The foundation of the Mexican welfare state and social security reform in the 1990s

Before 1982 Mexico's welfare state regime was a limited conservative one that put priority on the social security of organized labor. But following the country's debt crisis in 1982, this regime changed to a hybrid liberal model. The Ernest Zedillo government (1995-2000) in particular pushed ahead with liberal reform of the social security system. This paper examines the characteristics and the policy making of the social security reforms in the 1990s. The results suggest that underlying these reforms was the restructuring of the economy and the need to cope with the cost of this restructuring. The paper also points out that one of the main factors making possible the rapid execution of the reforms were the weakened political clout of the officialist labor unions due to their steady breakdown during the 1990s and the increase in the monopolistic power of the state vis-a-vis the position of labor during the negotiations on social security reforms.

Technical Challenges in the Construction of Gothic Vaults: The Gothic Theory of Structural Design

The construction of a Gothic vault implied the solution of several technical challenges. The literature on Gothic vault construction is quite large and its growth continues steadily. The main challenge of any structure is that, during and after construction, it must be "safe", that is, it must not collapse. Indeed, it must be amply safe, able to support different loads for long periods of time. Masonry architecture has shown its structural safety for centuries or millennia. The Pantheon of Rome stands today after almost 2,000 years without having needed any structural reinforcement (of course, the survival of any building implies continuous maintenance) . Hagia Sophia in Istanbul, finished in the 6th century AD, has withstood not only the dead loads but also many severe earthquakes . Finally, the Gothic cathedrals, with their appearance of weakness, are• more than a half millennium old. The question arises of what the source of this amazing strength is and how the illiterate master masons were able to design such daring and safe structures . This question is usually evaded in manuals of Gothic architecture. This is quite surprising, the structure being a fundamental part of Gothic buildings. The present article aims to give such an explanation, which has been studied in detail elsewhere. In the first part, the Gothic design methods "V ill be discussed. In the second part, the validity of these methods wi11 be verified within the frame of the modern theory of masonry structures . References have been reduced to a minimum to make the text simpler and more direct.

Prototype of EN 301 549 Decision tree

The new European Standard EN 301 549 “Accessibility requirements suitable for public procurement of ICT products and services in Europe” is the response by CEN, CENELEC and ETSI to the European Commission’s Mandate 376. Today, ICT products and services are converging, and the boundaries between product categories are being constantly blurred. For that reason EN 301 549 has been drafted using a feature-based approach, instead of being based on product categories. The result is a standard that can be applied to any ICT product and service, by identifying applicable requirements depending on the features of the ICT. This demonstration presents ongoing work at the research group CETTICO of the Technical University of Madrid. CETTICO is developing a workgroup-based support tool where teams of people can annotate the result of performing a conformity assessment of a given ICT product or service according to the requirements of the EN. One of the functions of the tool is creating evaluation projects. During that task the user defines the features of the corresponding ICT product or service by answering questions presented by the tool. As a result of this process, the tool will create a list of applicable requirements and recommendations.