Recording the war effort: immigrant communities in Latin America and the memory of the Great War

ABSTRACT

This paper aims to analyse the initiatives undertaken by some immigrant communities residing in Latin America to record their mobilisation around the First World War. After the armistice, European communities in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Mexico, Paraguay, Peru, Uruguay and other countries gathered detailed information about their activities during the conflict, published as profusely illustrated books of remembrance, offered to their governments as proof of their loyalty. The article intends to establish the peculiar nature of these publications as records of the war effort, and analyse the agents and processes of their elaboration, and their role as commemorative but also as archival documents.     

Retrieving and classifying instances of source code plagiarism

Automatic detection of source code plagiarism is an important research field for both the commercial software industry and within the research community. Existing methods of plagiarism detection primarily involve exhaustive pairwise document comparison, which does not scale well for large software collections. To achieve scalability, we approach the problem from an information retrieval (IR) perspective. We retrieve a ranked list of candidate documents in response to a pseudo-query representation constructed from each source code document in the collection. The challenge in source code document retrieval is that the standard bag-of-words (BoW) representation model for such documents is likely to result in many false positives being retrieved, because of the use of identical programming language specific constructs and keywords. To address this problem, we make use of an abstract syntax tree (AST) representation of the source code documents. While the IR approach is efficient, it is essentially unsupervised in nature. To further improve its effectiveness, we apply a supervised classifier (pre-trained with features extracted from sample plagiarized source code pairs) on the top ranked retrieved documents. We report experiments on the SOCO-2014 dataset comprising 12K Java source files with almost 1M lines of code. Our experiments confirm that the AST based approach produces significantly better retrieval effectiveness than a standard BoW representation, i.e., the AST based approach is able to identify a higher number of plagiarized source code documents at top ranks in response to a query source code document. The supervised classifier, trained on features extracted from sample plagiarized source code pairs, is shown to effectively filter and thus further improve the ranked list of retrieved candidate plagiarized documents.     

Technological research in the EU is less efficient than the world average. EU research policy risks Europeans’ future

We have studied the efficiency of research in the EU by a percentile-based citation approach that analyzes the distribution of country papers among the world papers. Going up in the citation scale, the frequency of papers from efficient countries increases while the frequency from inefficient countries decreases. In the percentile-based approach, this trend, which is uniform at any citation level, is measured by the e_p index that equals the P_{top 1%}/P_{top 10%} ratio. By using the e_p index we demonstrate that EU research on fast-evolving technological topics is less efficient than the world average and that the EU is far from being able to compete with the most advanced countries. The e_p index also shows that the USA is well ahead of the EU in both fast- and slow-evolving technologies, which suggests that the advantage of the USA over the EU in innovation is due to low research efficiency in the EU. In accord with some previous studies, our results show that the European Commission’s ongoing claims about the excellence of EU research are based on a wrong diagnosis. The EU must focus its research policy on the improvement of its inefficient research. Otherwise, the future of Europeans is at risk.     

Analysis and conservation of modern modeling materials found in Auguste Rodin's sculptures

Prior to the exhibition Portrait-making, Rodin and his models (2009), the Rodin museum wanted to restore two busts of Hanako and Clemenceau. Interestingly, these two sculptures contain pieces of modern modeling materials (MMMs) invented at the end of the nineteenth century as an alternative to clay or waxes. The poor state of conservation of the two portraits made any handling and exhibition impossible. Accordingly, the purpose of this article is twofold: to contribute to technical art history and conservation. Elemental and chemical analyses were done on samples from 12 sculptures (SEM–EDX, FTIR, GC–MS, GC–FID, XRD, synchrotron-based µXRF, µXANES, and µFTIR) aimed at identifying the composition of MMMs used by Rodin on plaster sculptures and establishing hypotheses about the origins of their degradation. This thorough study of their composition and degradation was necessary to implement an appropriate restoration plan. The development of conservation protocols adapted to such materials is rarely documented. Different tests were performed on mock-ups (pH, solubility, adhesion, consolidation, and cleaning). In particular, a protocol based on laser cleaning was developed and successfully applied to remove superficial dust and crusts so that the sculptures regained their original aspect.