1 to 2 percentage points in 2022 and may avoid an undershoot later on. When nonlinearities in the Phillips curve are taken into account, the net effect is to reduce inflation by about 0.5 percentage points in 2021-24, and keep it nearer to its target. About one-third to one-half of the reduction in 2022 reflects the direct effects of the measures on headline inflation, with much of the remainder reflecting the lower pass-through to core inflation. The fiscal measures were deficit-financed but had limited effects on raising inflation by stimulating demand and instead modestly helped to stabilize longer-term inflation expectations. Looking ahead, the prospective decline in inflation in the euro area is partly due to fortunate circumstances, with energy prices falling from their 2022 peaks and their pass-through effects fading, and with less economic overheating than in economies such as the United States. Implementing similar measures in the face of a more persistent increase in energy prices, or in a more overheated economy, would have caused a more persistent rise in core inflation.
Daily life in Africa is governed by the 'petty' corruption of public officials in services such as health, transport, or the judicial system. This remarkable study of everyday corruption in three African countries investigates the reasons for its extraordinary prevalence. The authors construct an illuminating analytical framework around the various forms of corruption, the corruptive strategies public officials resort to, and how these forms and strategies have become embedded in daily administrative practices. They investigate the roots of the system in the growing inability of weakened states in Africa to either reward their employees adequately or to deliver expected services. They conclude that corruption in Africa today is qualitatively different from other parts of the world in its pervasiveness, its legitimations, and its huge impact on the nature of the state.
Despite a formal ‘no-bailout clause,’ we estimate significant net present value transfers from the European Union to Cyprus, Greece, Ireland, Portugal, and Spain, ranging from roughly 0.5% (Ireland) to a whopping 43% (Greece) of 2010 output during the Eurozone crisis. We propose a model to analyze and understand bailouts in a monetary union, and the large observed differences across countries. We characterize bailout size and likelihood as a function of the economic fundamentals (economic activity, debt-to-gdp ratio, default costs). Our model embeds a ‘Southern view’ of the crisis (transfers did not help) and a ‘Northern view’ (transfers weaken fiscal discipline). While a stronger no-bailout commitment reduces risk-shifting, it may not be optimal from the perspective of the creditor country, even ex-ante, if it increases the risk of immediate insolvency for high debt countries. Hence, the model provides a potential justification for the often decried policy of ‘kicking the can down the road.’ Mapping the model to the estimated transfers, we find that the main purpose of the outsized Greek bailout was to prevent an exit from the eurozone and possible contagion. Bailouts to avoid sovereign default were comparatively modest.
4 zettabytes (4 billion terabytes) of data generated in 2013, 44 zettabytes predicted for 2020 and 185 zettabytes for 2025. These figures are staggering and perfectly illustrate this new era of data deluge. Data has become a major economic and social challenge. The speed of processing of these data is the weakest link in a computer system: the storage system. It is therefore crucial to optimize this operation. During the last decade, storage systems have experienced a major revolution: the advent of flash memory. Flash Memory Integration: Performance and Energy Issues contributes to a better understanding of these revolutions. The authors offer us an insight into the integration of flash memory in computer systems, their behavior in performance and in power consumption compared to traditional storage systems. The book also presents, in their entirety, various methods for measuring the performance and energy consumption of storage systems for embedded as well as desktop/server computer systems. We are invited on a journey to the memories of the future. Ideal for computer scientists, featuring low level details to concentrate on system issues Tackles flash memory aspects while spanning domains such as embedded systems and HPC Contains an exhaustive set of experimental results conducted in the Lab-STICC laboratory Provides details on methodologies to perform performance and energy measurements on flash storage systems
Environmental Life Cycle Assessment is a pivotal guide to identifying environmental problems and reducing related impacts for companies and organizations in need of life cycle assessment (LCA). LCA, a unique sustainability tool, provides a framework that addresses a growing demand for practical technological solutions. Detailing each phase of the LCA methodology, this textbook covers the historical development of LCA, presents the general principles and characteristics of LCA, and outlines the corresponding standards for good practice determined by the International Organization for Standardization. It also explains how to identify the critical aspects of an LCA, provides detailed examples of LCA analysis and applications, and includes illustrated problems and solutions with concrete examples from water management, electronics, packaging, automotive, and other industries. In addition, readers will learn how to: Use consistent criteria to realize and evaluate an LCA independently of individual interests Understand the LCA methodology and become familiar with existing databases and methods based on the latest results of international research Analyze and critique a completed LCA Apply LCA methodology to simple case studies Geared toward graduate and undergraduate students studying environmental science and industrial ecology, as well as practicing environmental engineers, and sustainability professionals who want to teach themselves LCA good practices, Environmental Life Cycle Assessment demonstrates how to conduct environmental assessments for products throughout their life cycles. It presents existing methods and recent developments in the growing field of LCA and systematically covers goal and system definition, life cycle inventory, life cycle impact assessment, and interpretation.
The endothelial cells of the cerebral vasculature constitute, together with perivascular elements (astrocytes, pcricytes, basement membrane), the blood-brain barrier (BBB), which strictly limits and specifically controls the exchanges between the blood and the cerebral extracellular spacc.The existence of such a physical, enzymatic, and active barrier isolating the central nervous system has broad physiological, biological, pharmacological, and patho logical consequences, most of which are not yet fully elucidated. The Cerebral Vascular Biology conference (CVB '95) was organized and held at the "Carre des Sciences" in Paris on July I 0-12, 1995. Like the CVB '92 conference held in Duluth, Minnesota, three years ago, the objectives were to provide a forum for presentation of the most recent progresses and to stimulate discussions in the ticld of the biology, physiology. and pathology of the blood-brain barrier. The Paris conference gathered more than !50 participants. including investigators in basic neuroscience, physicians. and stu dents, who actively contributed to the scientific program by their oral or poster presentations. This volume contains a collection of short articles that summarize most of the new data that were presented at the conference. Six thematic parts focus on physiological transports. drug delivery, multidrug resistance P-glycoprotein, signal transduction at the BBB. interactions between the immune system and the cerebral endothelial cells, and the blood-brain barrier-related pathologies in the central nervous system. In addition, two introductory articles present new insights in the rapidly evolving topics of cerebral angiogenesis and gene transfer to the brain.
IP (internet protocol) Telephony, enabled by softswitches, isgoing to usher in a new era in telecommunications. By putting voiceand data over one IP network, operators can enjoy lower costs andcreate new, revenue-generating "multimedia" services. This valuable reference offers a comprehensive overview of thetechnology behind IP telephony and offers essential information tonetwork engineers, designers and managers who need to understandthe protocols and explore the issues involved in migrating theexisting telephony infrastructure to an IP-based real timecommunication service. Drawing on extensive research and practical developmentexperience in VoIP from its earliest stages, the authors giveaccess to all the relevant standards and cutting-edge techniques ina single resource. IP Telephony: Deploying Voice-over-IP Protocols: Assumes a working knowledge of IP and networking and addressesthe technical aspects of real-time communication over IP. Presents a high level overview of packet media transporttechnologies, covering all the major VoIP protocols – SIP,H323 and MGCP Details specific strategies to design services for publicnetworks where endpoints cannot be trusted and can be behindfirewalls. Explores the problems that may arise from incomplete protocolimplementations, or architectures optimized for private networkswhich fail in a public environment. This amply illustrated, state-of-the art reference tool will bean invaluable resource for all those involved in the practicaldeployment of VoIP technology.
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