Des mots, des figures, des personnages : une étude de quelques aspects de paroles de Jacques Prévert

A presente dissertação tem por objetivo estudar alguns aspectos de Paroles, conjunto de poemas de Jacques Prévert (1900-1977). Ela começa com um primeiro capítulo de introdução à retórica: uma breve história da retórica ou de seu lugar na sociedade ocidental, em seguida uma apresentação do sistema retórico. O segundo capítulo estuda a trajetória da vida e da escrita de Jacques Prévert até a publicação de Paroles. O terceiro capítulo estuda alguns aspectos de Paroles. Ele começa por perguntar qual o tipo de linguagem utilizada por Prévert: ela é tão simples e popular quanto parece? Depois, ele se debruça sobre a questão do jogo de palavras. Em seguida ele tenta fazer um levantamento bastante completo, um inventário das figuras de retórica presentes em Paroles. Para evitar que a leitura do capítulo se tornasse excessivamente pesada e indigesta, foi organizado um anexo que recebeu todo o inventário quantitativo; ele se encontra após o texto propriamente dito da dissertação. Enfim, o capítulo apresenta algumas considerações de ordem temática, sobre a questão da população: quais espécies de personagens povoam Paroles? Um breve léxico dos principais termos da retórica se encontra no fim da dissertação, antes da bibliografia.

Figures of equilibrium for tidally deformed non-homogeneous celestial bodies

Abstract (2,250 Maximum Characters): Several theories of tidal evolution, since the theory developed by Darwin in the XIX century, are based on the figure of equilibrium of the tidally deformed body. Frequently the adopted figure is a Jeans prolate spheroid. In some case, however, the rotation is important and Roche ellipsoids are used. The main limitations of these models are (a) they refer to homogeneous bodies; (b) the rotation axis is perpendicular to the plane of the orbit. This communication aims at presenting several results in which these hypotheses are not done. In what concerns the non-homogeneity, the presented results concerns initially bodies formed by N homogeneous layers and we study the non sphericity of each layer and relate them to the density distribution. The result is similar to the Clairaut figure of equilibrium, often used in planetary sciences, but taking into full account the tidal deformation. The case of the rotation axis non perpendicular to the orbital plane is much more complex and the study has been restricted for the moment to the case of homogeneous bodies.

"Making Sense of Figures": Statistics, Computing and Information Technologies in Agriculture and Biology in Britain, 1920s-1960s

Throughout the twentieth century statistical methods have increasingly become part of experimental research. In particular, statistics has made quantification processes meaningful in the soft sciences, which had traditionally relied on activities such as collecting and describing diversity rather than timing variation. The thesis explores this change in relation to agriculture and biology, focusing on analysis of variance and experimental design, the statistical methods developed by the mathematician and geneticist Ronald Aylmer Fisher during the 1920s. The role that Fisher’s methods acquired as tools of scientific research, side by side with the laboratory equipment and the field practices adopted by research workers, is here investigated bottom-up, beginning with the computing instruments and the information technologies that were the tools of the trade for statisticians. Four case studies show under several perspectives the interaction of statistics, computing and information technologies, giving on the one hand an overview of the main tools – mechanical calculators, statistical tables, punched and index cards, standardised forms, digital computers – adopted in the period, and on the other pointing out how these tools complemented each other and were instrumental for the development and dissemination of analysis of variance and experimental design. The period considered is the half-century from the early 1920s to the late 1960s, the institutions investigated are Rothamsted Experimental Station and the Galton Laboratory, and the statisticians examined are Ronald Fisher and Frank Yates.

Attacks on German public figures, 1968-2004: warning behaviors, potentially lethal and non-lethal acts, psychiatric status, and motivations

Fourteen non-terrorist attackers of public figures in Germany between 1968 and 2004 were intensively studied, with a particular focus on warning behaviors, attack behaviors, and the relationship between psychiatric diagnosis, symptoms, and motivations for the assault. A large proportion of the attackers were severely mentally ill, and most likely to be in the potentially lethal rather than the non-lethal group. A new typology of seven warning behaviors was applied to the data, and all were present, most frequently fixation and pathway warning behavior, and least frequently a direct threat. Psychiatric diagnosis could be closely linked to motivation when analyzed at the level of symptom and content of thought, often delusional. Most of the attacks were directed at political figures, and the majority occurred after 1995.