ORIGEN Y FLORA DE LAS SABANAS DE LA PROVINCIA DE GUANACASTE (COSTA RICA): UN ANALISIS EN LA FITOGEOGRAFIA HISTORICA

El presente artículo de fitogeografía histórica trata  de explicar a partir de documentos históricos y relatos de exploradores, buscadores de oro y científicos que recorrieron Costa Rica durante los siglos XVll, XVlll, XlX, el origen y flora de la sabana.   Las sabanas de Guanacaste deben su origen a factores antropológicos, edafológicos y climatológicos que actúan en conjunto y no solo al factor antrópico como ha querido explicar.   La flora de sabana proviene de la asociación vegetal matorral deciduo por la sequia con especies sempervirentes entremezcladas, cuya florase relaciona con la de las formaciones arbusticas herbáceas secas americanas, llanas y cerradas. Esta flora encuentra las condiciones favorables (fuego anual, larga estación seca, precipitación mal distribuida en el año, etc.) para diseminarse y ocupar el área del bosque seco deciduo por la sequia.   SUMMARY The present article of historical phytogeography tryst to explain by means of historical documents and commentaries of explorers, goldminers and scientists that traveled in Costa Rica during the 17, 18 and 19 th centuries, the origin of the flora found in the Guanacaste savanna.   The Guanacaste savanna owes its origin to a combination of anthropologic, edafologic and climatologic factors; and not only to the anthropologic factor as has been often thought.   The savanna type flora originates from the deciduous thicket vegetative association that is common in dry areas intermingled with evergreen species. This type of flora is related to shrub and opens and closed dry Americans herbaceous formations. This flora chooses favorable conditions (burnt off areas, long dry season, poor annual precipitation distribution, etc) in the order to disseminate and occupy the deciduous dry forest. RESUME Cet article de phytogéographie historique, à partir de documents historiques, de récits d’explorateurs, de chercheurs d’or ; de scientifiques qui ont parcouru C.R aux XVll, XVlll et XlX siècles, tente d’expliquer l’origine de la savane ainsi que sa flore.   On reconnaît que ces origines sont plutôt dûes aux actions conjointes de facteurs anthropologiques, pédologiques et climatiques, au lieu du seul facteur anthropologique comme on voulait l’expliquer auparavant. La savane résulte d’une association végétale : une brousse entremêlée d’espèces « semper virens » malgré l’existence de la saison sèche. Cette flore est en relation avec les informations arbustives et herbeuses –qui caractérisent les dépressions centre américaines-  fermées, fonc sèches. Cette association végétale s’est implantée à la faveur de pratiqués culturales tels les brûlis annuels, des longues saisons sèches et de la répartition irrégulière des pluies au long de l’année, à la place de la forêt claire caducifoliée.

Avances e inconsistencias en el concepto de reparación integral a raíz de las decisiones de la Corte Interamericana de Derechos Humanos y del Consejo de Estado Colombiano

Resumen El concepto de reparación integral en Colombia está mediado en gran parte por las decisiones de la Corte Interamericana de Derechos Humanos. Ello ha propiciado algunos avances en materia de ampliar el espectro de las reparaciones económicas; en la posibilidad de reabrir investigaciones antes cobijadas por la intangibilidad de la cosa juzgada; en la participación de las víctimas en los procesos penales y disciplinarios, y en algunas formas de reparación simbólica. Sin embargo, en general hay carencia de verdadera voluntad política y de mecanismos jurídicos que posibiliten que la reparación integral sea una realidad.Además, el cruce de decisiones de la Corte Interamericana con las decisiones del Consejo de Estado colombiano, ha originado situaciones absurdas que, aunque teóricamente se ven como un avance, en términos reales son un retroceso frente a los derechos de las víctimas. Ello se debe a la aparente similitud de las competencias de ambos tribunales; a una equivocada lectura del Consejo de Estado sobre los límites y posibilidades reales de su jurisdicción, y finalmente, a que la Corte no ha adoptado criterios claros en relación con las reparaciones económicas y en relación con la coherencia en el cumplimiento de sus sentencias. Palabras clave: reparación, Colombia, Corte Interamericana de Derechos Humanos, Consejo de Estado. Abstract The concept of integral reparation in Colombia is mediated largely by the decisions of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights. This has led to some progress in broadening the spectrum of economic reparations; in the possibility of reopening investigations sheltered by the intangibility for defendants; in the participation of victims in criminal and disciplinary proceedings, besides in some symbolic forms of reparation. However, there is general lack of real political will and legal mechanisms that enable that comprehensive reparation be a reality. Furthermore, crossing inter-American court decisions with the decisions of the Colombian State Council has created absurd situations that, although theoretically are seen as a breakthrough, in real terms are a retreat from the rights of victims. This is due to the apparent similarity in the competencies of both courts; a mistaken reading of the State Council on the limits and real possibilities of their jurisdiction, and finally, the Court has not adopted clear criteria regarding economic reparations and in relation to consistent com­pliance with its sentences.Keywords: repair, Colombia, Interamerican Court of Human rights, State Council.   

Essays in the Economics of the Family and Cultural Transmission

My research aims at identifying the role cultural-ethnic traits play in marriage choices and at uncovering the implications of marital sorting on consequent intra-household decisions. From different perspectives, this thesis focuses on intermarriages, within the Italian marriage market. In the first chapter, I explore the role of ethnic endogamy on marital instability. I document the existence of a positive differential in marital instability of interethnic marriages compared to homogeneous ones and I demonstrate that genetic and ethnolinguistic measures of cultural diversity are informative about the incidence of marital dissolution. The second chapter investigates a novel channel, which explains the differential in household stability and investments across family types: cultural socialization of children. I propose a marital matching model along cultural-ethnic lines, to study the process of family formation and intra-household decision making in a context where ethnic differences between spouses potentially matter both in terms of preferences and technologies for household production. The observed intermarriage, fertility, separation and socialization rates are in line with theoretical predictions and they are consistent with strong preferences of parents toward cultural socialization of children to their own ethnic identity. In the third chapter, I propose and estimate a marital matching model along ethnic lines. I argue that gains to intermarriage depend on both cultural preferences and legal status motives. Taking advantage of the exogenous EU enlargements to East European countries in 2004 and 2007, I show that gains to intermarriage of East European migrants significantly decrease in response to the acquisition of the legal status. The final chapter aims to understand whether judicial decisions respond to the ethnic identity of spouses and what incentives those judgments are guided, by looking at separation and divorce sentences. Studying the legal custody assignment of children, I document a significant differential interacting mothers’ ethnicities with the family type.

Typing your mind away. Comparing keylogged tasks with the Task Segment Framework

One of the main process features under study in Cognitive Translation & Interpreting Studies (CTIS) is the chronological unfolding of the tasks. The analyses of time spans in translation have been conceived in two ways: (1) studying those falling between text units of different sizes: words, phrases, sentences, and paragraphs; (2) setting arbitrary time span thresholds to explore where do they fall in the text, whether between text units or not. Writing disfluencies may lead to comprehensive insights into the cognitive activities involved in typing while translating. Indeed, long time spans are often taken as hints that cognitive resources have been subtracted from typing and devoted to other activities, such as planning, evaluating, etc. This exploratory, pilot study combined both approaches to seek potential general tendencies and contrasts in informants’ inferred mental processes when performing different writing tasks, through the analysis of their behaviors, as keylogged. The study tasks were retyping, monolingual free writing, translation, revision and a multimodal task—namely, monolingual text production based on an infographic leaflet. Task logs were chunked, and shorter time spans, including those within words, were analyzed following the Task Segment Framework (Muñoz & Apfelthaler, in press). Finally, time span analysis was combined with the analysis of the texts as to their lexical density, type-token ratio and word frequency. Several previous results were confirmed, and some others were surprising. Time spans in free writing were longer between paragraphs and sentences, possibly hinting at planning and, in translation, between clauses and words, suggesting more cognitive activities at these levels. On the other hand, the infographic was expected to facilitate the writing process, but most time spans were longer than in both free writing and translation. Results of the multimodal task and some other results suggest venues for further research.

Data-stream driven Fuzzy-granular approaches for system maintenance

Intelligent systems are currently inherent to the society, supporting a synergistic human-machine collaboration. Beyond economical and climate factors, energy consumption is strongly affected by the performance of computing systems. The quality of software functioning may invalidate any improvement attempt. In addition, data-driven machine learning algorithms are the basis for human-centered applications, being their interpretability one of the most important features of computational systems. Software maintenance is a critical discipline to support automatic and life-long system operation. As most software registers its inner events by means of logs, log analysis is an approach to keep system operation. Logs are characterized as Big data assembled in large-flow streams, being unstructured, heterogeneous, imprecise, and uncertain. This thesis addresses fuzzy and neuro-granular methods to provide maintenance solutions applied to anomaly detection (AD) and log parsing (LP), dealing with data uncertainty, identifying ideal time periods for detailed software analyses. LP provides deeper semantics interpretation of the anomalous occurrences. The solutions evolve over time and are general-purpose, being highly applicable, scalable, and maintainable. Granular classification models, namely, Fuzzy set-Based evolving Model (FBeM), evolving Granular Neural Network (eGNN), and evolving Gaussian Fuzzy Classifier (eGFC), are compared considering the AD problem. The evolving Log Parsing (eLP) method is proposed to approach the automatic parsing applied to system logs. All the methods perform recursive mechanisms to create, update, merge, and delete information granules according with the data behavior. For the first time in the evolving intelligent systems literature, the proposed method, eLP, is able to process streams of words and sentences. Essentially, regarding to AD accuracy, FBeM achieved (85.64+-3.69)%; eGNN reached (96.17+-0.78)%; eGFC obtained (92.48+-1.21)%; and eLP reached (96.05+-1.04)%. Besides being competitive, eLP particularly generates a log grammar, and presents a higher level of model interpretability.

Variety, flexibility, and use of abstract concepts. A multiple grounded perspective.

The nature of concepts is a matter of intense debate in cognitive sciences. While traditional views claim that conceptual knowledge is represented in a unitary symbolic system, recent Embodied and Grounded Cognition theories (EGC) submit the idea that conceptual system is couched in our body and influenced by the environment (Barsalou, 2008). One of the major challenges for EGC is constituted by abstract concepts (ACs), like fantasy. Recently, some EGC proposals addressed this criticism, arguing that the ACs comprise multifaced exemplars that rely on different grounding sources beyond sensorimotor one, including interoception, emotions, language, and sociality (Borghi et al., 2018). However, little is known about how ACs representation varies as a function of life experiences and their use in communication. The theoretical arguments and empirical studies comprised in this dissertation aim to provide evidence on multiple grounding of ACs taking into account their varieties and flexibility. Study I analyzed multiple ratings on a large sample of ACs and identified four distinct subclusters. Study II validated this classification with an interference paradigm involving motor/manual, interoceptive, and linguistic systems during a difficulty rating task. Results confirm that different grounding sources are activated depending on ACs kind. Study III-IV investigate the variability of institutional concepts, showing that the higher the law expertise level, the stronger the concrete/emotional determinants in their representation. Study V introduced a novel interactive task in which abstract and concrete sentences serve as cues to simulate conversation. Analysis of language production revealed that the uncertainty and interactive exchanges increase with abstractness, leading to generating more questions/requests for clarifications with abstract than concrete sentences. Overall, results confirm that ACs are multidimensional, heterogeneous, and flexible constructs and that social and linguistic interactions are crucial to shaping their meanings. Investigating ACs in real-time dialogues may be a promising direction for future research.

Neural Machine Translation in the Field of Law. Analysis and Evaluation against Human Reference of NMT Raw Outputs of an Atto Costitutivo of S.r.l. from Italian into German.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is gaining ever more ground in every sphere of human life, to the point that it is now even used to pass sentences in courts. The use of AI in the field of Law is however deemed quite controversial, as it could provide more objectivity yet entail an abuse of power as well, given that bias in algorithms behind AI may cause lack of accuracy. As a product of AI, machine translation is being increasingly used in the field of Law too in order to translate laws, judgements, contracts, etc. between different languages and different legal systems. In the legal setting of Company Law, accuracy of the content and suitability of terminology play a crucial role within a translation task, as any addition or omission of content or mistranslation of terms could entail legal consequences for companies. The purpose of the present study is to first assess which neural machine translation system between DeepL and ModernMT produces a more suitable translation from Italian into German of the atto costitutivo of an Italian s.r.l. in terms of accuracy of the content and correctness of terminology, and then to assess which translation proves to be closer to a human reference translation. In order to achieve the above-mentioned aims, two human and automatic evaluations are carried out based on the MQM taxonomy and the BLEU metric. Results of both evaluations show an overall better performance delivered by ModernMT in terms of content accuracy, suitability of terminology, and closeness to a human translation. As emerged from the MQM-based evaluation, its accuracy and terminology errors account for just 8.43% (as opposed to DeepL’s 9.22%), while it obtains an overall BLEU score of 29.14 (against DeepL’s 27.02). The overall performances however show that machines still face barriers in overcoming semantic complexity, tackling polysemy, and choosing domain-specific terminology, which suggests that the discrepancy with human translation may still be remarkable.