On [summation of 1 raised to the power 1] equivalence relations over the natural numbers

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Discourse, knowledge, power and politics: towards critical epistemic discourse analysis

Although both are fundamental terms in the humanities and social sciences, discourse and knowledge have seldom been explicitly related, and even less so in critical discourse studies. After a brief summary of what we know about these relationships in linguistics, psychology, epistemology and the social sciences, with special emphasis on the role of knowledge in the formation of mental models as a basis for discourse, I examine in more detail how a critical study of discourse and knowledge may be articulated in critical discourse studies. Thus, several areas of critical epistemic discourse analysis are identified, and then applied in a study of Tony Blair’s Iraq speech on March 18, 2003, in which he sought to legitimatize his decision to go to war in Iraq with George Bush. The analysis shows the various modes of how knowledge is managed and manipulated of all levels of discourse of this speech.

Personal relations and their effect on behavior in an organizational setting: an experimental study

We study how personal relations affect performance in organizations. In the experimental game we use a manager has to assign different degrees of decision power to two employees. These two employees then have to make distributive decisions which affect themselves and the manager. Our focus is on the effects on managers' assignment of decision power and on employees' distributive decisions of one of the employees and the manager knowing each other personally. Our evidence shows that managers tend to favor employees that they personally know and that these employees tend, more than other employees, to favor the manager in their distributive decisions. However, this behavior does not affect the performance of the employees that do not know the manager. All these effects are independent of whether the employees that know the manager are more or less productive than those who do not know the manager. The results shed light on discrimination and nepotism and its consequences for the performance of family firms and other organizations.

The Politics of Intergovernmental Fiscal Relations in Argentina

The search for political determinants of intergovernmental fiscal relations has shaped much of the recent literature on the economic viability of federalism. This study assesses the explanatory power of two competing views about intergovernmental transfers; one emphasizing the traditional neoclassical approach to federal-subnational fiscal relations and the other suggesting that transfers are contingent on the political fortunes and current political vulnerability of each level of government. The author tests these models using data from Argentina, a federation exhibiting one of the most decentralised fiscal systems in the world and severe imbalances in the territorial distribution of legislative and economic resources. It is shown that overrespresented provinces ruled by governors who belong to opposition parties can bring into play their political overrepresentation to attract shares of federal transfers beyond social welfare criteria and to shield themselves from unwanted reforms to increase fiscal co-responsibilty. This finding suggests that decision makers in federal countries must pay close heed to the need to synchronize institutional reforms and fiscal adjustment.

Water scarcity, social power and the production of an elite suburb: the political ecology of water in Matadepera, Catalonia

This article investigates the history of land and water transformations in Matadepera, a wealthy suburb of metropolitan Barcelona. Analysis is informed by theories of political ecology and methods of environmental history; although very relevant, these have received relatively little attention within ecological economics. Empirical material includes communications from the City Archives of Matadepera (1919-1979), 17 interviews with locals born between 1913 and 1958, and an exhaustive review of grey historical literature. Existing water histories of Barcelona and its outskirts portray a battle against natural water scarcity, hard won by heroic engineers and politicians acting for the good of the community. Our research in Matadepera tells a very different story. We reveal the production of a highly uneven landscape and waterscape through fierce political and power struggles. The evolution of Matadepera from a small rural village to an elite suburb was anything but spontaneous or peaceful. It was a socio-environmental project well intended by landowning elites and heavily fought by others. The struggle for the control of water went hand in hand with the land and political struggles that culminated – and were violently resolved - in the Spanish Civil War. The displacement of the economic and environmental costs of water use from few to many continues to this day and is constitutive of Matadepera’s uneven and unsustainable landscape. By unravelling the relations of power that are inscribed in the urbanization of nature (Swyngedouw, 2004), we question the perceived wisdoms of contemporary water policy debates, particularly the notion of a natural scarcity that merits a technical or economic response. We argue that the water question is fundamentally a political question of environmental justice; it is about negotiating alternative visions of the future and deciding whose visions will be produced.

Església, poder i societat als comtats catalans d'origen carolingi (877-1010)

El projecte de recerca “Església, poder i societat als comtats catalans d'origen carolingi (877-1010)” contempla l'estudi de l'Església catalana del segle X en tots els seus vessants: com a estructura formada per diferents institucions (seus episcopals, cenobis, parròquies i esglésies-oratoris); com a conjunt de persones (clergues i laics que participen de diferent manera i amb diferent implicació dels afers eclesiàstics); en relació al poder polític-administratiu dels comtats catalans (comtes, vescomtes, senyors i altres delegats del poder i la justícia); com en relació amb els aspectes socioeconòmics i d'ordenació territorial (la gran massa de camperols, l'acaparament de terres per part dels grans propietaris, l'articulació d'un sistema de rendes, els vincles entre persones de diferents rangs, la compartimentació d'un espai creixent). Observem, doncs, que l'Església catalana altmedieval resta present en tots els àmbits de la vida i que el seu estudi permet, de retruc, un coneixement més profund i rigorós de la societat. Tot això, contextualitzat durant el segle X, a cavall entre dos períodes ben estudiats i que en ocasions l'han ennuvolat. El segle X és un període privilegiat per a l'estudi d'un bon nombre de dinàmiques polítiques, socials, econòmiques i culturals que demostren que aquesta centúria tenia una personalitat pròpia i que la posen en rellevància respecte als temps anteriors i posteriors. La historiografia tradicional altmedieval catalana tendeix a buscar l'origen dels canvis socials, institucionals i polítics, de la Catalunya medieval, en dos moments concrets: el món carolingi o els anys immediatament posteriors al canvi de mil•lenni. No obstant això, l'augment de fonts històriques, el millor coneixement dels conceptes i de les institucions i l'apropament a la història mitjançant nous enfocaments i paradigmes, permet visualitzar el segle X com a moment de continuació, però també de naixement de situacions prou importants com per a no ser negligides.

Social network measures for "nosduocentered" networks, their predictive power on performance

Our purpose in this article is to define a network structure which is based on two egos instead of the egocentered (one ego) or the complete network (n egos). We describe the characteristics and properties for this kind of network which we call “nosduocentered network”, comparing it with complete and egocentered networks. The key point for this kind of network is that relations exist between the two main egos and all alters, but relations among others are not observed. After that, we use new social network measures adapted to the nosduocentered network, some of which are based on measures for complete networks such as degree, betweenness, closeness centrality or density, while some others are tailormade for nosduocentered networks. We specify three regression models to predict research performance of PhD students based on these social network measures for different networks such as advice, collaboration, emotional support and trust. Data used are from Slovenian PhD students and their s

International regimes as knowledge syndicates? Energy and trends of global governance

El poder de l'Estat i la sobirania tradicional s'està deteriorant de manera constant, sobretot en termes de la provisió de certs béns públics fonamentals. Els Estats, en particular, són incapaços de manejar el coneixement i la informació que és essencial per mantenir la competitivitat i la sostenibilitat en una economia interdependent. Estructures fiables de la governança mundial i la cooperació internacional estan lluny de ser establertes. Energia com a problema a les agendes p dels governs, les empreses privades i la societat civil és un exemple manifest d'aquesta dinàmica.. L'actual sistema de governança mundial d'energia implica accions polítiques disperses per actors divers. L'Agència Internacional de l'Energia té un paper destacat, però està debilitat per la seva composició limitada i basada en el coneixement- epistèmic en lloc del material o executiu. Aquest treball sosté que ni la mida ni nombre de membres disponibles estan dificultant la governabilitat mundial d'energia. Més aviat, l'energia és una sèrie de béns públics que es troben als llimbs, on els estats no poden pagar la seva disposició, així com els diversos interessos impedir l'establiment d'una autoritat internacional. Després de la introducció de la teoria del règim internacional i el concepte de coneixement basats en les comunitats epistèmiques, l'article revisa l'estat actual de la governabilitat de l'energia mundia. A continuació es presenta una comparació d'aquesta estructura amb els règims de govern nacional i regional, d'una banda, i amb règims globals ambientals i de salut, de l'altra

A hybrid method for sag source location in power network

The work presented in this paper belongs to the power quality knowledge area and deals with the voltage sags in power transmission and distribution systems. Propagating throughout the power network, voltage sags can cause plenty of problems for domestic and industrial loads that can financially cost a lot. To impose penalties to responsible party and to improve monitoring and mitigation strategies, sags must be located in the power network. With such a worthwhile objective, this paper comes up with a new method for associating a sag waveform with its origin in transmission and distribution networks. It solves this problem through developing hybrid methods which hire multiway principal component analysis (MPCA) as a dimension reduction tool. MPCA reexpresses sag waveforms in a new subspace just in a few scores. We train some well-known classifiers with these scores and exploit them for classification of future sags. The capabilities of the proposed method for dimension reduction and classification are examined using the real data gathered from three substations in Catalonia, Spain. The obtained classification rates certify the goodness and powerfulness of the developed hybrid methods as brand-new tools for sag classification

Knowledge management for systems biology a general and visually driven framework applied to translational medicine

Background: To enhance our understanding of complex biological systems like diseases we need to put all of the available data into context and use this to detect relations, pattern and rules which allow predictive hypotheses to be defined. Life science has become a data rich science with information about the behaviour of millions of entities like genes, chemical compounds, diseases, cell types and organs, which are organised in many different databases and/or spread throughout the literature. Existing knowledge such as genotype - phenotype relations or signal transduction pathways must be semantically integrated and dynamically organised into structured networks that are connected with clinical and experimental data. Different approaches to this challenge exist but so far none has proven entirely satisfactory. Results: To address this challenge we previously developed a generic knowledge management framework, BioXM™, which allows the dynamic, graphic generation of domain specific knowledge representation models based on specific objects and their relations supporting annotations and ontologies. Here we demonstrate the utility of BioXM for knowledge management in systems biology as part of the EU FP6 BioBridge project on translational approaches to chronic diseases. From clinical and experimental data, text-mining results and public databases we generate a chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) knowledge base and demonstrate its use by mining specific molecular networks together with integrated clinical and experimental data. Conclusions: We generate the first semantically integrated COPD specific public knowledge base and find that for the integration of clinical and experimental data with pre-existing knowledge the configuration based set-up enabled by BioXM reduced implementation time and effort for the knowledge base compared to similar systems implemented as classical software development projects. The knowledgebase enables the retrieval of sub-networks including protein-protein interaction, pathway, gene - disease and gene - compound data which are used for subsequent data analysis, modelling and simulation. Pre-structured queries and reports enhance usability; establishing their use in everyday clinical settings requires further simplification with a browser based interface which is currently under development.

El Misterio de la biblioteca Mil.lènium o cómo promover relaciones colaborativas desde la participación del alumnado = The Mystery of the Mil.lènium Library: How to Promote Collaborative Relationships Through Student Participation

La pedagogía crítica acentúa la falta de neutralidad de la escuela respecto a las relaciones de poder que existen en la sociedad. Su propuesta consiste en modificar las relaciones de poder en el aula en el sentido de transformar las relaciones coercitivas –las que reproducen las relaciones existentes– en relaciones colaborativas partiendo del reconocimiento y la participación de los alumnos en las actividades escolares. Desde esta perspectiva, uno de los objetivos de las actividades es que los niños produzcan «textos identitarios», entendidos como artefactos que los alumnos se pueden apropiar para promover su desarrollo cognitivo. El artículo muestra el trabajo educativo integrado desde Educación Infantil hasta 6.º de Primaria de una escuela de la provincia de Girona en la que el 97% de los alumnos es de origen extranjero y cuyo propósito es incrementar las habilidades lingüísticas orales y escritas en la lengua escolar, así como la utilización de otros lenguajes multimedia. La unidad didáctica consiste en la elaboración de un cuento a lo largo de un curso escolar por parte de todo el alumnado con la ayuda de los profesores, de dos autores y de tres ilustradores. Cada ciclo escolar decide los personajes y el escenario y explicita textualmente el transcurso de la acción. Los ilustradores producen las imágenes y los autores posibilitan la transición de aquello que ha elaborado un ciclo al producto del siguiente. La actividad basada en la participación y la utilización de procedimientos democráticos de decisión se inserta en la propuesta educativa y lingüística de la escuela, así como en sus concreciones curriculares. Los resultados muestran que los textos construidos por los niños se apoyan en sus «fondos de conocimiento» sociales y familiares y constituyen una fuente de progreso en la consecución de las competencias básicas y en la construcción de valores democráticos

The mechanisms of agglomeration: Evidence from the effect of inter-industry relations on the location of new firms

The objective of this paper is to explore the relative importance of each of Marshall's agglomeration mechanisms by examining the location of new manufacturing firms in Spain. In particular, we estimate the count of new firms by industry and location as a function of (pre-determined) local employment levels in industries that: 1) use similar workers (labor market pooling); 2) have a customer- supplier relationship (input sharing); and 3) use similar technologies (knowledge spillovers). We examine the variation in the creation of new firms across cities and across municipalities within large cities to shed light on the geographical scope of each of the three agglomeration mechanisms. We find evidence of all three agglomeration mechanisms, although their incidence differs depending on the geographical scale of the analysis.

The mechanisms of agglomeration: Evidence from the effect of inter-industry relations on the location of new firms

The objective of this paper is to explore the relative importance of each of Marshall's agglomeration mechanisms by examining the location of new manufacturing firms in Spain. In particular, we estimate the count of new firms by industry and location as a function of (pre-determined) local employment levels in industries that: 1) use similar workers (labor market pooling); 2) have a customer- supplier relationship (input sharing); and 3) use similar technologies (knowledge spillovers). We examine the variation in the creation of new firms across cities and across municipalities within large cities to shed light on the geographical scope of each of the three agglomeration mechanisms. We find evidence of all three agglomeration mechanisms, although their incidence differs depending on the geographical scale of the analysis.

Rethinking study and management of agricultural systems for policy design

There is a concern that agriculture will no longer be able to meet, on a global scale, the growing demand for food. Facing such a challenge requires new patterns of thinking in the context of complexity and sustainability sciences. This paper, focused on the social dimension of the study and management of agricultural systems, suggests that rethinking the study of agricultural systems entails analyzing them as complex socio-ecological systems, as well as considering the differing thinking patterns of diverse stakeholders. The intersubjective nature of knowledge, as studied by different philosophical schools, needs to be better integrated into the study and management of agricultural systems than it is done so far, forcing us to accept that there are no simplistic solutions, and to seek a better understanding of the social dimension of agriculture. Different agriculture related problems require different policy and institutional approaches. Finally, the intersubjective nature of knowledge asks for the visualization of different framings and the power relations taking place in the decision-making process. Rethinking management of agricultural systems implies that policy making should be shaped by different principles: learning, flexibility, adaptation, scale-matching, participation, diversity enhancement and precaution hold the promise to significantly improve current standard management procedures.

La “ciudad arqueológica” en el área catalana ante la irrupción del Islam

Se presenta un breve estado de la cuestión sobre la realidad arqueológica de los principales núcleos urbanos del este de la provincia Tarraconensis y a finales del Regnum Gothorum. Existe un nivel de conocimiento desigual para estas ciudades, fruto del contexto actual de la investigación, y también de una evolución histórica diferenciada, como consecuencia de unas características geopolíticas propias que, posiblemente, indujeron a una modificación de las jerarquías entre las ciudades. Planteamos la ciudad visigoda como el centro de gestión civil y religioso de una unidad territorial donde la arqueología identifica los vestigios de la arquitectura del poder, pero todavía no consigue definir con precisión los procesos domésticos inherentes a toda comunidad urbana. Conocemos globalmente los diferentes procesos de la desestructuración urbana de la Antigüedad tardía pero no los parámetros de la ocupación agrourbana de los recintos amurallados. Para este período histórico se supone que la redimensión demográfica del hecho urbano más una reducción de las relaciones económicas entre la ciudad y el territorio son factores determinantes de las nuevas ciudades visigodas, pero se reconoce una incertidumbre fruto de la dificultad arqueológica de estudiar las nuevas pautas constructivas y una cultura material más restringida.