Les échelles de temps sur les marchés financiers

Modern financial modelling massively implements scaling laws to describe market fluctuations, with the use of stochastic processes in stock market price behavior equations. Scaling laws, which already existed as an implicit part of Brownian motion although notperceived at such, habe become increasingly and explicitely important, since the financial markets regulatory authorities have drawn the attention of the banking industry to the risk control issued posed by the ineffective current valuation achieved using the classical Gaussian distribution. The différent elements surrounding this debate are developed based around Mandelbrot's fractal models, which have underlined the main modelling conflicts of the behavior of stock market prices over the last forty years. I demonstrate that the root of the problem of whether scaling laws exist is the more fundemental issue of the nature of market time.     

SS-Unterscharführer Adolf Storms and the massacre of Hungarian-Jewish forced labourers in Deutsch Schützen

Adolf Storms was not hard to find in the summer of 2008. He was listed in the German telephone book. The former SSUnterscharführer, who had been a member of the Waffen-SS Panzer Division Wiking, was accused, along with two other SS men, of having shot to death at least fifty-seven Hungarian-Jewish forced labourers on 29 March 1945 in Deutsch Schützen, a village close to the Austrian-Hungarian border. Immediately after that massacre, he allegedly executed a Jew – a man, name unknown, who could not walk any further – by shooting him from behind. Adolf Storms had lived in Duisburg under his true name since the late 1940s. In 2008, the author interviewed Storms and two Hitler Jugend (HJ) leaders who also took part in this crime, and three Jews who survived the massacre. In 2009, Storms was charged with murder and as an accessory to murder in Düsseldorf. In June 2010, shortly before the decision for the trial to commence, he died at the age of ninety-one. This case study scrutinizes the intersection of ideology, Nazi morality, motivation and situational factors in perpetrating massacres. It also analyses how the judicial system in Austria dealt with this crime.     

Provocative Readings in Intransigent Archives: Finding Aneityumese Women

Anticolonialists — my past self included — tend to read colonial texts with hostile but literal eyes, assuming that colonial intentions were realised and taking at face value colonisers' representations of their own centrality for indigenous people. In such discursive settings, indigenous — especially female — agency is likely to be elided or denied. I argue instead for a reading strategy that decentres colonial representations by identifying and decoding the traces of indigenous actions and presence which are sedimented in, and surreptitiously help shape, dominant texts. Decentred, such representations are susceptible to reverse colonisation: to appropriation and exploitation in writing historical narratives which can envisage indigenous agency and naturalisation of the alien and the novel in even the most repressive colonial arenas. I illustrate the principles and method via a narrative vignette which exemplifies, interrogates and exploits demeaning missionary tropes for indigenous women in mid-nineteenth century Aneityum, Vanuatu. The story evokes key issues in the politics of representation: the need to problematise assumptions that the discursively dominant are necessarily central in subaltern affairs; the need to dislodge the romanticism and ethnocentrism which bemoan the involvement of indigenous women in Christian domesticity, especially sewing, because it looks like submission to missionary hegemony.