Polluting Student Test Performance: School-Based Evidence on the Adverse effects of Air Pollution

This study investigates the relationship between air pollution and children’s performance on cognitive tests, focusing on characteristics of individuals often assumed to be stable, such as cognitive ability and cognitive effort. Against the backdrop of mounting environmental concerns and policies striving for sustainable cities and inclusive communities, it aims to answer two main questions: (i) whether air pollution is negatively associated with children’s performance on tests of cognitive ability and cognitive effort, and (ii) whether socioeconomic status moderates these associations, or in other words, whether poor air quality dispropor-tionately thwarts the development of disadvantaged children. Specifically, we examine the influence of four different pollutants (CO, NO2, O3 and PM2.5) and two different test out-comes: children’s cognitive ability and effort. We hypothesize that air pollution reduces performance on both tests, and that children with low socioeconomic status may be more susceptible to adverse pollution effects, as high SES families may have ways to compensate for the air pollution their children are exposed to at school. By combining data on 1,368 fifth-grade students (around age 11) from a lab-in-the-field study in Madrid and Berlin with air pollution data from the Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service and weather data from the E-OBS dataset, the study employs multilevel linear mixed models to investigate how cumulative air pollution is associated with cognitive ability and effort across different pollutants and time spans of cumulative pollution. The results show significant negative relationships between cumulative air pollution and both cognitive ability and effort, with the strongest association observed between cumulative ozone exposure two months prior to the test and cognitive ability. In contrast to our second hypothesis, no heterogeneous effects are found by socioeconomic status.This research has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No 758600)

El exilio anticomunista centroeuropeo en la España de Franco

Tras el final de la Segunda Guerra Mundial y la ocupación soviética del Este del continente europeo, la España de Franco se convirtió en refugio del exilio anticomunista. La fundación de Colegio Mayor Santiago Apóstol como residencia de estudiantes; la emisión de propaganda por Radio Nacional de España; el reconocimiento de los delegados de los comités nacionales; las empresas editoriales de los exiliados, son algunas de las piezas estudiadas en este libro que permiten un acercamiento más rico al fenómeno

Derechos y Filosofía del Derecho en contexto

The presence of fundamental rights norms in legal systems has consequences for legal philosophical reflection, which includes rights as an object of attention and critical analysis. At the same time, in the constitutionalist context, rights constitute a scenario in which the relationship that law establishes with morality and power is manifested in a singular way

The Art of Cybercrime Community Research

In the last decade, cybercrime has risen considerably. One key factor is the proliferation of online cybercrime communities, where actors trade products and services, and also learn from each other. Accordingly, understanding the operation and behavior of these communities is of great interest, and they have been explored across multiple disciplines with different, often quite novel, approaches. This survey explores the challenges inherent to the field and the methodological approaches researchers used to understand this space. We note that, in many cases, cybercrime research is more of an art than a science. We highlight the good practices and propose a list of recommendations for future cybercrime community scholars, including taking steps to verify and validate results, establishing privacy and ethical research practices, and mitigating the challenge of ground truth data.This work is supported by the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Unions Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No 949127) (for JH and AH), grant TED2021-132170A-I00 from the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation, funded by MCIN/AEI /10.13039/501100011033, and the European UnionNextGenerationEU/PRTR (for SP). The work is also supported by the National Science Foundation under the Secure and Trustworthy Cyberspace programme (grant No CNS-1936370) (for WL), under grants OAC-2319325 (for SS), DGE-1946537 (for SS), OAC-1917117 (for SS), CNS-2338479 (for SS), and award No 2246220 (for EM

¿Cómo preparar un Plan de Gestión de Datos?

Taller impartido en la Universidad de Extremadura los días 18 y 19 de abril de 2024

An archaeology of media artivism: attempting to draft the history of digital culture for social change

The emergence of media artivism over the last decades constitutes a new and relevant field of study for researchers of digital culture and social change, digital art historians and media archaeologists. Since the inception of the new millennium and the spread of electronic culture, media artivism has grown into a field of its own with distinctive organizations, artists, curators and critics devoted to engaged practices that are close to political antagonism and far from the concerns of the elitist art world. Considering the worsening environmental and political crisis around the globe, the spread and conscious use of new technologies becomes essential to update the concept of artivism, intended as a kind of action-taking art devoted to social issues. By establishing an epistemological framework along the lines of media archaeology and digital art history, the research highlights the role of media artivism in the context of recent historical and societal developments, as well as its potentially leading role for behavioral and social change. From pioneering experiences to current practices, the paper explores how a growing number of practitioners are tackling societal concerns through digital strategies and thus drawing attention to several critical topics, such as: gender issues, environmental delinquency, racial discrimination, social injustices, political corruption, abuse of power, invasive technologies and surveillance abuse. In the course of the analysis, a relevant role is given to practices based on hacktivism, public engagement and intercreative procedures that aim at highlighting, disclosing, or spreading the state of affairs which are still uncovered in traditional media and thus expanding the role of investigative art/journalism in the Postdigital Age. The case studies presented show how media artivism emerges as an autonomous field shaped by practitioners acting on the premise of a vocation on the fringe between society and the art world.El surgimiento del artivismo de los medios en las últimas décadas constituye un nuevo campo de estudio de gran relevancia para los investigadores de la cultura digital y el cambio social, los historiadores del arte digital y los arqueólogos de medios. Desde el inicio del nuevo milenio y con la difusión de la cultura electrónica, el artivismo de los medios se ha convertido en un campo específico para organizaciones, artistas, comisarios y críticos dedicados a prácticas comprometidas próximas al antagonismo político y alejadas de las preocupaciones del mundo del arte elitista. Teniendo en cuenta el agravamiento de la crisis ambiental y política en todo el mundo, la difusión y el uso consciente de las nuevas tecnologías se vuelve esencial para actualizar el concepto de artivismo, concebido como un tipo de arte de acción destinado a cuestiones sociales. Al establecer un marco epistemológico en línea con la arqueología de medios y la historia del arte digital, la investigación destaca el papel del artivismo de los medios de comunicación en el contexto de los desarrollos históricos y sociales recientes, así como su potencial liderazgo en el cambio social y del comportamiento. Desde experiencias pioneras hasta prácticas más actuales, el artículo explora cómo un número creciente de profesionales están abordando una serie de cuestiones de relevancia social a través de estrategias digitales para dirigir nuestra atención hacia varios temas críticos, tales como: cuestiones de género, delincuencia medioambiental, discriminación racial, injusticias sociales, corrupción política, abuso de poder, tecnologías invasivas y abuso de la vigilancia. A lo largo del análisis, se otorga un papel relevante a las prácticas basadas en el hacktivismo, el compromiso público y los procedimientos intercreativos que pretenden dar visibilidad, revelar o difundir situaciones aún no cubiertas desde los medios tradicionales, ampliando así el papel del arte y periodismo de investigación en la era posdigital. Los estudios de caso presentados muestran cómo el artivismo de los medios emerge como un campo autónomo moldeado por profesionales que actúan sobre la premisa vocacional desde los límites entre la sociedad y el mundo del arte.The research is part of the project Digital Media Culture: Intercreativity and Public Engagement (PI: Fernández-Castrillo 2019-2023) at the Venice Center for Digital and Public Humanities (Ca’ Foscari Università di Venezia), financed by the Ministero dell’ Università e della Ricerca, Progetto MIUR Dipartimenti di Eccellenza. The results of the work are also integrated into the research line Archaeology of digital media: intermediality, transmedia narratives and UGC driven by Fernández-Castrillo from TECMERIN group (Television-Cinema: Memory, Representation and Industry) at the Department of Communication and Media Studies, Carlos III University of Madrid. This work is further part of the EU-funded research project PARSEU. Sustainable Art’s Scope and Impact in Southwestern Europe (PI: Diego Mantoan 2023-24) based on a Next Generation EU program at the Department of Humanities, University of Palermo, Italy

Revealing information &- or not &- in a social network of traders

We propose a simple micro-founded model of trading with ex-ante asymmetric information similar to one proposed by Kyle (1985) in which the equilibrium price is fully revealing under rational expectations. We analyze under which conditions a privately informed trader may want to share her information with other traders for free. Despite the strictly competitive setupand conventional wisdom, we show that there is a unique separating equilibrium in which the informed trader reveals some signals and conceals others. A consequence of this is that the price need not be fully revealing of the aggregate information in the market (even if traders are risk neutral), which in turn has welfare implications on the distribution of the social surplusat equilibrium. We establish these results for a context where the pattern of communication among traders is restricted by a given social network, studying as well what network arises when links are established endogenously.This research was supported by the Italian Ministry of Education Progetti di Rilevante Interesse Nazionale (PRIN) grant 2017ELHNNJ. F. Vega-Redondo acknowledges financial support by grant CEX2021-001181-M financed by MICIU/AEI /10.13039/501100011033, María Zambrano Program 2021, and Comunidad de Madrid, grant EPUC3M11 (V PRICIT)