Análisis contrastivo del español y el inglés como lenguas de instrucción en la educación superior: estrategias discursivas del profesor en un corpus oral

El amplio dominio del inglés como lengua global también está dejando huella en el mundo académico. En un principio fue la lengua a través de la cual se realizaba gran parte de la investigación y la publicación de los conocimientos específicos de cada disciplina académica. Actualmente también se está convirtiendo gradualmente en lengua de instrucción. A pesar de que en numerosos contextos a lo largo de la historia la enseñanza a través de una lengua extranjera ha sido más la regla que la excepción, las repercusiones que está causando a todos los niveles (político, económico, social, educativo y pedagógico) hacen de este fenómeno educativo un objeto necesario de investigación. Uno de los principales factores que han llevado a la adopción del inglés como lengua de instrucción en la educación superior ha sido la internacionalización de la universidad. Además, puesto que su implementación ya constituye una práctica extendida y aceptada en previos niveles educativos debido a la expansión del aprendizaje integrado de contenidos y lengua (AICLE) en primaria y secundaria (Dafouz & Guerrini, 2009; Dalton-Puffer, Nikula & Smit, 2010), continuar con este enfoque parece una elección lógica y, en principio, no muy costosa y problemática (Coleman, 2013: XIV). A este hecho hay que sumarle el factor competitivo que lleva a las universidades a atraer a estudiantes nacionales e internacionales, a profesores e investigadores con vocación y éxito de todas las partes del mundo y a alumnos de postgrado con talento con el objeto de incentivar la reputación y el prestigio de la universidad (Graddol, 2006; Ramos, 2013; Dafouz, 2015)...

Rivalidad de preeminencias entre el cabildo civil y eclesiástico en los cortejos procesionales del Corpus Christi. Antequera (siglo XVI)

Entre 1598 y 1606 la procesión del Corpus en Antequera quedó suspendida por desavenencias entre los miembros del concejo y el clero de la Colegiata por ocupar los mejores puestos y más cercanos a la Sagrada Forma para significar así su posición predominante en la sociedad del momento. Las alteraciones a describir en el presente artículo forman parte del proceso de institucionalización de una fiesta, cuyo culmen estético y simbólico se confirma durante el siglo XVII, bajo la ideología contrarreformista de Trento. Between 1598 and 1606 the Corpus Christi’s procession in Antequera was suspended because of disagreements between the members of the Council and the clergy. These disagreements focused on the matter of who must occupy the best positions in the procession (that is: as close to the Communion Bread as possible). These locations signify the status in that society. The changes described in this paper are part of the process of institutionalization of a festivity, which reach its crowning moment (aesthetically and symbolically) during the seventeenth century, under the ideology of Trento.

Propuesta de un manual para la determinación del precio de transferencia, aplicando el método de precios comparable no controlado para las firmas de auditoría ubicadas en el municipio de San Salvador.

En la actualidad una gran parte del comercio se desarrolla entre empresas relacionadas, generando constantemente el nacimiento de nuevas transacciones, que para las administraciones tributarias de muchos países resulta difícil poder fiscalizar, ya que estas transacciones nacen planificadas por los grupos empresariales con el ánimo de llevar sus ganancias a países donde existe una menor presión fiscal inclusive pueden ser de nula tributación, evitando así que sus rentas sean sujetas al pago de los tributos en su país de origen. Por lo tanto, en el país la situación no es muy distinta, es por ello que el Ministerio de Hacienda ha tomado a bien, establecer mecanismos que garanticen que las transacciones entre partes relacionadas sean gravadas con el respectivo impuesto sobre la renta y para ello ha incluido en la legislación salvadoreña explícitamente la utilización de las directrices emitidas por la Organización para la Cooperación y el Desarrollo Económico (OCDE), aplicables en materia de precios de transferencia a empresas multinacionales y administraciones tributarias, para poder determinar si las operaciones entre partes relacionadas se han realizado a precios de mercado y sí el interés fiscal no se ha visto afectado por tales operaciones. Tal situación conlleva a los profesionales de la contaduría pública y auditoría a actualizarse en la aplicación de estas directrices, debido a que los grupos empresariales acuden a ellos para que les ayuden a determinar si los precios transados entre partes relacionadas, han sido realizados ante la exigencia del Código Tributario, a precios de mercado. En ese sentido surge una problemática, debido a que se debe conocer los aspectos teóricos y prácticos de tales directrices para poder aplicarlas correctamente. Es por ello que el presente trabajo nace en vista de esa necesidad, con la finalidad de contribuir al fortalecimiento de la profesión mediante la propuesta de un manual que contribuya a la aplicación del método del precio comparable no controlado y que éste ofrezca un apoyo metodológico en la prestación de servicios de determinación de precios de transferencia. Para su elaboración se recurrió a consultar a profesionales de la contaduría pública y auditoría, que prestan sus servicios a las firmas de auditoría del municipio de San Salvador, en tal sentido, para poder determinar la familiaridad que se tiene a los lineamientos de las directrices de la OCDE, y de la necesidad de tener una herramienta de apoyo metodológico que ilustre la aplicación de uno de los métodos utilizados para realizar el estudio y la determinación de los precios de transferencia a nivel mundial. Obteniendo como resultado la necesidad que los profesionales tienen en cuanto a consultar casos prácticos, los cuales podrán ser encontrados en este documento y además podrá consultar una estructura general del trabajo que conlleva la realización de un estudio de precios de transferencia. Sin embargo, el tema de precios de transferencia en El Salvador no es muy reciente, puesto que se incluyó en la legislación tributaria en el año 2009, aún sigue existiendo la necesidad de obtener mayores conocimientos sobre la aplicación correcta de los métodos que reconoce la Organización para la Cooperación y el Desarrollo Económico (OCDE), no solo para los profesionales de la contaduría pública y auditoría, sino también para la Administración Tributaria; la cual debe continuar buscando factores claves para legislar lo que actualmente, se presentan como vacíos que las mismas leyes salvadoreñas no han logrado cubrir. En tal sentido, en este documento se puede encontrar la normativa legal vigente en El Salvador, ya que es de gran importancia que los profesionales consideren dichas leyes al momento de desarrollar un estudio de precios de transferencia, puesto que el legislador salvadoreño ha incluido dicha figura en el marco legal del país, en tal sentido, como un aporte fundamental al sector de profesionales de la contaduría pública y la auditoría, se muestra en esencia el marco legal que rige la figura de precios de transferencia en El Salvador, así como obligaciones formales y sustantivas que se derivan del desarrollo de un estudio de precios de trasferencia. Como ya es bien conocido, el contador público en el ejercicio de sus funciones no solamente debe cumplir con los requerimientos legales, sino también con un marco técnico, el cual está delimitado en materia de precios de transferencia por las directrices de la OCDE, las cuales se encuentran contempladas en este documento, los requerimientos y principios fundamentales, además de una descripción de cada método reconocido por dichas directrices, así como también una descripción de cada uno de los momentos claves que involucran un estudio de precios de trasferencia. Todo lo anterior como una respuesta legal, técnica y práctica, a la necesidad de los profesionales de la contaduría pública y Auditoría en cuanto a la temática en cuestión, por lo tanto, en el documento se muestran casos prácticos de la aplicación del método de precio libre comparable no controlado, para reforzar los conocimientos y de la misma manera evitar en cierta medida problemas de incumplimientos por parte de los clientes que están obligados a realizar dicho estudio.

La sabiduría árabe antigua reflejada en los proverbios de Al-Maydani: traducción y análisis paremiológico de un corpus seleccionado

Little is known about Ancient Arabia before the arrival of Islam as it was an area with few inhabited settlements and it was mostly a passageway for traders. In those inhabited settlements we could find some settled Arabs, but the prevailing life style was that of the rest of the population, nomadic Bedouin Arabs who travelled from place to place looking for water and pasture for their cattle, which they lived off. The desert was their natural habitat, a hostile environment full of danger where life was not easy. Camel taming made it possible for them to live that nomadic lifestyle, and the Bedouins became inseparable from their camels and from their horses and cattle. In order to make a living they worked as hunters, transported caravans, and plundered too. In the pre-Islamic era, knowledge was transmitted by oral communication, so very little written information about that time and place remains. One thing that has been handed down are proverbs, which after the 8th Century started to be collected by several writers in various written works. Given the characteristics of those proverbs, which are conserved almost intact from their origins, we can learn much about the lifestyle in Ancient Arabia. What is to be investigated within this thesis is whether through Paremiology it is possible to learn more about this area at this historic moment that precedes the arrival of Islam, and the first years of this religion. To learn about history, we usually rely on historians and palaeontologists, but this work will demonstrate that through Paremiology it is possible to know other aspects of culture, their knowledge, the way of life, thinking, society, etc...

"Not one word of it made any sense" : Hyperbolic Synecdoche in the British National Corpus

A distinct metonymic pattern was discovered in the course of conducting a corpus-based study of figurative uses of WORD. The pattern involved examples such as Not one word of it made any sense and I agree with every word. It was labelled ‘hyperbolic synecdoche’, defined as a case in which a lexeme which typically refers to part of an entity (a) is used to stand for the whole entity and (b) is described with reference to the end point on a scale. Specifically, the speaker/writer selects the perspective of a lower-level unit (such as word for ‘utterance’), which is quantified as NOTHING or ALL, thus forming a subset of ‘extreme case formulations’. Hyperbolic synecdoche was found to exhibit a restricted range of lexicogrammatical patterns involving word, with the negated NOTHING patterns being considerably more common than the ALL patterns. The phenomenon was shown to be common in metonymic uses in general, constituting one-fifth of all cases of metonymy in word. The examples of hyperbolic synecdoche were found not to be covered by the oftquoted ‘abbreviation’ rationale for metonymy; instead, they represent a more roundabout way of expression. It is shown that other cases of hyperbolic synecdoche exist outside of word and the domain of communication (such as ‘time’ and ‘money’).

Efficient microwave hydrothermal preparation of nanocrystalline anatase TiO2 colloids

Titanium dioxide nanocrystals are an important commercial product used primarily in white pigments and abrasives, however, more recently the anatase form of TiO2 has become a major component in electrochemical and photoelectrochemical devices. An important property of titanium dioxide nanocrystals for electrical applications is the degree of crystallinity. Numerous preparation methods exist for the production of highly crystalline TiO2 particles. The majority of these processes require long reaction times, high pressures and temperatures (450–1400 °C). Recently, hydrothermal treatment of colloidal TiO2 suspensions has been shown to produce quality crystalline products at low temperatures (<250 °C). In this paper we extend this idea utilising a direct microwave heating source. A comparison between convection and microwave hydrothermal treatment of colloidal TiO2 is presented. The resulting highly crystalline TiO2 colloids were characterised using Raman spectroscopy, XRD, TEM, and electron diffraction. The results show that the microwave treatment of colloidal TiO2 gives comparable increases in crystallinity with respect to normal hydrothermal treatments while requiring significantly less time and energy than the hydrothermal convection treatment.

Raman spectroscopy of kaolinites using different excitation wavelengths

The Raman spectra of both low- and high-defect kaolinites in the hydroxyl stretching and low-wavenumber region were obtained with excitation at three visible wavelengths of 633, 514 and 442 nm and a UV wavelength of 325 nm. The UV-excited spectra were comparable to those excited by the visible wavelengths. The Raman spectra show hydroxyl stretching bands at 3621 cm-1 attributed to the inner hydroxyl, at 3692 and 3684 cm-1 attributed to the longitudinal and transverse optic modes of the inner surface hydroxyls and at 3668 and 3653 cm-1 assigned to the out-of phase vibrations of the inner surface hydroxyls. Two bands were observed in the spectral profile at 3695 cm-1 for the high-defect kaolinite at 3698 and 3691 cm-1 and were assigned to TO/LO splitting. An increase in relative intensity of the transverse optic mode is observed with decrease in laser wavelength. The intensity of the out-of-phase vibrations at 3668 and 3653 cm-1 of the inner surface hydroxyls shows a linear relationship with the longitudinal and transverse optic modes. In the low-wavenumber region excellent correlation was found between the experimentally determined and the calculated band positions.

Employability and job status as moderators of the effects of job insecurity on work outcomes

Despite greater use of temporary employment contracts, little is known about how employees react to job length uncertainty. Individual careers within the safety of one or two primary organisations are no longer the norm. This study investigates the effects of job insecurity and employment status (temporary/permanent) on work outcomes. Three hundred and ninety-one employees (122 temporary and 269 permanent) in low to medium level non-academic positions from two Australian universities completed a survey. The results show that a belief that comparable employment is easily available did not alleviate the negative effects of job insecurity. Work attitudes for temporaries and permanents though were differentially influenced by employee perceptions of their own employability.

Diesel bus emissions of submicrometer particles measured in a tunnel study

The emission factors of a bus fleet consisting of approximately three hundreds diesel powered buses were measured in a tunnel study under well controlled conditions during a two-day monitoring campaign in Brisbane. The number concentration of particles in the size range 0.017-0.7 m was monitored simultaneously by two Scanning Mobility Particle Sizers located at the tunnel’s entrance and exit. The mean value of the number emission factors was found to be (2.44±1.41)×1014 particles km-1. The results are in good agreement with the emission factors determined from steady-state dynamometer testing of 12 buses from the same Brisbane City bus fleet, thus indicating that when carefully designed, both approaches, the dynamometer and on-road studies, can provide comparable results, applicable for the assessment of the effect of traffic emissions on airborne particle pollution.

Speaker identification using higher order spectral phase features and their effectiveness vis-a-vis Mel-Cepstral features

The effectiveness of higher-order spectral (HOS) phase features in speaker recognition is investigated by comparison with Mel Cepstral features on the same speech data. HOS phase features retain phase information from the Fourier spectrum unlikeMel–frequency Cepstral coefficients (MFCC). Gaussian mixture models are constructed from Mel– Cepstral features and HOS features, respectively, for the same data from various speakers in the Switchboard telephone Speech Corpus. Feature clusters, model parameters and classification performance are analyzed. HOS phase features on their own provide a correct identification rate of about 97% on the chosen subset of the corpus. This is the same level of accuracy as provided by MFCCs. Cluster plots and model parameters are compared to show that HOS phase features can provide complementary information to better discriminate between speakers.

Creative design and the generative evolutionary paradigm

Design as seen from the designer's perspective is a series of amazing imaginative jumps or creative leaps. But design as seen by the design historian is a smooth progression or evolution of ideas that they seem self-evident and inevitable after the event. But the next step is anything but obvious for the artist/creator/inventor/designer stuck at that point just before the creative leap. They know where they have come from and have a general sense of where they are going, but often do not have a precise target or goal. This is why it is misleading to talk of design as a problem-solving activity - it is better defined as a problem-finding activity. This has been very frustrating for those trying to assist the design process with computer-based, problem-solving techniques. By the time the problem has been defined, it has been solved. Indeed the solution is often the very definition of the problem. Design must be creative-or it is mere imitation. But since this crucial creative leap seem inevitable after the event, the question must arise, can we find some way of searching the space ahead? Of course there are serious problems of knowing what we are looking for and the vastness of the search space. It may be better to discard altogether the term "searching" in the context of the design process: Conceptual analogies such as search, search spaces and fitness landscapes aim to elucidate the design process. However, the vastness of the multidimensional spaces involved make these analogies misguided and they thereby actually result in further confounding the issue. The term search becomes a misnomer since it has connotations that imply that it is possible to find what you are looking for. In such vast spaces the term search must be discarded. Thus, any attempt at searching for the highest peak in the fitness landscape as an optimal solution is also meaningless. Futhermore, even the very existence of a fitness landscape is fallacious. Although alternatives in the same region of the vast space can be compared to one another, distant alternatives will stem from radically different roots and will therefore not be comparable in any straightforward manner (Janssen 2000). Nevertheless we still have this tantalizing possibility that if a creative idea seems inevitable after the event, then somehow might the process be rserved? This may be as improbable as attempting to reverse time. A more helpful analogy is from nature, where it is generally assumed that the process of evolution is not long-term goal directed or teleological. Dennett points out a common minsunderstanding of Darwinism: the idea that evolution by natural selection is a procedure for producing human beings. Evolution can have produced humankind by an algorithmic process, without its being true that evolution is an algorithm for producing us. If we were to wind the tape of life back and run this algorithm again, the likelihood of "us" being created again is infinitesimally small (Gould 1989; Dennett 1995). But nevertheless Mother Nature has proved a remarkably successful, resourceful, and imaginative inventor generating a constant flow of incredible new design ideas to fire our imagination. Hence the current interest in the potential of the evolutionary paradigm in design. These evolutionary methods are frequently based on techniques such as the application of evolutionary algorithms that are usually thought of as search algorithms. It is necessary to abandon such connections with searching and see the evolutionary algorithm as a direct analogy with the evolutionary processes of nature. The process of natural selection can generate a wealth of alternative experiements, and the better ones survive. There is no one solution, there is no optimal solution, but there is continuous experiment. Nature is profligate with her prototyping and ruthless in her elimination of less successful experiments. Most importantly, nature has all the time in the world. As designers we cannot afford prototyping and ruthless experiment, nor can we operate on the time scale of the natural design process. Instead we can use the computer to compress space and time and to perform virtual prototyping and evaluation before committing ourselves to actual prototypes. This is the hypothesis underlying the evolutionary paradigm in design (1992, 1995).

Lateral bone density variations in the scoliotic spine

Adolescent Idiopathic Scoliosis (AIS) is the most common deformity of the spine, affecting 2-4% of the population. Previous studies have shown that the vertebrae in scoliotic spines undergo abnormal shape changes, however there has been little exploration of how AIS affects bone density distribution within the vertebrae. Existing pre-operative CT scans of 53 female idiopathic scoliosis patients with right-sided main thoracic curves were used to measure the lateral (right to left) bone density profile at mid-height through each vertebral body. This study demonstrated that AIS patients have a marked convex/concave asymmetry in bone density for vertebral levels at or near the apex of the scoliotic curve. To the best of our knowledge, the only previous studies of bone density distribution in AIS are those of Périé et al [1,2], who reported a coronal plane ‘mechanical migration’ of 0.54mm toward the concavity of the scoliotic curve in the lumbar apical vertebrae of 11 scoliosis patients. This is comparable to the value of 0.8mm (4%) in our study, especially since our patients had more severe scoliotic curves. From a bone adaptation perspective, these results suggest that the axial loading on the scoliotic spine is strongly asymmetric.