An example of integration between en economic and an hydrologic model in the framework of water resource management problems

Growing scarcity, increasing demand and bad management of water resources are causing weighty competition for water and consequently managers are facing more and more pressure in an attempt to satisfy users? requirement. In many regions agriculture is one of the most important users at river basin scale since it concentrates high volumes of water consumption during relatively short periods (irrigation season), with a significant economic, social and environmental impact. The interdisciplinary characteristics of related water resources problems require, as established in the Water Framework Directive 2000/60/EC, an integrated and participative approach to water management and assigns an essential role to economic analysis as a decision support tool. For this reason, a methodology is developed to analyse the economic and environmental implications of water resource management under different scenarios, with a focus on the agricultural sector. This research integrates both economic and hydrologic components in modelling, defining scenarios of water resource management with the goal of preventing critical situations, such as droughts. The model follows the Positive Mathematical Programming (PMP) approach, an innovative methodology successfully used for agricultural policy analysis in the last decade and also applied in several analyses regarding water use in agriculture. This approach has, among others, the very important capability of perfectly calibrating the baseline scenario using a very limited database. However one important disadvantage is its limited capacity to simulate activities non-observed during the reference period but which could be adopted if the scenario changed. To overcome this problem the classical methodology is extended in order to simulate a more realistic farmers? response to new agricultural policies or modified water availability. In this way an economic model has been developed to reproduce the farmers? behaviour within two irrigation districts in the Tiber High Valley. This economic model is then integrated with SIMBAT, an hydrologic model developed for the Tiber basin which allows to simulate the balance between the water volumes available at the Montedoglio dam and the water volumes required by the various irrigation users.

An analysis of recent changes in Spanish Coastal Law

Spanish coastal legislation has changed in response to changing circumstances. The objective of the 1969 Spanish Coastal Law was to assign responsibilities in the Public Domain to the authorities. The 1980 Spanish Coastal Law addressed infractions and sanctions issues. The 1988 Spanish Coastal Law completed the responsibilities and sanctions aspects and included others related to the delimitation of the Public Domain, the private properties close to the Public Domain, and limitations on landuse in this area. The 1988 Spanish Coastal Law has been controversial since its publication. The “European Parliament Report on the impact of extensive urbanization in Spain on individual rights of European citizen, on the environment and on the application of EU law, based upon petitions received”, published in 2009 recommended that the Spanish Authorities make an urgent revision of the Coastal Law with the main objective of protecting property owners whose buildings do not have negative effects on the coastal environment. The revision recommended has been carried out, in the new Spanish Coastal Law “Ley 2/2013, de 29 de mayo, de protección y uso sostenible del litoral y de modificación de la Ley 22/1988, de 28 de Julio, de Costas”, published in May of 2013. This is the first major change in the 25 years since the previous 1988 Spanish Coastal Law. This paper compares the 1988 and 2013 Spanish Coastal Law documents, highlighting the most important issues like the Public Domain description, limitations in private properties close to the Public Domain limit, climate change influence, authorizations length, etc. The paper includes proposals for further improvements.

Subjective Evaluation of Transmission Errors in IPTV and 3DTV

The increase of multimedia services delivered over packet-based networks has entailed greater quality expectations of the end-users. This has led to an intensive research on techniques for evaluating the quality of experience perceived by the viewers of audiovisual content, considering the different degradations that it could suffer along the broadcasting system. In this paper, a comprehensive study of the impact of transmission errors affecting video and audio in IPTV is presented. With this aim, subjective assessment tests were carried out proposing a novel methodology trying to keep as close as possible home environment viewing conditions. Also 3DTV content in side-by-side format has been used in the experiments to compare the impact of the degradations. The results provide a better understanding of the effects of transmission errors, and show that the QoE related to the first approach of 3DTV is acceptable, but the visual discomfort that it causes should be reduced.

An overview of the ciao multiparadigm language and program development environment and its design philosophy

We describe some of the novel aspects and motivations behind the design and implementation of the Ciao multiparadigm programming system. An important aspect of Ciao is that it provides the programmer with a large number of useful features from different programming paradigms and styles, and that the use of each of these features can be turned on and off at will for each program module. Thus, a given module may be using e.g. higher order functions and constraints, while another module may be using objects, predicates, and concurrency. Furthermore, the language is designed to be extensible in a simple and modular way. Another important aspect of Ciao is its programming environment, which provides a powerful preprocessor (with an associated assertion language) capable of statically finding non-trivial bugs, verifying that programs comply with specifications, and performing many types of program optimizations. Such optimizations produce code that is highly competitive with other dynamic languages or, when the highest levéis of optimization are used, even that of static languages, all while retaining the interactive development environment of a dynamic language. The environment also includes a powerful auto-documenter. The paper provides an informal overview of the language and program development environment. It aims at illustrating the design philosophy rather than at being exhaustive, which would be impossible in the format of a paper, pointing instead to the existing literature on the system.

An integration of partial evaluation in a generic abstract interpretation framework

Information generated by abstract interpreters has long been used to perform program specialization. Additionally, if the abstract interpreter generates a multivariant analysis, it is also possible to perform múltiple specialization. Information about valúes of variables is propagated by simulating program execution and performing fixpoint computations for recursive calis. In contrast, traditional partial evaluators (mainly) use unfolding for both propagating valúes of variables and transforming the program. It is known that abstract interpretation is a better technique for propagating success valúes than unfolding. However, the program transformations induced by unfolding may lead to important optimizations which are not directly achievable in the existing frameworks for múltiple specialization based on abstract interpretation. The aim of this work is to devise a specialization framework which integrates the better information propagation of abstract interpretation with the powerful program transformations performed by partial evaluation, and which can be implemented via small modifications to existing generic abstract interpreters. With this aim, we will relate top-down abstract interpretation with traditional concepts in partial evaluation and sketch how the sophisticated techniques developed for controlling partial evaluation can be adapted to the proposed specialization framework. We conclude that there can be both practical and conceptual advantages in the proposed integration of partial evaluation and abstract interpretation.

On the uses of attributed variables in parallel and concurrent logic programming systems

Incorporating the possibility of attaching attributes to variables in a logic programming system has been shown to allow the addition of general constraint solving capabilities to it. This approach is very attractive in that by adding a few primitives any logic programming system can be turned into a generic constraint logic programming system in which constraint solving can be user defined, and at source level - an extreme example of the "glass box" approach. In this paper we propose a different and novel use for the concept of attributed variables: developing a generic parallel/concurrent (constraint) logic programming system, using the same "glass box" flavor. We argüe that a system which implements attributed variables and a few additional primitives can be easily customized at source level to implement many of the languages and execution models of parallelism and concurrency currently proposed, in both shared memory and distributed systems. We illustrate this through examples.

Simulation of wind farms in flat and complex terrain using CFD

Use of computational fluid dynamic (CFD) methods to predict the power production from wind entire wind farms in flat and complex terrain is presented in this paper. Two full 3D Navier–Stokes solvers for incompressible flow are employed that incorporate the k–ε and k–ω turbulence models respectively. The wind turbines (W/Ts) are modelled as momentum absorbers by means of their thrust coefficient using the actuator disk approach. The WT thrust is estimated using the wind speed one diameter upstream of the rotor at hub height. An alternative method that employs an induction-factor based concept is also tested. This method features the advantage of not utilizing the wind speed at a specific distance from the rotor disk, which is a doubtful approximation when a W/T is located in the wake of another and/or the terrain is complex. To account for the underestimation of the near wake deficit, a correction is introduced to the turbulence model. The turbulence time scale is bounded using the general “realizability” constraint for the turbulent velocities. Application is made on two wind farms, a five-machine one located in flat terrain and another 43-machine one located in complex terrain. In the flat terrain case, the combination of the induction factor method along with the turbulence correction provides satisfactory results. In the complex terrain case, there are some significant discrepancies with the measurements, which are discussed. In this case, the induction factor method does not provide satisfactory results.

An evaluation of seismic hazard in La Hispaniola, after the 2010 Haiti earthquake

An evaluation of the seismic hazard in La Hispaniola Island has been carried out, as part of the cooperative project SISMO-HAITI, supported by the Technical University of Madrid (UPM) and developed by several Spanish Universities, the National Observatory of Environment and Vulnerability) ONEV of Haiti, and with contributions from the Puerto Rico Seismic Network (PRSN) and University Seismological Institute of Dominican Republic (ISU). The study was aimed at obtaining results suitable for seismic design purposes. It started with the elaboration of a seismic catalogue for the Hispaniola Island, requiring an exhaustive revision of data reported by more than 20 seismic agencies, apart from these from the PRSN and ISU. The final catalogue contains 96 historical earthquakes and 1690 instrumental events, and it was homogenized to moment magnitude, Mw. Seismotectonic models proposed for the region were revised and a new regional zonation was proposed, taking into account geological andtectonic data, seismicity, focal mechanisms, and GPS observations. In parallel, attenuation models for subduction and crustal zones were revised in previous projects and the most suitable for the Caribbean plate were selected. Then, a seismic hazard analysis was developed in terms of peak ground acceleration, PGA, and spectral accelerations, SA (T), for periods of 0.1, 0.2, 0.5, 1 and 2s, using the Probabilistic Seismic Hazard Assessment (PSHA) methodology. As a result, different hazard maps were obtained for the quoted parameters, together with Uniform Hazard Spectra for Port au Prince and the main cities in the country. Hazard deaggregation was also carried out in these towns, for the target motion given by the PGA and SA (1s) obtained for return periods of 475, 975 and 2475 years. Therefore, the controlling earthquakes for short- and long-period target motions were derived. This study was started a few months after the 2010 earthquake, as a response to an aid request from the Haitian government to the UPM, and the results are available for the definition of the first building code in Haiti.

A comparative analysis of ABE Bachelor of Science programs in European and US Universities.

European Universities are involved in series of great changes regarding teaching and education organization during the last few years. The origin of these changes is the creation of the so-called European Higher Education Area (EHEA), which main target is to harmonize the different University studies throughout Europe. As a consequence, most of the programs of studies in all degrees are suffering changes in order to converge to common structures. Taking advantage of the actual process, some European universities are moving from traditional Agricultural Engineering programs to a more wide discipline named recently as Biosystems Engineering, which is a science- based engineering discipline that integrates engineering science and design with applied biological, environmental and agricultural sciences, broadening in this way the area of application of Engineering sciences not strictly to agricultural sciences, but to the biologic al sciences in general, including the agricultural sciences. This paper presents a comparative study of different Bachelor of Science degrees offered by American and European Universities in the field of Agricultural/Biosystems Engineering. To carry out the analysis 40 programs accredited by ABET in American Universities and 50 European programs. Among other questions, the total number of credits, the number of semesters, the kind of modules and the distribution of subjects in groups (Basic Sciences, Engineering Fundamentals, Agricultural/Biological Sciences, Humanities & Economic Sciences, Applied Agricultural/Biological Engineering and electives) are discussed in the paper. The information provided can be an useful starting point in future definitions of new or renewed degrees with the aim of advancing in internationalization of the programs and helping student’s mobility.

Test Analysis Tool (TATo). A new tool for standardization of time series in maritime and port environment

During the last decades, Puertos del Estado and research groups have developed a huge effort on numerical an physical monitoring. This effort has led to the necessity to implement a tool to standardize, store and process all gathered data. The Test Analysis Tool (TATo) is described in the paper.

Proposal for a semantic hierarchy of terminological metaphors in science and technology

Cognitive linguistics is considered as one of the most appropriate approaches to the study of scientific and technical language formation and development, where metaphor is accepted to play an essential role. This paper, based on the Cognitive Theory of Metaphor, takes as the starting point the terminological metaphors established in the research project METACITEC(Note 1), which was developed with the purpose of unfolding constitutive metaphors and their function in the language of science and technology. After the analysis of metaphorical terms and using a mixed corpus from the fields of Agriculture, Geology, Mining, Metallurgy, and other related technical fields, this study presents a proposal for a hierarchy of the selected metaphors underlying the scientific conceptual system, based on the semantic distance found in the projection from the source domain to the target domain. We argue that this semantic distance can be considered as an important parameter to take into account in order to establish the metaphoricity of science and technology metaphorical terms. The findings contribute to expand on the CTM stance that metaphor is a matter of cognition by reviewing the abstract-concrete conceptual relationship between the target and source domains, and to determine the role of human creativity and imagination in the language of science and technology configuration

Comparative Analysis of Firms’ Participation in National and International Programmes to Support Innovation

Innovation is a process that faces several market failure situations. For this reason and for being considered one of the main drivers of economic growth, a large number of governmental and supranational policies are designed to foster technological progress. Along with these policies, there is an increasing concern with their continuous evaluation aiming at providing valuable feedback for these program?s adaptation and adequacy to the firm?s needs. The paper develops an evaluation of the influence of innovation-focused programs in firm¿s innovation and economic performance by means of a comparative analysis of the results obtained by Spanish firms that have participated in R&D national programmes and those achieved by Spanish firms participating in EUREKA international program. Findings show that the programmes were effective in achieving their objective of promoting technological innovation but, as regards the economic effects, the results were less conclusive since some differences were observed depending on the programme. The EUREKA companies displayed better behaviour, with positive differences in their returns on assets and labour productivity. The results also confirm the importance of designing more detailed and rigorous evaluation processes, taking into account the risk variable, in order to draw a more realistic picture of the impact of national and international programmes.

Improvement of root architecture under abiotic stress through control of auxin homeostasis in Arabidopsis and Brassica crops

Auxin plays an important role in many aspects of plant development including stress responses. Here we briefly summarize how auxin is involved in salt stress, drought (i.e. mostly osmotic stress), waterlogging and nutrient deficiency in Brassica plants. In addition, some mechanisms to control auxin levels and signaling in relation to root formation (under stress) will be reviewed. Molecular studies are mainly described for the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana, but we also like to demonstrate how this knowledge can be transferred to agriculturally important Brassica species, such as Brassica rapa, Brassica napus and Brassica campestris. Moreover, beneficial fungi could play a role in the adaptation response of Brassica roots to abiotic stresses. Therefore, the possible influence of Piriformospora indica will also be covered since the growth promoting response of plants colonized by P. indica is also linked to plant hormones, among them auxin.

Analysis of microbial populations in Rusitec fermenters fed diets of variable composition

Fermenters are widely used to study ruminal fermentation, but information on microbial populations developing in fermenters over the incubation period is limited. Four Rusitec fermenters were fed 2 diets representative of those administered to dairy sheep(DAI; 50:50 alfalfa hay:concentrate) and fattening lambs (FAT; 15:85 barley straw:concentrate) in a crossover design with 2 14-d incubation periods to assess the evolution of the microbial populations. There were 4 fermenters per diet.