Suchergebnisse

The complicated relations civilians - militaries, in Spain have as underlying element the hard years of pro-Franco dictatorship. In this attitude, to the wonder if the Spanish armed forces have reached his democratic consolidation and have stopped being a political power, to turn into military administration turns out to be pertinent. The present work was made, by means of data of the public opinion and information extracted of interviews and questionnaires realized to the futures leaderships of the Spanish armed forces, reveal a progresses, intense, will have been realized in this sense and what deficits is still to settle; concluding in the undeniable democratic mien and assumption of the civil supremacy for the part of the official and subofficial more young of the Spanish army (Land, Navy and Air). ; Las complicadas relaciones civiles-militares en España tienen como elemento subyacente los duros años de dictadura franquista. En esa tesitura, preguntarse si las fuerzas armadas españolas han culminado su consolidación democrática y han dejado de ser poder político, para convertirse en administración militar resulta pertinente. El presente trabajo sustentado mediante datos de opinión pública y datos extraídos de diversos entrevistas y cuestionarios realizados a los futuros mandos de las fuerzas armadas españolas, devela qué progresos, intensos, se han realizado en ese sentido y qué déficits quedan todavía por solventar;concluyendo en el innegable talante democrático y asunción de la supremacía civil por parte de la oficialidad y suboficialidad más joven del ejército (Tierra, Armada y Aire) Español. ; As complicadas relações civis-militares em Espanha têm como elemento subyacente nos duros anos de ditadura franquista. Nessa tesitura, perguntar-se se as forças armadas espanholas culminaram sua consolidación democrática e deixaram de ser poder político, para converter-se em administração militar resulta pertinente. O presente trabalho sustentado mediante dados de opinião pública e dados extraídos de diversos entrevistas e cuestionarios realizados aos futuros comandos das forças armadas espanholas, devela que progressos, intensos, se realizaram nesse sentido e daí déficits ficam ainda por solventar, concluindo no innegable talante democrático e assunção da supremacía civil por parte da oficialidad e suboficialidad mais jovem do exército (Terra, Armada e Ar) Espanhol.

A proposed activity to improve the process of planning for horizontal construction projects of the Department of Publiuc Works and Highways (DPWH) is applied geotagging, Geotagging is a process where a device with a Global Positioning System (GPS) feature, is used to capture and mark images or other form of media with a geographical reference point. Applied geotagging was done on the APEC road, connecting the Institute of Plant Breeding (IPB) road to municipal road, Bay, Laguna. Applied geotagging in the project was used to gather information such as distances, elevations, and mapping profiles. The data gathered using applied geotagging are processed using Google Earth Pro and used for the computation of various quantities, namely total road length, volume of earthworks (for road and drainage), and total area for clearing and grubbing, for the planning of the assigned road project. The quantities based on applied geotagging was found out to be near the values as stated on the program of the project, which concludes that applied geotagging can be used for the planning of horizontal construction in government projects. Applied geotagging replaces the traditional methods of acquiring data which improves the planning process using up-to-date information. It also promotes project transparency and validation and the geotagging process saves manpower, time, and effort.

The complicated relations civilians - militaries, in Spain have as underlying element the hard years of pro-Franco dictatorship. In this attitude, to the wonder if the Spanish armed forces have reached his democratic consolidation and have stopped being a political power, to turn into military administration turns out to be pertinent. The present work was made, by means of data of the public opinion and information extracted of interviews and questionnaires realized to the futures leaderships of the Spanish armed forces, reveal a progresses, intense, will have been realized in this sense and what deficits is still to settle; concluding in the undeniable democratic mien and assumption of the civil supremacy for the part of the official and subofficial more young of the Spanish army (Land, Navy and Air). ; Las complicadas relaciones civiles-militares en España tienen como elemento subyacente los duros años de dictadura franquista. En esa tesitura, preguntarse si las fuerzas armadas españolas han culminado su consolidación democrática y han dejado de ser poder político, para convertirse en administración militar resulta pertinente. El presente trabajo sustentado mediante datos de opinión pública y datos extraídos de diversos entrevistas y cuestionarios realizados a los futuros mandos de las fuerzas armadas españolas, devela qué progresos, intensos, se han realizado en ese sentido y qué déficits quedan todavía por solventar;concluyendo en el innegable talante democrático y asunción de la supremacía civil por parte de la oficialidad y suboficialidad más joven del ejército (Tierra, Armada y Aire) Español. ; As complicadas relações civis-militares em Espanha têm como elemento subyacente nos duros anos de ditadura franquista. Nessa tesitura, perguntar-se se as forças armadas espanholas culminaram sua consolidación democrática e deixaram de ser poder político, para converter-se em administração militar resulta pertinente. O presente trabalho sustentado mediante dados de opinião pública e dados extraídos de diversos entrevistas e cuestionarios realizados aos futuros comandos das forças armadas espanholas, devela que progressos, intensos, se realizaram nesse sentido e daí déficits ficam ainda por solventar, concluindo no innegable talante democrático e assunção da supremacía civil por parte da oficialidad e suboficialidad mais jovem do exército (Terra, Armada e Ar) Espanhol.

This article provides a comparative study of citizen comments on the Electronic Participatory Budgeting (e‐PB) online forums in Belo Horizonte (Brazil) in 2008 and 2011. The forums allow citizens to deliberate on public projects suggested by the city hall and to vote on which ones they think should be carried out. We analyzed all messages sent to the forums (N = 2,370) in order to investigate citizen feelings toward the initiative, use of narratives and testimonies, perception of e‐PB political effectiveness and representation and whether uses changed from one edition to the next. The results indicate a significant change, from an environment of positive citizen evaluation in 2008 to a negative one in 2011, suggesting a loss of trust in the process. In 2011, participants expressed frustration over the lack of options, dissatisfaction that work promised in 2008 was not carried out, and lack of city hall responses in general. These findings demonstrate the importance of analyzing citizen perceptions and feelings when evaluating online channels and e‐participation initiatives set up by local governments, and the necessity for governments to ensure interaction and feedback, in order to sustain citizen engagement and trust.

ABSTRACTThe emergence of ex-rebels' political parties after peace accords creates a vehicle for political reintegration, which in turn has positive effects on peace and democracy consolidation after war. However, many of these parties tend to break apart and disappear, elevating the risk of renewed cycles of political violence. In times of war, cohesion plays a pivotal role in maintaining the bonds among members of armed organizations. It empowers them to perform effectively even in the face of challenging conditions and continues to be a critical factor during postconflict transitions. By means of a quantitative analysis of former FARC guerrillas in Colombia, now part of a newly founded legal political party, we test whether ideology, organizational dynamics, or individual perceptions and motivations help to explain their levels of cohesion. Our results show that even if all dimensions add up to the observed cohesion levels, perceptions of internal democracy, and inclusion, are the most relevant. We argue that assistance to former rebels in their organizational reengineering efforts after war will help to reduce the risk of the negative effects of rebel party collapse.

Abstract. Many previous modelling studies have considered
storm-tide and riverine flooding independently, even though
joint-probability analysis highlighted significant dependence between
extreme rainfall and extreme storm surges in estuarine environments. This
study investigates compound flooding by quantifying horizontal and vertical
differences in coastal flood risk estimates resulting from a separation of
storm-tide and riverine flooding processes. We used an open-source version
of the Delft3D model to simulate flood extent and inundation depth due to a
storm event that occurred in June 2016 in the Shoalhaven Estuary,
south-eastern
Australia. Time series of observed water levels and discharge measurements
are used to force model boundaries, whereas observational data such as
satellite imagery, aerial photographs, tidal gauges and water level logger
measurements are used to validate modelling results. The comparison of
simulation results including and excluding riverine discharge demonstrated
large differences in modelled flood extents and inundation depths. A flood
risk assessment accounting only for storm-tide flooding would have
underestimated the flood extent of the June 2016 storm event by 30 %
(20.5 km2). Furthermore, inundation depths would have been
underestimated on average by 0.34 m and by up to 1.5 m locally. We recommend
considering storm-tide and riverine flooding processes jointly in estuaries
with large catchment areas, which are known to have a quick response time to
extreme rainfall. In addition, comparison of different boundary set-ups at
the intermittent entrance in Shoalhaven Heads indicated that a permanent
opening, in order to reduce exposure to riverine flooding, would increase
tidal range and exposure to both storm-tide flooding and wave action.

Sandy beaches are highly dynamic systems which provide natural protection from the impact of waves to coastal communities. With coastal erosion hazards predicted to increase globally, data to inform decision making on erosion mitigation and adaptation strategies is becoming critical. However, multi-temporal topographic data over wide geographical areas is expensive and time consuming and often requires highly trained professionals. In this study we demonstrate a novel approach combining citizen science with low-cost unmanned aerial vehicles that reliably produces survey-grade morphological data able to model sediment dynamics from event to annual scales. The high-energy wave-dominated coast of south-eastern Australia, in Victoria, is used as a field laboratory to test the reliability of our protocol and develop a set of indices to study multi-scale erosional dynamics. We found that citizen scientists provide unbiased data as accurate as professional researchers. We then observed that open-ocean beaches mobilise three times as much sediment as embayed beaches and distinguished between slowed and accelerated erosional modes. The data was also able to assess the efficiency of sand nourishment for shore protection. Our citizen science protocol provides high quality monitoring capabilities, which although subject to important legislative preconditions, it is applicable in other parts of the world and transferable to other landscape systems where the understanding of sediment dynamics is critical for management of natural or anthropogenic processes.

ABSTRACT Purpose: This research examines the superiority of analysts over random walk models in forecasting the results of publicly-traded Brazilian companies in the short and long term. Originality/value: The literature indicates the uncontested superiority of market analysts because of their temporal and informational advantages. However, recent international studies call for a re-evaluation of this superiority, indicating that, for certain company characteristics, and primarily for long-term estimates, the superiority of analysts is not confirmed. Design/methodology/approach: This work evaluates the profit forecasting of analysts and simple and growth random walk models over the short and long term over 2010-2015 for publicly traded Brazilian companies, using the information available for the period with annual intervals. Findings: The results indicate: 1. the greater forecasting accuracy of simple random walk models compared to the growth random walk models; and 2. the greater forecasting accuracy of random walk models overall, with analyst forecasts only being superior for cases with three months of lag. The evidence suggests the forecasting superiority of the random walk models when compared to the market analysts' forecasts. The results suggest low efficiency of the forecasts of market analysts for the forecast of future results of publicly traded Brazilian companies in the analyzed period.

Large bilingual parallel texts (also known as bitexts) are usually stored in a compressed form, and previous work has shown that they can be more efficiently compressed if the fact that the two texts are mutual translations is exploited. For example, a bitext can be seen as a sequence of biwords —pairs of parallel words with a high probability of co-occurrence— that can be used as an intermediate representation in the compression process. However, the simple biword approach described in the literature can only exploit one-to-one word alignments and cannot tackle the reordering of words. We therefore introduce a generalization of biwords which can describe multi-word expressions and reorderings. We also describe some methods for the binary compression of generalized biword sequences, and compare their performance when different schemes are applied to the extraction of the biword sequence. In addition, we show that this generalization of biwords allows for the implementation of an efficient algorithm to look on the compressed bitext for words or text segments in one of the texts and retrieve their counterpart translations in the other text —an application usually referred to as translation spotting— with only some minor modifications in the compression algorithm. ; This work has been supported by the Spanish Government through projects TIN2009-14009-C02-01 and TIN2009-14009-C02-02, and by the Millennium Institute for Cell Dynamics and Biotechnology (grant ICM P05-001-F).

The use of enzymes in industrial processes requires the improvement of their features in many instances. Enzyme immobilization, a requirement to facilitate the recovery and reuse of these water-soluble catalysts, is one of the tools that researchers may utilize to improve many of their properties. This review is focused on how enzyme immobilization may improve enzyme stability. Starting from the stabilization effects that an enzyme may experience by the mere fact of being inside a solid particle, we detail other possibilities to stabilize enzymes: generation of favorable enzyme environments, prevention of enzyme subunit dissociation in multimeric enzymes, generation of more stable enzyme conformations, or enzyme rigidification via multipoint covalent attachment. In this last point, we will discuss the features of an "ideal" immobilization protocol to maximize the intensity of the enzyme-support interactions. The most interesting active groups in the support (glutaraldehyde, epoxide, glyoxyl and vinyl sulfone) will be also presented, discussing their main properties and uses. Some instances in which the number of enzyme-support bonds is not directly related to a higher stabilization will be also presented. Finally, the possibility of coupling site-directed mutagenesis or chemical modification to get a more intense multipoint covalent immobilization will be discussed. ; We gratefully recognize the financial support from Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación-Spanish Government (project number CTQ2017-86170-R) and CSIC for the project AEP045. Diego Carballares thanks a FPI fellowship to Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación, Roberto Morellon-Sterling recognizes a FPU to Ministerio de educación.