Proyecto de construcción y puesta en marcha de nueva explotación de cebo porcino para 4.000 plazas en el término municipal de La Puebla de Castro (Huesca)

Aquest treball intenta explicar, de forma detallada, tots els materials, obres i processos que s’han de dur a terme per a la construcción d’una nova explotació d’engreix porcí. L’explotació que es projecta tindrà capacitat per a 4.000 places, i s’ubicarà al terme municipal de La Puebla de Castro, província d’Osca. Es tracta d’un projecte d’enginyeria on es descriu el disseny i el càlcul de les diferents edificacions i instal·lacions que formaran part de la futura explotació. Alhora, es realitzen diversos estudis com el de l’impacte ambiental o el de protecció contra incendis, per a complir el que estableix el Codi Tècnic de l’Edificació; i poder sol·licitar la llicència d’activitat per posar en funcionament l’explotació.

Investor protection, risk sharing and inequality

This paper studies the relationship between investor protection, financial risk sharing and income inequality. In the presence of market frictions, better protection makes investors more willing to take on entrepreneurial risk while lending to firms. This implies lower cost of external finance and better risk sharing between financiers and entrepreneurs. Investor protection, by boosting the market for risk sharing plays the twofold role of encouraging agents to undertake risky enterprises and providing them with insurance. By increasing the number of risky projects, it raises income inequality. By extending insurance to more agents, it reduces it. As a result, the relationship between the size of the market for risk sharing and income inequality is hump-shaped. Empirical evidence from a cross-section of sixty-eight countries, and a panel of fifty countries over the period 1976-2000, supports the predictions of the model.

Efficient knowledge retrieval to calibrate input variables in forest fire prediction

Forest fires are a serious threat to humans and nature from an ecological, social and economic point of view. Predicting their behaviour by simulation still delivers unreliable results and remains a challenging task. Latest approaches try to calibrate input variables, often tainted with imprecision, using optimisation techniques like Genetic Algorithms. To converge faster towards fitter solutions, the GA is guided with knowledge obtained from historical or synthetical fires. We developed a robust and efficient knowledge storage and retrieval method. Nearest neighbour search is applied to find the fire configuration from knowledge base most similar to the current configuration. Therefore, a distance measure was elaborated and implemented in several ways. Experiments show the performance of the different implementations regarding occupied storage and retrieval time with overly satisfactory results.

Industrial districts, innovation and I-district

The I-district effect hypothesis establishes the existence of highly intense innovation in Marshallian industrial districts due to the presence of external localization economies. However, industrial districts are characterized by specific manufacturing specializations in such a way that this effect could be due to these dominant specializations. The objective of this research is to test whether the effect is explained by the conditions of the territory or by the industrial specialization and to provide additional evidence of the existence and causes of the highly intense innovation in industrial districts (I-district effect). The estimates for Spain of a fixed effects model interacting territory and industry suggest that the high innovative performance of industrial districts is maintained across sectors whereas the industrial specialization behaves differently depending on the type of local production system in which it is placed. The I-district effect is related to the conditions of the territory more than to the industrial specialization. The territory is a key variable in explaining the processes of innovation and should be considered a basic dimension in the design of innovation and industrial policies.

Modelling of bird distribution under complex mediterranean landscape dynamics: open habitat birds and fire (MEDFIRE)

Report for the scientific sojourn at the Simon Fraser University, Canada, from July to September 2007. General context: landscape change during the last years is having significant impacts on biodiversity in many Mediterranean areas. Land abandonment, urbanisation and specially fire are profoundly transforming large areas in the Western Mediterranean basin and we know little on how these changes influence species distribution and in particular how these species will respond to further change in a context of global change including climate. General objectives: integrate landscape and population dynamics models in a platform allowing capturing species distribution responses to landscape changes and assessing impact on species distribution of different scenarios of further change. Specific objective 1: develop a landscape dynamic model capturing fire and forest succession dynamics in Catalonia and linked to a stochastic landscape occupancy (SLOM) (or spatially explicit population, SEPM) model for the Ortolan bunting, a species strongly linked to fire related habitat in the region. Predictions from the occupancy or spatially explicit population Ortolan bunting model (SEPM) should be evaluated using data from the DINDIS database. This database tracks bird colonisation of recently burnt big areas (&50 ha). Through a number of different SEPM scenarios with different values for a number of parameter, we should be able to assess different hypothesis in factors driving bird colonisation in new burnt patches. These factors to be mainly, landscape context (i.e. difficulty to reach the patch, and potential presence of coloniser sources), dispersal constraints, type of regenerating vegetation after fire, and species characteristics (niche breadth, etc).

Investor protection and income inequality: risk sharing vs risk taking

This paper studies the relationship between investor protection, entrepreneurial risk taking and income inequality. In the presence of market frictions, better protection makes investors more willing to take on entrepreneurial risk when lending to firms, thereby improving the degree of risk sharing between financiers and entrepreneurs. On the other hand, by increasing risk sharing, investor protection also induces more firms to undertake risky projects. By increasing entrepreneurial risk taking, it raises income dispersion. By reducing the risk faced by entrepreneurs, it reduces income volatility. As a result, investor protection raises income inequality to the extent that it fosters risk taking, while it reduces it for a given level of risk taking. Empirical evidence from a panel of forty-five countries spanning the period 1976-2000 supports the predictions of the model.

Analysis of nonlinear noisy integrate & fire neuron models: blow-up and steady states

Nonlinear Noisy Leaky Integrate and Fire (NNLIF) models for neurons networks can be written as Fokker-Planck-Kolmogorov equations on the probability density of neurons, the main parameters in the model being the connectivity of the network and the noise. We analyse several aspects of the NNLIF model: the number of steady states, a priori estimates, blow-up issues and convergence toward equilibrium in the linear case. In particular, for excitatory networks, blow-up always occurs for initial data concentrated close to the firing potential. These results show how critical is the balance between noise and excitatory/inhibitory interactions to the connectivity parameter.

Research activities at european level performed at the Institute for Públic Safety of Catalonia

To start off, this document describes the Catalan model for emergencies response and its reference frame in terms of geography, location population…In addition, describes the main actors involved in emergencies response such as: police, the Fire and Rescue Emergency Service, the Emergency Medical System, Civil Protection, Reception and Management of Emergency Calls, Rural Agents, ADF’s and UME. Civil Protection, Firefighters and Police are includes in the training model developed by the Institute for Public Safety of Catalonia which at the same time does research in both security and safety matters. Research activities are performed by the Area for Research, Knowledge and International Cooperation at the ISPC and an example of these activities are European Research Projects such as COIM-Best (Coordination Improvement by Best Practices) and BESECU (cross-cultural differences of human behaviour in fire disasters and other crisis situations) among others.

Descripció i anàlisi dels factors protectors d’adolescents en la prevenció del delicte: el perfil de l’adolescent desistent i les competències emocionals associades

En els darrers anys, ha augmentat l’interès per l’estudi de la prevenció i la protecció de la delinqüència juvenil. En aquest context els conceptes vinculats són els de desistiment i resiliència. L’objectiu principal d’aquest estudi és aprofundir en el concepte de desistiment i els factors de protecció, primer en el pla teòric i després en l’àmbit empíric. L’estudi consta de dues parts: la primera descriptiu el perfil del menor desistent a la Direcció General de Justícia Juvenil, i la segona mostra enquestes en què s’avaluen les dimensions de la competència emocional en un grup d’adolescents infractors. A partir d’una mostra de 288 adolescents infractors, 86 reincidents i 202 desistents, de les comarques del Baix Llobregat, Garraf, Alt Penedès i d’alguns municipis de l’Anoia, s’analitzen les diferències sociodemogràfiques, criminològiques i de recorregut educatiu fet a la Direcció General de Justícia Juvenil. A continuació, participen de l’estudi per enquesta una mostra accidental de 101 adolescents, 45 reincidents i 56 desistents, procedents dels programes de mediació, medi obert i internament. Els adolescents desistents en el delicte obtenen puntuacions superiors als reincidents, diferències que són estadísticament significatives en la dimensió de competència social i en la puntuació total de competència emocional.

Enhancing MPLS QoS routing algorithms by using the network protection degree paradigm

IP based networks still do not have the required degree of reliability required by new multimedia services, achieving such reliability will be crucial in the success or failure of the new Internet generation. Most of existing schemes for QoS routing do not take into consideration parameters concerning the quality of the protection, such as packet loss or restoration time. In this paper, we define a new paradigm to develop new protection strategies for building reliable MPLS networks, based on what we have called the network protection degree (NPD). This NPD consists of an a priori evaluation, the failure sensibility degree (FSD), which provides the failure probability and an a posteriori evaluation, the failure impact degree (FID), to determine the impact on the network in case of failure. Having mathematical formulated these components, we point out the most relevant components. Experimental results demonstrate the benefits of the utilization of the NPD, when used to enhance some current QoS routing algorithms to offer a certain degree of protection

Minimum interference routing with fast protection

One of the most effective techniques offering QoS routing is minimum interference routing. However, it is complex in terms of computation time and is not oriented toward improving the network protection level. In order to include better levels of protection, new minimum interference routing algorithms are necessary. Minimizing the failure recovery time is also a complex process involving different failure recovery phases. Some of these phases depend completely on correct routing selection, such as minimizing the failure notification time. The level of protection also involves other aspects, such as the amount of resources used. In this case shared backup techniques should be considered. Therefore, minimum interference techniques should also be modified in order to include sharing resources for protection in their objectives. These aspects are reviewed and analyzed in this article, and a new proposal combining minimum interference with fast protection using shared segment backups is introduced. Results show that our proposed method improves both minimization of the request rejection ratio and the percentage of bandwidth allocated to backup paths in networks with low and medium protection requirements

QoS online routing and MPLS multilevel protection: a survey

A survey of MPLS protection methods and their utilization in combination with online routing methods is presented in this article. Usually, fault management methods pre-establish backup paths to recover traffic after a failure. In addition, MPLS allows the creation of different backup types, and hence MPLS is a suitable method to support traffic-engineered networks. In this article, an introduction of several label switch path backup types and their pros and cons are pointed out. The creation of an LSP involves a routing phase, which should include QoS aspects. In a similar way, to achieve a reliable network the LSP backups must also be routed by a QoS routing method. When LSP creation requests arrive one by one (a dynamic network scenario), online routing methods are applied. The relationship between MPLS fault management and QoS online routing methods is unavoidable, in particular during the creation of LSP backups. Both aspects are discussed in this article. Several ideas on how these actual technologies could be applied together are presented and compared

Adding QoS protection in order to enhance MPLS QoS routing

In this paper, a method for enhancing current QoS routing methods by means of QoS protection is presented. In an MPLS network, the segments (links) to be protected are predefined and an LSP request involves, apart from establishing a working path, creating a specific type of backup path (local, reverse or global). Different QoS parameters, such as network load balancing, resource optimization and minimization of LSP request rejection should be considered. QoS protection is defined as a function of QoS parameters, such as packet loss, restoration time, and resource optimization. A framework to add QoS protection to many of the current QoS routing algorithms is introduced. A backup decision module to select the most suitable protection method is formulated and different case studies are analyzed