Intro -- Table of Contents -- Chapter One -- Abstract -- Health, financial, and equity impact due to COVID-19 -- COVID-19 countermeasures: Ethical overview -- Conclusion -- Bibliography -- Chapter Two -- Abstract -- Introduction -- Our Relationship with Technology -- Post-COVID-19 Future -- Bibliography -- Chapter Three -- Abstract -- Bibliography -- Chapter Four -- Abstract -- Introduction -- Analogy -- What is philosophy for? -- Philosophical Reflections -- What help can we expect from philosophy? -- Bibliography -- Chapter Five -- Abstract
From 1942 to 1964, a bilateral agreement known as the Bracero Program allowed Mexican men to work in the United States as seasonal contract laborers. During the program's 22-year duration, Mexican officials distributed 4.64 million contracts. This dissertation examines two interrelated questions. First, how did the Mexican government distribute contracts? And second, what motivated rural workers from the center-western states of Guanajuato, Jalisco, and Michoacán – the states that sent the most braceros, between one-third and one-half of the total, to the U.S. – to want to migrate as braceros.Political factors linked to the implementation of and conservative Catholic opposition to the government-sponsored agrarian reform heavily influenced demand for bracero contracts. During the 1920s and 1930s, the federal government expropriated millions of hectares of land in the center-west and redistributed them among hundreds of thousands of rural workers. But numerous agrarian reform beneficiaries were granted insufficient or poor-quality lands, and the statutes that governed agrarian reform communities limited what beneficiaries could do with their lands. Those beneficiaries who had been adversely affected by the agrarian reform's structures expressed an interest in migrating through the Bracero Program. The land redistribution process also drew the ire of conservative Catholics who believed that private property was sacrosanct and who were also upset with a series of anticlerical measures implemented by federal- and state-level administrations. This discontent led to open rebellion between 1926 and 1929, and Guanajuato, Jalisco, and Michoacán were the epicenter of the conflict. Community-level clashes between conservative Catholic and pro-government factions continued into the years of the Bracero Program and center-western rural workers who were pushed off their lands because of these conflicts also became interested in migrating as braceros. Federal officials acknowledged this demand by sending a significant number of contracts to center-western state governments. But because they had failed when they tried to directly recruit and select braceros, and because state-level officials did not want to risk losing control of that process, it was municipal-level officials that ultimately determined who received bracero contracts. Municipal authorities then used the bracero recruitment and selection process to enrich themselves, reward local allies, or remove local opponents. Thus, this dissertation shows that bracero migration was a deeply politicized process.
This thesis is divided into four chapters and analyses the role of the European Union and other International Organisations in promoting Corporate Social Responsibility. The first chapter introduces the key concepts and concludes on the necessary re-contextualisation of CSR within International Human Rights Law (IHRL), which is its legal foundation. It particularly studies the practice of the United Nations and proposes a definition of CSR with its inherent characteristics. Chapter two shows the increasing institutional coordination between different International Organisations at a global level, which start to have a substantive impact on IHRL. It further detects the main opportunity niches to transversally introduce human rights into commercial and investment matters, provided that States act in good faith when it comes to manage their concurring international obligations. The third chapter reorders the main initiatives of the European Union and observes promising legal spill-overs of CSR, well beyond mere voluntariness. In the EU, CSR has become a crosscutting strategy or governance tool rather than a separate new policy. The fourth chapter analyses the potential of the EU's contribution to global CSR, focusing on three problematics: first, the potential of soft-law in its interaction with traditional hard-law; secondly, access to justice for human rights' victims of violations directly or indirectly caused by the activities of transnational companies; and finally, how both institutional and substantive aspects have influenced the way the EU develops CSR. ; La tesi, suddivisa in quattro capitoli, analizza e sistematizza il ruolo istituzionale delle organizzazioni internazionali a livello globale (capitoli 1 e 2), e dell'Unione Europea, a livello regionale (capitoli 3 e 4), nella promozione della responsabilità sociale delle imprese (RSI). Il primo capitolo introduttivo sostiene la pertinenza di ricollocare la responsabilità sociale nel quadro del diritto internazionale dei diritti umani –la sua base giuridica. Si studia la prassi delle Nazioni Unite e si conclude con l'individuazione delle caratteristiche della RSI ed una proposta di definizione. Il secondo capitolo mostra il crescente coordinamento istituzionale fra organizzazioni, con potenziali conseguenze per aspetti sostanziali dei diritto. Si dimostra che ci sono margini di possibilità per introdurre nel sistema di risoluzione delle controversie commerciali e sugli investimenti problematiche trasversali riguardanti i diritti umani, in particolare nel caso in cui gli Stati agiscano in buona fede nell'adempimento e nella gestione di obblighi internazionali concorrenti. Il terzo capitolo riordina le iniziative europee a questo riguardo, anche a livello nazionale, ed osserva gli importanti impatti sul diritto europeo, diventando la RSI un obbiettivo trasversale più che una nuova 'policy' per se. Il quarto e ultimo capitolo analizza e valuta il ruolo globale dell'UE nello sviluppo della RSI, ponendo in particolare l'accento su tre questioni: il potenziale della c.d. 'soft-law', in interazione con elementi giuridici tradizionali (o 'hard'), l'accesso alla giustizia per le vittime di violazione dei diritti umani (direttamente o indirettamente dovute alle attività delle imprese transnazionali) ed infine il rapporto fra aspetti istituzionali e sostanziali nel modo in cui l'UE ha affrontato la RSI.
La vivienda es una cuestión clave en los procesos de segregación contemporáneos y debe ser situada en el centro a la hora de estudiar la exclusión social. Sin embargo, tanto en el ámbito académico como en el de las políticas públicas, existe una debilidad a la hora de estudiar la exclusión residencial con respecto a uno de los grupos poblacionales que la viven de una manera más agravada: la infancia. El presente artículo parte de esta situación para realizar una aproximación cualitativa, estableciendo las principales causas y consecuencias de la pobreza infantil en relación a la vivienda. Los resultados obtenidos muestran que los NNA que viven en situación de pobreza residencial sufren unos efectos que les afectan a múltiples planos de sus vidas en el presente, desembocando en un deterioro de las oportunidades futuras que perpetúa la desigualdad.
El presente artículo tiene como propósito analizar los conceptos de asociatividad empresarial y gobernanza, con énfasis en Áreas Naturales Protegidas (ANP) dedicadas a la prestación de servicios turísticos. Para ello, se define el concepto de asociatividad empresarial y sus posibles contribuciones al desarrollo económico. Igualmente, se examina la noción de gobernanza como elemento en la implementación de modelos asociativos. La metodología empleada es de tipo exploratoria. Los resultados obtenidos son la determinación de los componentes que integran los procesos de asociatividad, así como un marco conceptual queexplica la importancia de la gobernanza en el cumplimiento de los objetivos comunitarios
The Canary Islands are a well-known brand in Europe, and in 2017 the number of tourist arrivals exceeded 14 million. The heavy tourist inflow in the 1990s prompted the Government of the Canary Islands to adopt a policy to protect the environment by restricting the building of new hotels. This moratorium was abolished in 2018. The paper describes the evolution of Canary Islands tourism policy in recent years and explains how the government, in cooperation with the private sector, is planning transform the Canary archipelago into a destination with distinct features, different from its competitors. ; peer-reviewed
Schaeffer's sign language consists of a reduced set of gestures designed to help children with autism or cognitive learning disabilities to develop adequate communication skills. Our automatic recognition system for Schaeffer's gesture language uses the information provided by an RGB-D camera to capture body motion and recognize gestures using dynamic time warping combined with k-nearest neighbors methods. The learning process is reinforced by the interaction with the proposed system that accelerates learning itself thus helping both children and educators. To demonstrate the validity of the system, a set of qualitative experiments with children were carried out. As a result, a system which is able to recognize a subset of 11 gestures of Schaeffer's sign language online was achieved. ; This work has been supported by the Spanish Government DPI2013-40534-R Grant, supported with Feder funds.
This article describes how the human activity recognition in videos is a very attractive topic among researchers due to vast possible applications. This article considers the analysis of behaviors and activities in videos obtained with low-cost RGB cameras. To do this, a system is developed where a video is input, and produces as output the possible activities happening in the video. This information could be used in many applications such as video surveillance, disabled person assistance, as a home assistant, employee monitoring, etc. The developed system makes use of the successful techniques of Deep Learning. In particular, convolutional neural networks are used to detect features in the video images, meanwhile Recurrent Neural Networks are used to analyze these features and predict the possible activity in the video. ; This work has been funded by the Spanish Government TIN2016-76515-R grant for the COMBAHO project, supported with Feder funds.
Tactile sensors provide useful contact data during the interaction with an object which can be used to accurately learn to determine the stability of a grasp. Most of the works in the literature represented tactile readings as plain feature vectors or matrix-like tactile images, using them to train machine learning models. In this work, we explore an alternative way of exploiting tactile information to predict grasp stability by leveraging graph-like representations of tactile data, which preserve the actual spatial arrangement of the sensor's taxels and their locality. In experimentation, we trained a Graph Neural Network to binary classify grasps as stable or slippery ones. To train such network and prove its predictive capabilities for the problem at hand, we captured a novel dataset of ~ 5000 three-fingered grasps across 41 objects for training and 1000 grasps with 10 unknown objects for testing. Our experiments prove that this novel approach can be effectively used to predict grasp stability. ; This work has been funded by the Spanish Government with Feder funds (TIN2016-76515-R and DPI2015-68087-R), by two grants for PhD studies (FPU15/04516 and BES-2016-07829), by regional projects (GV/2018/022 and GRE16-19) and by the European Commission (COMMANDIA SOE2/P1/F0638), action supported by Interreg-V Sudoe.
Tactile sensors provide useful contact data during the interaction with an object which can be used to accurately learn to determine the stability of a grasp. Most of the works in the literature represented tactile readings as plain feature vectors or matrix-like tactile images, using them to train machine learning models. In this work, we explore an alternative way of exploiting tactile information to predict grasp stability by leveraging graph-like representations of tactile data, which preserve the actual spatial arrangement of the sensor's taxels and their locality. In experimentation, we trained a Graph Neural Network to binary classify grasps as stable or slippery ones. To train such network and prove its predictive capabilities for the problem at hand, we captured a novel dataset of approximately 5000 three-fingered grasps across 41 objects for training and 1000 grasps with 10 unknown objects for testing. Our experiments prove that this novel approach can be effectively used to predict grasp stability. ; This work has been funded by the Spanish Government with Feder funds (TIN2016-76515-R and DPI2015-68087-R), by two grants for PhD studies (FPU15/04516 and BES-2016-07829), by regional projects (GV/2018/022 and GRE16-19) and by the European Commission (COMMANDIA SOE2/P1/F0638), action supported by Interreg-V Sudoe.
