Publications Office of the European Union

The ethics of science is an integral part of the (scientific) culture(s) of any modern society. It is part of how sciences are embedded in society and how society shapes scientific practices. The modes, how society appropriates sciences reflect societal practices and always imply ethical issues. Regulated and codified ethics are essential for a well-functioning scientific system. Geosciences are exposed to ethical issues in a specific manner (see previous book, “Exploring Geoethics”) because geosciences, such as meteorology, hydrology or volcanology, are directly applied in society’s daily practices, compared to theoretical physics or mathematics, for example. Thus, the geosciences’ scientific culture is strongly intertwined with the ethics of society in general and professional ethics of scholarly work, in particular. It is, therefore, important that geoethics identifies and represents those interactions. Subsequently, the current situation of the geoscience-society interface would be better understood, and foresight would be more reliable, for example, of how geosciences are applied in the design of future societal pathways (e.g. carbon emission pathways).

Par sa jurisprudence recente en matiere de travail a duree determinee, la Cour a trace les contours des clauses 4 et 5 de l’accord-cadre sur le travail a duree determinee qui figure a l’annexe de la directive 1999/70/CE en fournissant une interpretation pragmatique du principe general de non-discrimination, reposant sur une mise en balance des interets en jeu, a savoir, d’un cote, le besoin de flexibilite du marche de l’emploi et, de l’autre, le besoin imperatif de stabilite de l’emploi des travailleurs, concu comme un element majeur de la protection de ces derniers.

In this paper we report on the experience gathered in producing two gold-standard alignment datasets between the European Union thesaurus EuroVoc and two other notable resources adopted in legal environments: the thesaurus of the Italian Senate TESEO and the IATE European terminological resource. The realization of these two resources has been performed in the context of the PMKI project, an European Commission action aiming at creating a Public Multilingual Knowledge management Infrastructure to support e-commerce solutions in a multilingual environment. As of the numerous lexical and terminological resources involved in this project, ontology and thesaurus alignment and, as a consequence, the evaluation of automatically generated alignments, play a pivotal role for the success of the project.

Le fondateur de Saint-Gobain Pont à Mousson a-t-il été aussi le visionnaire qui a anticipé le destin de la sidérurgie française ? L’article montre qu’il dessine un projet sidérurgique pendant la période où il est fonctionnaire et qu’il l’adapte ensuite aux hommes et aux réalités des terrains qu’il rencontre. Il abandonne ce projet sidérurgique en 1964-1965, tout en poursuivant une implication forte dans une industrie dont il ne croit plus à l’avenir en France. Il a un regard lucide sur les mécanismes qui conduisent à la crise financière de 1978, mais par souci de défendre les intérêts de Sidelor et par diplomatie, il masque ses convictions.

Assigning uncertainty to ocean-color satellite products is a requirement to allow informed use of these data. Here,
\nuncertainty estimates are derived using the comparison on a 12th-degree grid of coincident daily records of the
\nremote-sensing reflectance RRS obtained with the same processing chain from three satellite missions, MERIS,
\nMODIS and SeaWiFS. The approach is spatially resolved and produces σ, the part of the RRS uncertainty budget
\nassociated with random effects. The global average of σ decreases with wavelength from approximately 0.7–
\n0.9 10−3 sr−1 at 412 nm to 0.05–0.1 10−3 sr−1 at the red band, with uncertainties on σ evaluated as 20–30% between
\n412 and 555 nm, and 30–40% at 670 nm. The distribution of σ shows a restricted spatial variability and
\nsmall variations with season, which makes the multi-annual global distribution of σ an estimate applicable to
\nall retrievals of the considered missions. The comparison of σ with other uncertainty estimates derived from
\nfield data or with the support of algorithms provides a consistent picture. When translated in relative terms,
\nand assuming a relatively low bias, the distribution of σ suggests that the objective of a 5% uncertainty is fulfilled
\nbetween 412 and 490 nm for oligotrophic waters (chlorophyll-a concentration below 0.1 mg m−3). This study
\nalso provides comparison statistics. Spectrally, the mean absolute relative difference between RRS from different
\nmissions shows a characteristic U-shape with both ends at blue and red wavelengths inversely related to the amplitude
\nof RRS. On average and for the considered data sets, SeaWiFS RRS tend to be slightly higher than MODIS RRS,
\nwhich in turn appear higher than MERIS RRS. Biases between mission-specific RRS may exhibit a seasonal dependence,
\nparticularly in the subtropical belt.