148 acceptances versus 98 rejections...

... for a bogus paper with a fake experiment that was submitted to web based journals (in biology) that claim they use peer-review. These are journals that charge large sums to authors but nothing to readers.

Listen to the interview or read the transcript on NPR.

Liberté d'expression ?

Voilà une restriction à la liberté d'expression dont j'ignorais l'existence: une circulaire (dite Alliot-Marie) permet de "réprimer les appels lancés par des citoyens ou des asso­cia­tions au boy­cottage de pro­duits issus d’un Etat dont la poli­tique est contestée."

Je ne suis pas juriste, mais je trouve fascinant qu'une telle circulaire puisse exister dans un Etat membre de l'Union Européenne..

Cessons de pénaliser le boycottage d’Israël

Ivar Ekeland, Rony Brauman, Ghislain Poissonnier, Le Monde, mercredi 5 mars 2014

Il faut abroger la circulaire Alliot-​​Marie.

En tant que consom­mateur citoyen, je n’achète pas de pro­duits israé­liens tant qu’Israël ne res­pectera pas le droit inter­na­tional ; j’appelle aussi mes conci­toyens à faire de même afin de faire pression sur Israël pour qu’il démantèle le mur de sépa­ration et les colonies. " Pour avoir tenu de tels propos dans la rue ou dans des com­merces, pour les avoir écrits dans des maga­zines ou sur Internet, près d’une cen­taine de per­sonnes sont tra­duites en France devant les tri­bunaux. Il s’agit de membres d’associations qui sou­tiennent la cam­pagne "Boycott-​​désinvestissement-​​sanctions " (BDS). Ces per­sonnes sont pour­suivies par les pro­cu­reurs en vertu d’un texte interne au ministère de la justice adopté le 12 février 2010, dite cir­cu­laire Alliot-​​Marie, garde des sceaux de l’époque.

La cir­cu­laire ordonne aux par­quets de pour­suivre péna­lement les per­sonnes qui appellent au boy­cottage des pro­duits israé­liens. Elle affirme, sans le démontrer, que l’article 24 alinéa 8 de la loi de 1881 sur la presse per­met­trait de réprimer les appels lancés par des citoyens ou des asso­cia­tions au boy­cottage de pro­duits issus d’un Etat dont la poli­tique est contestée. Ce texte inter­prète la loi de manière extensive, en contra­diction avec la règle de l’interprétation stricte des lois pénales.

En effet, l’article 24 alinéa 8 de la loi de 1881 ne s’attache pas à interdire les appels au boy­cottage, mais uni­quement les pro­vo­ca­tions " à la dis­cri­mi­nation, à la haine ou à la vio­lence à l’égard d’une per­sonne ou d’un groupe de per­sonnes en raison de leur origine ou de leur appar­te­nance ou de leur non-​​appartenance à une ethnie, une nation, une race ou une religion déterminée ".

La cir­cu­laire Alliot-​​Marie a été cri­tiquée par le monde asso­ciatif au nom de la liberté d’expression. Mais éga­lement par de nom­breux juristes, uni­ver­si­taires, avocats et magis­trats, en raison de son contenu qui procède à un usage détourné de la loi prévue pour lutter contre les propos racistes et anti­sé­mites. Des pro­cu­reurs ont même refusé de requérir ora­lement la condam­nation des mili­tants de la cam­pagne BDS, en dépit des ins­truc­tions écrites de leur hiérarchie.

La cour d’appel de Paris a pro­noncé en 2012 des relaxes, consi­dérant que les propos tenus rele­vaient de la cri­tique paci­fique de la poli­tique d’un Etat. La Cour euro­péenne des droits de l’homme, quant à elle, rap­pelle très régu­liè­rement que les groupes mili­tants béné­fi­cient sur des sujets poli­tiques d’une pro­tection ren­forcée de leur liberté d’expression. Chris­tiane Taubira a même déclaré publi­quement à plu­sieurs reprises que cette cir­cu­laire contenait une inter­pré­tation de la loi qui pouvait être consi­dérée comme " injuste " ou " abusive ".

L’ensemble de ces élé­ments et le chan­gement de majorité poli­tique per­met­taient de penser que la prise de conscience du caractère absurde de cette situation allait se tra­duire en acte. Or, la cir­cu­laire Alliot-​​Marie de2010 est tou­jours en vigueur et les pour­suites pénales contre des mili­tants de la cam­pagne BDS conti­nuent. Ce faisant, la France se sin­gu­larise en Europe et dans le monde : elle est le seul Etat, avec Israël, à envi­sager la péna­li­sation d’une cam­pagne paci­fique et citoyenne, demandant le respect du droit inter­na­tional. Cam­pagne paci­fique en ce sens que les actions d’appel au boy­cottage orga­nisées consistent en des mesures inci­ta­tives, qui se limitent à faire appel, par la dif­fusion d’informations, à la conscience poli­tique des consom­ma­teurs. Aucune forme de contrainte n’est exercée ni à l’égard des clients et des dis­tri­bu­teurs français, ni à l’égard des pro­duc­teurs israé­liens. En France, l’appel au boy­cottage, forme d’action poli­tique non vio­lente, s’inscrit dans le débat poli­tique répu­blicain depuis des décennies.

Mme Taubira l’a même qua­lifié de " pra­tique mili­tante, reconnue, publique " et admet l’avoir encouragé en son temps contre les pro­duits sud-​​africains, dans le cadre d’une cam­pagne inter­na­tionale que per­sonne n’avait alors envisagé d’interdire.

Cam­pagne citoyenne en ce sens qu’elle repose sur une mobi­li­sation des sociétés civiles. La cam­pagne BDS a été engagée en 2005 à la demande de 172 asso­cia­tions et syn­dicats pales­ti­niens. Elle appelle les sociétés civiles du monde entier à se mobi­liser pour que leur gou­ver­nement fasse pression sur l’Etat d’Israël.

En France, de nom­breuses asso­cia­tions ont rejoint l’appel lancé en 2005. Les actions qu’elles conduisent dans le cadre de cette cam­pagne se situent au cœur de la liberté d’expression et d’information des citoyens français sur un sujet inter­na­tional. Ces actions ne consistent pas à dis­cri­miner les citoyens israé­liens : elles visent à boy­cotter les ins­ti­tu­tions et les pro­duits d’Israël en vue de faire changer une poli­tique d’Etat.

Cam­pagne pour le respect du droit inter­na­tional enfin, dans la mesure où le but recherché est d’obtenir le respect des réso­lu­tions des Nations unies et la fin des poli­tiques déclarées illé­gales par l’avis du 9 juillet 2004de la Cour inter­na­tionale de justice de La Haye que sont la construction du mur de sépa­ration et la colo­ni­sation en Cis­jor­danie et à Jérusalem-​​Est. La mobi­li­sation des sociétés civiles est rendue indis­pen­sable, car la plupart des Etats n’ont rien fait ou presque pour pousser Israël à se conformer à l’avis de la Cour, notamment en prenant des mesures de sanc­tions pour que le mur et les colonies soient démantelés.

Rien n’est plus faux que de laisser entendre que la cam­pagne BDS puisse être raciste ou anti­sémite. Cet amalgame relève de la même rhé­to­rique que celle parfois uti­lisée dans les années 1970 et 1980 contre les mili­tants anti-​​apartheid com­parés à d’irresponsables marxistes-​​léninistes ou à des racistes anti-​​Blancs. Aucun des mili­tants de la cam­pagne BDSpour­suivis depuis 2010 en vertu de la cir­cu­laire évoquée ne l’a d’ailleurs été pour avoir tenu des propos ou commis des actes racistes et anti­sé­mites. Il est temps de pro­céder à l’abrogation de la cir­cu­laire Alliot-​​Marie.

Ivar Ekeland, Pré­sident de l’Association uni­ver­si­taire pour le respect du droit inter­na­tional en Palestine

Rony Brauman, Médecin, essayiste

Ghislain Poissonnier, Magistrat

What we can learn from the US on concentration in the mobile phone industry

Here is food for thought at the Autorité de la Concurrence...

T-Mobile Turns an Industry on Its Ear

• By Farhad Manjoo, www.nytimes.com
• February 26th, 201
  
  4

A rash of consumer-friendliness has broken out across the mobile data industry. Over the last year, the four major carriers — AT&T, Verizon, Sprint and T-Mobile — have cut prices and offered greater flexibility in how they sell their voice, text and broadband services. The industry could be on the verge of an all-out price war.

Who is responsible for this blessed state of affairs?

Credit must go to the United States government.

In 2011, officials at the Federal Communications Commission and the Justice Department moved to block AT&T’s proposed $39 billion acquisition of T-Mobile. That kept the struggling, fourth-place carrier alive as an independent firm. And it led John J. Legere, T-Mobile’s flamboyant, foul-mouthed chief executive, to brand his company the “uncarrier,” and inaugurate a string of measures that have turned every accepted practice in the mobile business on its head.

T-Mobile’s resurgence, and the effect it has had on the larger market for cellular service, may hold important lessons for regulators who will soon sit in judgment over the latest enormous broadband proposal, Comcast’s deal to gobble up Time Warner Cable.

While T-Mobile executives are reluctant to credit the failed merger with AT&T as the source of the firm’s aggressive new pricing strategy, they admit that they see themselves as disrupters in the market. “We want to identify every pain point for consumers in this industry and eliminate them all,” said Michael Katz, T-Mobile’s vice president for marketing.

In the last year, T-Mobile has dropped the traditional two-year contract from its lineup; now its plans come without customer lock-in. It has also dropped early termination fees, overage charges and other extra strings that carriers apply to keep you in line. The carrier now allows customers to text and use the Web while traveling in 100 countries at no extra charge. T-Mobile has also offered to pay off the early-termination fees its new customers might incur with their old carriers when switching. Most important, it has unbundled the price of a phone from the price of wireless service. Now, you can pay a separate amount for each piece. This means that if you decide against immediately upgrading when you finish paying off your phone, your monthly bill might — astonishingly — go down.

Former F.C.C. officials say this is exactly what the agency hoped for when, in 2011, it weighed in against AT&T’s plan to purchase T-Mobile. As the agency’s staff explained in a lengthy report, regulators feared that shrinking the four major carriers to three would give providers an incentive to raise prices. Instead, regulators saw an elegant escape hatch for T-Mobile. If AT&T was forced to call off the deal, it would owe T-Mobile a breakup fee worth at least $3 billion in cash, plus an additional $1 billion in rights to wireless spectrum. The money and spectrum would allow T-Mobile to build out its network infrastructure, making it more attractive to new users. Given the right leadership, regulators hoped the fourth-place carrier could play a spoiler’s role in the marketplace. By aggressively courting new users, T-Mobile would act as an agitator prompting change across the industry.

And that’s what has happened. After the merger fell apart, T-Mobile began to invest heavily in its network; its LTE broadband area now reaches 200 million people and its access speeds have been found to be faster than those of its larger rivals. The firm’s real innovation began last March, though, when it announced its Simple Choice plan, which offered two unusual features. First, there was no contract lock-in; if you found a better deal on some other network a few months after signing up, you were free to leave. Second, the advertised prices were for network access alone, and did not include a smartphone. If you wanted a smartphone, T-Mobile would sell you one at full price, splitting the payments over two years. A top-of-the-line phone, like the iPhone 5S, sells for about $650, which is about $27 a month for 24 months.

What’s the benefit of paying for the plan and the phone separately rather than as one big bundle? At first glance, it might not seem as if you’re saving that much. If you buy an iPhone 5S and a 2.5-gigabyte plan from T-Mobile, you’ll be out $87 a month — that’s $60 for the service, and $27 for the phone. That’s only slightly less than the $95 a month AT&T charges for its 2 GB, two-year contract plan, which includes a subsidized phone. This plan was once AT&T’s primary offering. (If you bought a high-end phone, AT&T would also charge $199 when you signed up.)

But the real benefit of T-Mobile’s unbundled pricing is its flexibility. Separating the phone from the service lets you jump off what Jeff Bezos once called the “upgrade treadmill” — the pressure to constantly purchase the latest and greatest device even when you don’t really need it. After two years with T-Mobile, your $27-a-month device payment shrinks to $0, and then, if you’re still managing just fine with your pretty good phone, you’ll pay just $60 a month for network access. A contract plan doesn’t work that way; after you’ve paid off your phone, your payments remain the same. So even if you don’t need another phone, it makes financial sense to upgrade — and, in the process, lock yourself in for another two years because otherwise, you were just giving extra money to your carrier. Unbundled plans are also attractive for those who want to purchase low-cost unlocked phones — devices that can work on multiple carriers, like Google’s fantastic $349 Nexus 5. If you buy that device from Google, you can pay T-Mobile just for network access.

T-Mobile’s plans were so blindingly sensible that its competitors have been forced to respond.

In December, AT&T updated its plans to include a contract-free option. In February, Verizon offered a new set of plans that include similar options, though Verizon’s plans are far more costly and less flexible. The larger carriers have also copied other T-Mobile ideas. After T-Mobile introduced its early upgrade program, Jump, which lets you pay an optional fee for the privilege of getting a new phone more frequently than every two years, AT&T, Verizon and Sprint followed suit.

T-Mobile’s bold pricing efforts have helped it attract four million new customers over the last year. But the company’s cuts have come at a cost; in its earnings report this week, T-Mobile reported a loss of $20 million in the fourth quarter, up from $8 million last year, a decline the company attributed to the sums it has spent on promotions. Privately, its rivals say that T-Mobile’s spending is unsustainable, and that if larger competitors match all of its efforts, the company won’t be able to invest in its network. Many analysts also say they believe T-Mobile is bent on adding customers to make itself more attractive for an eventual sale to Sprint. That will be difficult, because the very fact that T-Mobile has been so disruptive as an independent company has made officials wary of approving more consolidation in the industry.

The upshot: Nobody knows if T-Mobile’s aggressive pricing will lead to a permanent change in the way cellular service is sold. But I, for one, am happy to see it die trying.

Législation électorale en France

Apparemment, les journalistes politiques du Monde sont bien meilleurs que leurs journalistes économiques (voir post précédent): excellent article de synthèse sur la législation électorale par Patrick Roger!

A lire ici:

L'éthique en économie selon Le Monde

Morceau choisi d'un article parlant de Martin Bouygues et de la téléphonie mobile dans Le Monde:

"Ceux qui le connaissent décrivent aussi un homme droit, doté d'un « bon sens paysan » et d'une éthique à toute épreuve. Il aurait préféré que les trois concurrents fassent front commun, (...)"

Donc, l'éthique selon Le Monde consiste à pratiquer la collusion...

John Conley on publishing in economics

John Conley writes here (very persuasively I think) on the decrease in the acceptance rates in economic journals and on the impact on the profession.

Here are a few handpicked extracts:

"My experience from JPET and EB is that 20% to 30% of what is submitted is credible  and probably should be published. The next 20% or so is more boring in my personal view, but correct, and perhaps interesting to groups of researchers with whom I might be less familiar. The bottom 50% should be rejected with good reason. Picking 10% or 5% puts editors in the position of either attempting
to make Delphic predictions of which of the 20% to 30% of acceptable papers will end up being more important, or simply expressing his or her own biases about topics or people. This seems to me to give editors far too much power. Rather than simply being gatekeepers to prevent false, plagiarized or trivial results from appearing in the scholarly record, editors can both push favored topics and individuals while closing off other topics or limiting debate. Now I firmly believe that editors generally do the best they can and try to be as even-handed as possible, but forcing editors to choose which 7% of submissions to publish places them in a almost impossible position."


"Finally consider the combined effect of the doubling of publication lags documented by Ellison (2001) and the lower acceptance rates discussed in his note on the evaluation of junior faculty. Just from a mathematical standpoint, establishing a tenurable CV in six years with two year editorial lags and 10% acceptance rates is tremendously harder than it was twenty years ago with nine month editorial lags and 20% acceptance rates. Conley, et al. (2011) explore this further and document the phenomenon empirically. We find, for example, that graduates of the top 30 Ph.D. programs from the 1986 cohort were about 65% more productive than those from the 2000 cohort."

"The significant fraction of the editors at the meeting reported that they have started to make heavy
use of bench rejections. The numbers seem to be about 20% to 40% and this is mostly something started in the last two or three years"

"So why would publishers not be willing to increase page budgets when the costs of doing so are so reduced? The answer is that most journals are sold under “big deal” contracts in which publishers in effect give libraries all or nothing offers to subscribe to their whole catalog in a given field rather than allowing librarians or consortia to chose their subscriptions journal by journal. See the work of Ted Bergstrom and Preston McAfee on this for more details. What the exact incentives of the publishers are here is not entirely clear. They seem to care weakly about the over-all quality of the bundle, but they get little or no extra revenue from increasing page counts. Thus, the decision to starve journals for pages in light of strongly increasing submission rates is driven by the commercial interests of
the publisher and is entirely contrary to the mission of fostering scholarly communication. This is a new, and I think compelling, reason to try to reclaim scholarly communication back from commercial publishers and into the community of scholars, and is the main point I would like to be taken from this letter." (my emphasis)

"Acceptance Rates at Various Journals (Year 2008 or Shortly Before)
American Economic Review* 0.07
Econometrica* 0.09
Journal of Political Economy 0.05
Quarterly Journal of Economics 0.04
BEJ Applied Economics (All 4 Levels)* 0.51
Canadian Journal of Economics 0.18
Economica 0.11
Economics Letters 0.17
European Economic Review 0.09
Industrial and Labor Relations Review 0.18
Journal of Human Resources 0.10
Journal of Labor Economics 0.08
Journal of Monetary Economics 0.20
Journal of Population Economics 0.21
Journal of Public Economics 0.10
Labour Economics* 0.15
RAND Journal of Economics 0.11
Review of Economics and Statistics 0.12
American Political Science Review 0.08
American Sociological Review 0.08"