Social norms and farm animal protection

Social change is slow and difficult. Social change for animals is formidably slow and difficult. Advocates and scholars alike have long tried to change attitudes and convince the public that eating animals is wrong. The topic of norms and social change for animals has been neglected, which explains in part the relative failure of the animal protection movement to secure robust support reflected in social and legal norms. Moreover, animal ethics has suffered from a disproportionate focus on individual attitudes and behavior at the expense of collective behavior, social change, and empirical psychology. If what we want to change is behavior on a large scale, norms are important tools. This article reviews an account of social norms that provides insights into the possibility and limitations of social change for animals, approaching animal protection as a problem of reverse social engineering. It highlights avenues for future work from this neglected perspective

Shear instability of an axisymmetric air-water coaxial jet

We study the destabilization of a round liquid jet by a fast annular gas stream. We measure the frequency of the shear instability waves for several geometries and air/water velocities. We then carry out a linear stability analysis, and show that there are three competing mechanisms for the destabilization: a convective instability, an absolute instability driven by surface tension, and an absolute instability driven by confinement. We compare the predictions of this analysis with experimental results, and propose scaling laws for wave frequency in each regime. We finally introduce criteria to predict the boundaries between these three regimes

Le visage d’Adonis sur le corps d’Hercule

L’opposition du masculin et du féminin est une des plus fortes de notre imaginaire social. Il est d’autant plus intéressant de suivre une image qui trouve sa source dans l’emphase épique, mais se répand dans le registre burlesque de l’âge classique. Un jeune homme aurait « le visage d’Adonis sur le corps d’Hercule ». L’expression revient sous la plume de Voltaire et cristallise les contradictions d’une société qui voudrait faire du corps masculin le sujet et non l’objet du désir, l’incarnation de la force et non de la beauté. La crise de l’Ancien Régime est aussi celle d’une forme de libertinage où Faublas, travesti en fille, prend la place de Valmont. Le masculin peut aussi être clivé entre des postulations contraires. Les figures de la fiction classique ne sont pas sans expérimenter ce qui s’affiche aujourd’hui comme la « métrosexualité ».The opposition of male and female is among the strongest in our social imagination. It is all the more interesting to follow an image that has its source in epic pomposity, but spreads into the burlesque register of the Enlightenment. A young man is said to have “the face of Adonis on the body of Hercules.” The expression returns in the writings of Voltaire and crystallizes the contradictions of a society that wishes to make the male body the subject, not the object, of desire and the incarnation of strength rather than beauty. The crisis of the Ancien Régime also centers on a form of libertinage where Faublas, impersonating a girl, takes the place of Valmont. The male can be split between opposing postulations as well. The figures of classical fiction experiment at times with the “metrosexuality” nowadays on display

Local matching indicators for transport with concave costs

In this note, we introduce a class of indicators that enable to compute efficiently optimal transport plans associated to arbitrary distributions of $N$ demands and $N$ supplies in $\mathbf{R}$ in the case where the cost function is concave. The computational cost of these indicators is small and independent of $N$. A hierarchical use of them enables to obtain an efficient algorithm