Breakguides: Creació d'una empresa de guiatge low cost

El projecte es planteja el repte de cobrir un forat en l’oferta turística seguint la fórmula low cost: el guiatge turístic. La idea de la empresa que volem estudiar i crear (BREAKGUIDES) és la de poder oferir els serveis de guiatge, ja siguin guies correu o guies locals en destinació, seguint una fórmula low cost que s’adapti al nou perfil de turista i al seu pressupost. L’empresa tindrà un perfil semblant al d’una xarxa social que ofereixi serveis de guiatge a canvi d’un petit sou i la manutenció

El sector hotelero en China : el fenómeno "low cost" en la nueva clase urbana

Aquest treball es justifica per la complementarietat que, d'una banda ofereix el potencial i volum d'un mercat en plena efervescència com és l'àmbit urbà de la Xina, on el seu incipient maduresa, com a conseqüència de l'efecte d'arrossegament que la inversió estrangera - intensa i innovadora - ha provocat, facilitant l'aparició d'una demanda d'un nivell superior, no primària, com les activitats emmarcades en el lleure i el turisme. D'altra banda, per una proposta de negoci dins d'un sector amb grans expectatives de desenvolupament com és el turístic i, finalment, també per l'opció d'un consum basat en el factor preu, amb unes característiques socioeconòmiques determinades de demanda, i en què la societat urbana de la Xina ja comença a veure's reflectida. Més enllà del paper tradicional de la Xina com a procés avantatjós dins de la cadena productiva o com a mercat d'outputs de volum, es dibuixa una nova classe mitjana urbana, inserint-se de ple i en molt poc temps en les dinàmiques de consum global, recolzada en les noves tecnologies - on el procés productiu low cost basa gran part del seu desenvolupament -.

The Emergence and Governance of Euroregions: The Case of the Euregio on the Dutch-German Border

Amb una història que data de la dècada de 1950, la EUREGIO és un de les més antigues euroregions a Europa. Es pot considerar com un cas exitós d'una regió transfronterera (CBR) en el sentit que s'ha establert fermament com una agència de fronteres dins del seu tram de la frontera holandesa-alemanya. L'EUREGIO també ha estat una de les protagonistes principals darrere de l'Associació de Regions Frontereres Europees (ARFE), que en les últimes dècades va actuar per difondre el model d'euroregió a tot el territori europeu. Aquest capítol té diversos objectius. En primer lloc, es presenta el cas de la EUREGIO i presenta evidència sobre la seva història, estructura orgànica i polítiques. En segon lloc, s'analitzen les condicions del context en què la EUREGIO ha sorgit i les estructures de govern que es van crear com a resultat. Es fa especial èmfasi en la posició i el paper de l'Euroregió en el context més ampli del marc de governança europea multinivell generat per la política de cohesió de la UE. El capítol conclou amb un intent d'avaluar l'èxit i l'impacte de la EUREGIO i una discussió dels reptes relacionats amb la doble funció de l'EUREGIO com a representant dels interessos de les autoritats locals i les agències de cohesió de la UE posada en pràctica de les polítiques.

The Franco-German motor before the eastern enlargement: the causes of its decline

The Franco-German axis has been a transcendent force behind the European integration ever since the early years of the EEC. Nevertheless, since the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989, the perception of a progressive distancing between France and Germany as far as the EU politics is concerned, has increased. There has not been a definitive break in Franco-German relations. However, the influence of the Franco-German axis in the EU has been reduced in the 90s. Finally, in the Nice IGC (December 2000), the misunderstandings of these two “big” states about their weight in the Council, almost caused the failure to conclude the Treaty of Nice, clearing the way for the Eastern enlargement. The traditional balance between France and Germany has been eroded. Germany has consolidated its role of leadership in the EU, and above all towards the candidate countries. The purpose of this paper is to analyse the fifth enlargement as one of the causes of the decline of the Franco-German axis as the motor of the process of European integration.

On high-rate full-diversity 2x2 space-time codes with low-complexity optimum detection

The 2×2 MIMO profiles included in Mobile WiMAX specifications are Alamouti’s space-time code (STC) fortransmit diversity and spatial multiplexing (SM). The former hasfull diversity and the latter has full rate, but neither of them hasboth of these desired features. An alternative 2×2 STC, which is both full rate and full diversity, is the Golden code. It is the best known 2×2 STC, but it has a high decoding complexity. Recently, the attention was turned to the decoder complexity, this issue wasincluded in the STC design criteria, and different STCs wereproposed. In this paper, we first present a full-rate full-diversity2×2 STC design leading to substantially lower complexity ofthe optimum detector compared to the Golden code with only a slight performance loss. We provide the general optimized form of this STC and show that this scheme achieves the diversitymultiplexing frontier for square QAM signal constellations. Then, we present a variant of the proposed STC, which provides a further decrease in the detection complexity with a rate reduction of 25% and show that this provides an interesting trade-off between the Alamouti scheme and SM.

Low-density parity-check codes for nonergodic block-fading channels

We design powerful low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes with iterative decoding for the block-fading channel. We first study the case of maximum-likelihood decoding, and show that the design criterion is rather straightforward. Since optimal constructions for maximum-likelihood decoding do not performwell under iterative decoding, we introduce a new family of full-diversity LDPC codes that exhibit near-outage-limit performance under iterative decoding for all block-lengths. This family competes favorably with multiplexed parallel turbo codes for nonergodic channels.

Automatic low baseline stereo in urban areas

In this work we propose a new automatic methodology for computing accurate digital elevation models (DEMs) in urban environments from low baseline stereo pairs that shall be available in the future from a new kind of earth observation satellite. This setting makes both views of the scene similarly, thus avoiding occlusions and illumination changes, which are the main disadvantages of the commonly accepted large-baseline configuration. There still remain two crucial technological challenges: (i) precisely estimating DEMs with strong discontinuities and (ii) providing a statistically proven result, automatically. The first one is solved here by a piecewise affine representation that is well adapted to man-made landscapes, whereas the application of computational Gestalt theory introduces reliability and automation. In fact this theory allows us to reduce the number of parameters to be adjusted, and tocontrol the number of false detections. This leads to the selection of a suitable segmentation into affine regions (whenever possible) by a novel and completely automatic perceptual grouping method. It also allows us to discriminate e.g. vegetation-dominated regions, where such an affine model does not apply anda more classical correlation technique should be preferred. In addition we propose here an extension of the classical ”quantized” Gestalt theory to continuous measurements, thus combining its reliability with the precision of variational robust estimation and fine interpolation methods that are necessary in the low baseline case. Such an extension is very general and will be useful for many other applications as well.

Per-antenna rate and power control for MIMO layered architectures in the low- and high-power regimes

In a MIMO layered architecture, several codewordsare transmitted from a multiplicity of antennas. Although thespectral efficiency is maximized if the rates of these codewordsare separately controlled, the feedback rate within the linkadaptation loop is reduced if they are constrained to be identical.This poses a direct tradeoff between performance andfeedback overhead. This paper provides analytical expressionsthat quantify the difference in spectral efficiency between bothapproaches for arbitrary numbers of antennas. Specifically, thecharacterization takes place in the realm of the low- and highpowerregimes via expansions that are shown to have a widerange of validity.In addition, the possibility of adjusting the transmit powerof each codeword individually is considered as an alternative tothe separate control of their rates. Power allocation, however,turns out to be inferior to rate control within the context of thisproblem.

Spectral efficiency in reference-signal-assisted low-power wireless communication

Expressions relating spectral efficiency, power and Doppler spectrum are derived for low-power Rayleighfaded wireless channels with proper complex signaling. Noside information on the state of the channel is assumed at the receiver. Rather, periodic reference signals are postulated inaccordance with the functioning of most wireless systems. In contrast with most previous studies, which relied on block-fading channel models, a continuous-fading model is adopted. This embeds the Doppler spectrum directly in thederived expressions thereby imbuing them with practical significance.

Generalized low-density codes with BCH constituents for full-diversity near-outage performance

A new graph-based construction of generalized low density codes (GLD-Tanner) with binary BCH constituents is described. The proposed family of GLD codes is optimal on block erasure channels and quasi-optimal on block fading channels. Optimality is considered in the outage probability sense. Aclassical GLD code for ergodic channels (e.g., the AWGN channel,the i.i.d. Rayleigh fading channel, and the i.i.d. binary erasure channel) is built by connecting bitnodes and subcode nodes via a unique random edge permutation. In the proposed construction of full-diversity GLD codes (referred to as root GLD), bitnodes are divided into 4 classes, subcodes are divided into 2 classes, and finally both sides of the Tanner graph are linked via 4 random edge permutations. The study focuses on non-ergodic channels with two states and can be easily extended to channels with 3 states or more.