Diagnosi d'una llei franquista: la Llei de Redempció de Censos de 1945

El 31 de desembre de 1945 les cons franquistes van aprovar una Llei de Redempció de Censos específica per a Catalunya. Es tractava d'una llei que permetia als censataris, és a dir, als emfiteutes, als propietaris de finques gravades amb censos, d'accedir a la propietat plena de les "seves" finques, és a dir, de les finques de les quals eren titulars del domini útil. D'entrada, la promulgació d'una llei com aquesta, en el marc d'un règim franquista, pot provocar un cert desconcert. En el discurs historiogràfic dominant sobre l'Espanya contemporània, la supervivència dels censos ha estat vista com una prova de la supervivència dels drets feudals, és a dir, com una clara rèmora del passat, com una evidencia del caràcter incomplet de la revolució liberal, i també com un obstacle al desenvolupament agrari i, per tant, al creixement econòmic'. Una llei de redempció de censos ha tendit a ser vista, en aquest context, com una llei clarament beneficiosa per al conjunt de la societat i, en particular, per a la pagesia i els sectors més populars. El corol·lari que es deriva d’aquesta percepció implica, admetem-ho, una visió favorable al paper del franquisme: aquest regim hauria exercit, en aquest terreny específic de les relacions socials agràries, un paper modernitzadori, i també, un paper clarament favorable a les classes populars

Trabajo y postemancipación en Haití

[spa]Este artículo analiza las estructuras sociales subyacentes a la Revolución haitiana, y cómo las aspiraciones diferentes de negros y mulatos durante la Revolución de independencia (1791-1804) se trasladaron al período postabolición. Pese a los cambios en la legislación agraria después de la independencia, el fracaso a la hora de proporcionar unas condiciones de trabajo adaptadas a las demandas de los trabajadores rurales haitianos se añadió a las dificultades y los obstáculos enfrentados por Haití en su intento por construir una nación próspera y en libertad

Power laws and scaling of rain events and dry spells in the Catalonia region

We analyze the statistics of rain-event sizes, rain-event durations, and dry-spell durations in a network of 20 rain gauges scattered in an area situated close to the NW Mediterranean coast. Power-law distributions emerge clearly for the dryspell durations, with an exponent around 1.50 ± 0.05, although for event sizes and durations the power-law ranges are rather limited, in some cases. Deviations from power-law behavior are attributed to finite-size effects. A scaling analysis helps to elucidate the situation, providing support for the existence of scale invariance in these distributions. It is remarkable that rain data of not very high resolution yield findings in agreement with self-organized critical phenomena.

Restless bandits, partial conservation laws and indexability

We show that if performance measures in a stochastic scheduling problem satisfy a set of so-called partial conservation laws (PCL), which extend previously studied generalized conservation laws (GCL), then the problem is solved optimally by a priority-index policy for an appropriate range of linear performance objectives, where the optimal indices are computed by a one-pass adaptive-greedy algorithm, based on Klimov's. We further apply this framework to investigate the indexability property of restless bandits introduced by Whittle, obtaining the following results: (1) we identify a class of restless bandits (PCL-indexable) which are indexable; membership in this class is tested through a single run of the adaptive-greedy algorithm, which also computes the Whittle indices when the test is positive; this provides a tractable sufficient condition for indexability; (2) we further indentify the class of GCL-indexable bandits, which includes classical bandits, having the property that they are indexable under any linear reward objective. The analysis is based on the so-called achievable region method, as the results follow fromnew linear programming formulations for the problems investigated.

Agricultural productivity and structural transformation. Evidence from Brazil

We study the effects of the adoption of new agricultural technologies on structural transformation. To guide empirical work, we present a simple model where the effect of agriculturalproductivity on industrial development depends on the factor bias of technical change. We testthe predictions of the model by studying the introduction of genetically engineered soybeanseeds in Brazil, which had heterogeneous effects on agricultural productivity across areas withdifferent soil and weather characteristics. We find that technical change in soy production wasstrongly labor saving and lead to industrial growth, as predicted by the model.

Singling out individual inventors from patent data

An increasing number of studies in recent years have sought to identify individual inventors from patent data. A variety of heuristics have been proposed for using the names and other information disclosed in patent documents to establish who is who in patents. This paper contributes to this literature by describing a methodology for identifying inventors using patents applied to the European Patent Office, EPO hereafter. As in much of this literature, we basically follow a threestep procedure : 1- the parsing stage, aimed at reducing the noise in the inventor’s name and other fields of the patent; 2- the matching stage, where name matching algorithms are used to group similar names; and 3- the filtering stage, where additional information and various scoring schemes are used to filter out these similarlynamed inventors. The paper presents the results obtained by using the algorithms with the set of European inventors applying to the EPO over a long period of time.

Patenta't els gens

Tradicionalment, bona part dels científics que treballem en institucions públiques hem pensat que la manera més eficient per avançar en ciència és permetre el lliure accés al coneixement, una idea que aquestes mateixes institucions tendeixen a fer canviar estimulant-nos a patentar les nostres troballes -i si cal també ens ajuden a crear un spin-off per rendibilitzar-les econòmicament- [...].