Indigenous people's mobilization and their struggle for rights in Colombia

This text aims at showing the history of indigenous peoples’ mobilization in Colombia, the effects that it has brought about on Colombian democracy and political system, and the state’s reactions to their claims and actions. It will show how they have moved from class-based claims to a politics where identity claims have been central in their agenda and part of their strategies to negotiate with the state. It will also show the existing constitutional and legal framework that recognizes the rights of indigenous peoples, despite the context of persecution, murder, and forced displacement.

Biodièsel: impacte en origen del biodièsel consumit a Catalunya i a Espanya

Actualment la situació del mercat espanyol i català del biodièsel es caracteritza per les grans importacions d’oli de palma africana. Per a produir aquesta matèria primera s’estan establint plantacions a gran escala d’Elaeis guineensis (palma africana) a Indonèsia. El monocultiu d’Elaeis guineensis i la producció de l’oli tenen associats grans impactes ambientals i socials. Per una banda, els impactes ambientals són principalment la desforestació, el canvi d’ús del sòl, la pèrdua de biodiversitat, l’erosió del sòl i la contaminació de l’aire, del sòl de l’aigua. Per altra banda, els impactes socials més destacats són la violació dels drets humans dels pobles indígenes, els conflictes d’adquisició de terres i que es compromet la seguretat alimentària del país. Per tant, l’ús del biodièsel produït amb oli de palma africana redueix les emissions de GEH a Espanya i a Catalunya provocant un gran impacte ambiental i social a Indonèsia.

A Case-based reasoning approach to validate grammatical gender and number agreement in Spanish language

Across Latin America 420 indigenous languages are spoken. Spanish is considered a second language in indigenous communities and is progressively introduced in education. However, most of the tools to support teaching processes of a second language have been developed for the most common languages such as English, French, German, Italian, etc. As a result, only a small amount of learning objects and authoring tools have been developed for indigenous people considering the specific needs of their population. This paper introduces Multilingual–Tiny as a web authoring tool to support the virtual experience of indigenous students and teachers when they are creating learning objects in indigenous languages or in Spanish language, in particular, when they have to deal with the grammatical structures of Spanish. Multilingual–Tiny has a module based on the Case-based Reasoning technique to provide recommendations in real time when teachers and students write texts in Spanish. An experiment was performed in order to compare some local similarity functions to retrieve cases from the case library taking into account the grammatical structures. As a result we found the similarity function with the best performance