Projecte i disseny d’ una talladora de closques de castanya

L’objectiu d’ aquest treball consisteix en projectar i dissenyar una màquina amb capacitat per realitzar el tall lateral a les castanyes a gran producció. Ideada per complir la norma USFDA, integra una sèrie d' elements que permeten carregar els fruits de manera manual amb facilitat, un sistema de dosificat sobre una cinta de transport i una descàrrega d'aquests fruits sobre un sistema de rails que orienten i pre-carreguen un sistema de talladors de doble acció que s' encarrega de fer el tall i retirar el fruit

Disseny i projecte per a la construcció d’una màquina per a realitzar el tall a les castanyes

L’objecte del present projecte es el de realitzar el disseny per a la construcció d’unamàquina per fer el tall de castanyes. Aquesta maquina inclourà la estructura, tolva d’alimentació, mecanisme de tall i sistema de seguretat. Un cop realitzat el tall a la castanya, aquesta serà evacuada per gravetat. L’alimentació dins la tolva i l’extracció del producte tallat es realitzarà manualment

Using free data mining software and clustering algorithms to find predictors from student qualifications

In this project a research both in finding predictors via clustering techniques and in reviewing the Data Mining free software is achieved. The research is based in a case of study, from where additionally to the KDD free software used by the scientific community; a new free tool for pre-processing the data is presented. The predictors are intended for the e-learning domain as the data from where these predictors have to be inferred are student qualifications from different e-learning environments. Through our case of study not only clustering algorithms are tested but also additional goals are proposed.

Profitability, uncertainty and multi-product firm product proliferation: The Spanish car industry

This article studies how product introduction decisions relate to profitability and uncertainty in the context of multi-product firms and product differentiation. These two features, common to many modern industries, have not received much attention in the literature as compared to the classical problem of firm entry, even if the determinants of firm and product entry are quite different. The theoretical predictions about the sign of the impact of uncertainty on product entry are not conclusive. Therefore, an econometric model relating firms’ product introduction decisions with profitability and profit uncertainty is proposed. Firm’s estimated profits are obtained from a structural model of product demand and supply, and uncertainty is proxied by profits’ variance. The empirical analysis is carried out using data on the Spanish car industry for the period 1990-2000. The results show a positive relationship between product introduction and profitability, and a negative one with respect to profit variability. Interestingly, the degree of uncertainty appears to be a driving force of entry stronger than profitability, suggesting that the product proliferation process in the Spanish car market may have been mainly a consequence of lower uncertainty rather than the result of having a more profitable market

From the “Mining Triangle” to the “Greater Region“ (“Großregion”/”Grande Région”). The Institutionalisation of the “SaarLorLux” Euroregion

Gairebé 182 milions d'ciutadans de la Unió Europea (= 37,5% de la població total) viuen en aproximadament 130 regions frontereres i transfrontereres. Aquestes regions contribueixen significativament al procés d'integració europea. Aquesta importància es documenta pel paquet dels Fons Estructurals 2007-2013, que ha estat presentat per la Comissió Europea i que va ser aprovat recentment pel Parlament Europeu. Considerant que la UE ha gastat uns 4875 € milions per a la cooperació transfronterera, transnacional i interregional en el marc de la iniciativa Interreg per al període 2000-2006, la cooperació territorial europea es convertirà en un dels tres objectius dels fons estructurals i rebrà € 7750000000 (5,57 milions d'euros per a la cooperació transfronterera només) per al període 2007-2013 (Comissió Europea, 2006a, 2006b). A part d'això, un nou conjunt de normes per a l'establiment d'una "agrupació europea de cooperació territorial" (AECT) ha estat adoptat i que facilitarà la cooperació transboundray, transnacional i interregional a la UE. Aquest treball s'ocuparà de les estructures de la institucionalització, la presa de decisions i l'execució i les polítiques de la "Gran Regió" / "Großregion" (d'ara endavant: GR o Gran Regió).

Mining and exploiting domain-specific corpora in the PANACEA platform

The objective of the PANACEA ICT-2007.2.2 EU project is to build a platform that automates the stages involved in the acquisition,production, updating and maintenance of the large language resources required by, among others, MT systems. The development of a Corpus Acquisition Component (CAC) for extracting monolingual and bilingual data from the web is one of the most innovative building blocks of PANACEA. The CAC, which is the first stage in the PANACEA pipeline for building Language Resources, adopts an efficient and distributed methodology to crawl for web documents with rich textual content in specific languages and predefined domains. The CAC includes modules that can acquire parallel data from sites with in-domain content available in more than one language. In order to extrinsically evaluate the CAC methodology, we have conducted several experiments that used crawled parallel corpora for the identification and extraction of parallel sentences using sentence alignment. The corpora were then successfully used for domain adaptation of Machine Translation Systems.

The Impact of Industry Collaboration on Academic Research Output: A Dynamic Panel Data Analysis

The aim of this paper is to analyse the impact of university knowledge and technology transfer activities on academic research output. Specifically, we study whether researchers with collaborative links with the private sector publish less than their peers without such links, once controlling for other sources of heterogeneity. We report findings from a longitudinal dataset on researchers from two engineering departments in the UK between 1985 until 2006. Our results indicate that researchers with industrial links publish significantly more than their peers. Academic productivity, though, is higher for low levels of industry involvement as compared to high levels.

Entrepreneurship, organization and economic performance among Spanish firms, 1930-1975. The case of the motor industry

Before the Civil War (1936-1939), Spain had seen the emergence offirms of complex organizational forms. However, the conflict andthe postwar years changed this pattern. The argument put forwardin this paper is based on historical experience, the efforts willbe addressed to explain the development of Spanish entrepreneurshipduring the second half of the twentieth century. To illustrate thechange in entrepreneurship and organizational patterns among theSpanish firms during the Francoist regime we will turn to the caseof the motor vehicle industry.

Capital formation in machinery and industrialization. Chile 1844-1938

The present paper revisits an old theme in Latin American and Chilean economic history; the early industrialization in the XIX - XX centuries. The difference with previous approaches is the elaboration of new quantitative series of Chilean machinery investment in the long run and its relative prices and composition, in the period when some authors have sited the beginning of the industrialization in the continent. Initial findings, based on the participation of capital formation in machinery imports and GDP, do not reinforce the idea of early industrialization in Chile.

Determinants of organizational form: Transaction costs and institutions in the European trucking industry

We explain why European trucking carriers are much smaller and rely more heavily on owner-operators(as opposed to employee drivers) than their US counterparts. Our analysis begins by ruling outdifferences in technology as the source of those disparities and confirms that standard hypothesesin organizational economics, which have been shown to explain the choice of organizational form inUS industry, also apply in Europe. We then argue that the preference for subcontracting oververtical integration in Europe is the result of European institutions particularly, labor regulationand tax laws that increase the costs of vertical integration.

The drive for quality - the impact on accounting in the wine industry

There is a substancial literature on the accounting procedures needed to trackdown the costs of quality control and quality failure. In a drive for improved quality the changes in the process of production or service delivery will also give rise to new accounting needs. In this article we take one example of an industry, wine production, where in most countries there has been a movement towards expanding higher quality production. We report on interviews with wine producers in the US, Australia, Canada, New Zealand and Spain, and identify avariety of ways in which a more sophisticated approach to accounting has become necessary as a result of the drive for quality.

Wage determination in the Spanish industry

In this paper we estimate wage equations for the Spanish industryusing time series data on 85 industrial sectors, which allows us todistinguish between aggregate and sector specific effects in wagedetermination. Industry wages respond mainly to economy wide labourmarket conditions and to a much lesser extent to sector specificproductivity gains. The size of the insider effect has not remainedstable through the sample period. The estimated equations show a strongtransitory effect of unemployment on wages, which is in accordancewith the non--stationarity of the Spanish unemployment rate. Thishysteresis effect seems well accounted for by the sharp rise in theproportion of long term unemployment.

The electric revolution in Latin America

Latin America participated in the electric revolution which profoundly transformed the most developed Western economies between 1880 and 1930. The electrification of Latin America began relatively soon after these economies, but it was incapable of keeping up with them. Public electric lighting was introduced early in the big Latin American cities, where electric trams started running at almost the same time as in Europe, and electricity spread rapidly in the mining sector. In the most advanced countries or areas in the region, the manufacturing industry substituted the steam engine with the electric motor, following the example of industry in the United States and Europe. Nevertheless, towards 1930 electricity consumption per inhabitant for Latin America was far below that of the more advanced economies, and only the Latin American countries which lead the process of electrification had reached levels of electric consumption that were similar to those of the late industrialised European countries. One of the most striking features of the electric revolution in Latin America is rooted precisely in the enormous national differences. These differences are indicative of the great economic inequalities existing in the heart of the region and these nations highly diverse capacity for economic modernisation.

The persistence of abnormal returns at industry and firm levels

The present paper proposes a model for the persistence of abnormal returnsboth at firm and industry levels, when longitudinal data for the profitsof firms classiffied as industries are available. The model produces a two-way variance decomposition of abnormal returns: (a) at firm versus industrylevels, and (b) for permanent versus transitory components. This variancedecomposition supplies information on the relative importance of thefundamental components of abnormal returns that have been discussed in theliterature. The model is applied to a Spanish sample of firms, obtainingresults such as: (a) there are significant and permanent differences betweenprofit rates both at industry and firm levels; (b) variation of abnormal returnsat firm level is greater than at industry level; and (c) firm and industry levelsdo not differ significantly regarding rates of convergence of abnormal returns.