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Actuaries model insurance claim amounts using heavy tailed probability distributions. They routinely need to evaluate quantities related to these distributions such as quantiles in the far right tail, moments or limited moments. Furthermore, actuaries often resort to simulation to solve otherwise untractable risk evaluation problems. The paper discusses our implementation of support functions for the Feller-Pareto distribution for the R package actuar. The Feller-Pareto defines a large family of heavy tailed distributions encompassing the transformed beta family and many variants of the Pareto distribution.

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This English translation has not been published in printed form/Cette traduction anglaise n'a pas été publiée sous forme imprimée. 1 A complex landscape of interdependent connections, a tangled web of motivations and interpenetrating methods and tools: such is the picture that emerges from the few existing studies on relationships between journalism and sociology. Recurrent themes include a somewhat indistinct "dividing line" (Ruellan, 1992 : 25), "lines of demarcation between the two camps", "zones of contact", "ring-fencing / étanchéité" (ibid.), and the various "affinities and misunderstandings" that result (Charon, 1996 : 17). Other topics discussed are methods and tools (press cuttings, interviews), with analyses of "borrowings, legitimate or not" (ibid. 30) between journalists and sociologists, conflicts of legitimacy and different ways of treating "actual facts". 2 While this literature usefully underlines the particularities of the two disciplines, it sometimes tends to reinforce, or even to naturalize, certain areas of oppositionjournalists and sociologists are taken for granted as having always belonged to clearly distinct spheres-and to impose ways of constructing the object by merely considering as a "problem" between journalists and sociologists something that actually reflects much more far-reaching transformations of society 1 , and in particular the question of intensifying conflict, from the second half of the 19th century, between the different activities that claim to "give an account of society" ("crier le social") 2. This is why any attempt to classify this literature, which works on the assumption of "journalism" and "sociology" as opposed spheres and delves no further than the most obvious polemics between them, is likely to obscure the real affinities between journalists who try to raise Journalists and Sociologists Questions de communication, 16 | 2011

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