DIRE ET SE DIRE AU FÉMININ

The decree of 21st of June 1993 sets out how to express the female gender in profession names and function titles in official and administrative publications of the Communauté française de Belgique. It has helped to change mindsets. The guide Mettre au féminin (“Express the female gender”) allows civil servants to fulfil the requirements of the decree and helps promote the usage of the female gender in the French language. First published in 1994, it has been reviewed and re-edited in 2005. Even if the visibility of women in language usage is on the increase, it faces not so much linguistic but ideological obstacles. Le décret du 21 juin 1993 installe la féminisation des noms de métier et des titres de fonction dans les textes officiels et administratifs de la Communauté française de Belgique. Il aide les mentalités à progresser. Le guide Mettre au féminin permet aux fonctionnaires de respecter le décret et sert à promouvoir l’emploi du féminin dans l’usage de la langue française. Paru en 1994, il est mis à jour en 2005. Même si la visibilité des femmes dans l’emploi de la langue augmente, elle rencontre des obstacles non pas linguistiques mais idéologiques.     

Security Identities and ‘No More,No Less’ Operations: On Making NATO's Involvement in Darfur Possible

This article explores NATO's support mission to the African Union's peacekeeping operation in Darfur, Sudan between 2005 and 2007. NATO policies are commonly presented as functional responses to events, but how did a conflict on the African continent become the Atlantic Alliance's business? In this essay, a poststructuralist practice-oriented approach is used to understand the way in which discursive practices progressively establish a policy option as ‘natural' in a given situation. It is argued that the normalization of NATO's support mission to the African Union in Darfur and the integration of this operation in NATO's security identity were the result of complex and conflict-ridden social interactions between different discursive practices supported by different actors.     

Study of the correlation between psychiatric and psychological diagnoses in sample offenders

This study deals with the frequency with which expert psychiatrists and psychologists make structural or nosographic diagnoses within the context of expert assessment.Thus, the rates of concordance between psychiatrists and psychologists in both types of diagnoses will be assessed.To do so, the level of inter-observer agreement on diagnoses between 1990 and 2003 was studied retrospectively in France through psychiatric and psychological assessments of 505 male offenders. The assessment of the correlation rates was carried out using the Kappa coefficient.The results show a range of 0.55 to 0.71 in inter-observer (psychiatrists vs psychologists) agreement for structural diagnoses, and 0.51 to 0.89 for nosographic diagnoses.In addition, a marked correlation between psychiatrists and psychologists may be noted regarding abstention in both structural (k = 66) and nosographic (k = 73) diagnoses. In fact, recommendations are made for improvement in the consistency of offender assessment in the psycho-legal French context.     

Craniofacial reconstruction as a prediction problem using a Latent Root Regression model

In this paper, we present a computer-assisted method for facial reconstruction. This method provides an estimation of the facial shape associated with unidentified skeletal remains. Current computer-assisted methods using a statistical framework rely on a common set of extracted points located on the bone and soft-tissue surfaces. Most of the facial reconstruction methods then consist of predicting the position of the soft-tissue surface points, when the positions of the bone surface points are known. We propose to use Latent Root Regression for prediction. The results obtained are then compared to those given by Principal Components Analysis linear models. In conjunction, we have evaluated the influence of the number of skull landmarks used. Anatomical skull landmarks are completed iteratively by points located upon geodesics which link these anatomical landmarks, thus enabling us to artificially increase the number of skull points. Facial points are obtained using a mesh-matching algorithm between a common reference mesh and individual soft-tissue surface meshes. The proposed method is validated in term of accuracy, based on a leave-one-out cross-validation test applied to a homogeneous database. Accuracy measures are obtained by computing the distance between the original face surface and its reconstruction. Finally, these results are discussed referring to current computer-assisted reconstruction facial techniques.     

Analysis of ancient human DNA and primer contamination: one step backward one step forward

The analysis of DNA from archaeological human remains is plagued by a unique set of methodological problems concerning contamination with modern exogenous DNA. Through an original approach, we propose complementary methods to identify all potential sources of contamination and complete guidelines for the validation of ancient human sequences. The study presented was conducted on non-European human samples (Polynesian and Amerindian) which were collected with all precautions during excavation. This permitted us to distinguish without ambiguity authentic and contaminant sequences. The samples' origins and histories were perfectly known, allowing us to trace all potential contamination sources and to determine the efficiency of precautions followed during all steps of the study. The data obtained confirm that precautions taken during sampling effectively prevent contamination. However, we demonstrate that human contamination can also be introduced during genetic analyses even if all precautions are strictly followed. Indeed, numerous human contaminations were detected in template-PCR products and negative controls, resulting in a striking diversity of contaminant mitochondrial DNA sequences. We argue that this contamination partly derives from the primers. To our knowledge, no previous experiment has been performed to investigate primers as a possible source of human contamination despite the fact that this specific type of contamination poses a real problem in terms of validating ancient human DNA studies. Finally, we confirm that the detection of contaminants in negative controls is clearly related to the number of PCR cycles used. This study enhances our understanding of contamination processes and confirms that, in reality, an absolutely contamination-free situation cannot be obtained. As a consequence, we propose improvements to the guidelines usually followed in the field in order to take the highly probable contamination of PCR reagents, including primers, into account.     

On the Incoherence of Legal Language to the General Public

I will suggest, in this article, a possible explanation of the fact that legal language appears incoherent to the general public. I will present one legal text (an indictment), explaining why it appears incoherent to legal laypersons. I will argue that the traits making this particular text appear incoherent are, first, that a specialized legal meaning is conveyed implicitly and, second, that there are no key-words that could direct laypersons to the knowledge making this meaning obvious to legalists. I will conclude that any legal text having these traits is likely to appear incoherent to the general public and suggest that the traits making my example appear incoherent might be rather common among the various texts of the various legal systems. On this suggestion there is no need to assume any causal relation between lawyers’ social interests and the apparent incoherence of legal language as it entails that this incoherence is inevitable. (I will argue that it is a result of the facts that legal language is ordinary language used, in the ordinary way, in the special context of the legal discourse.)