Pistang Pamana, Pistang Naaayon: A Socio-cultural and Environmental Sustainability Framework for Town Fiestas

Town fiestas have increasingly responded to the challenges posed by sustainable development. This study developed a framework for town fiestas which highlight its social, cultural and environmental sustainability by experiencing, exploring and analyzing its practices. Although none of these fiestas are identical, someconsistent patterns emerged to demonstrate that comparisons can be developed. Each community has an ongoing challenge of determining how their fiesta can best meet its needs presently and in the future. Each is trying to keep pace with the changes that are taking place within their communities, within the region and fromexternal forces. This study generated new knowledge: tracking the changes occurring in town fiestas in the Tagalog Region that a framework for sustainability was put together. This paper is a multiple case study which is highly ethnographic quantitative and qualitative in nature. In developing the framework, a survey of a sample of residents and tourists were administered for the selected fiestas. Purposive sampling was administered to gather first hand information from the main organizers/drivers of the fiesta: the tourism administrator, hermana mayor, LGU representative and church leaders. Lastly, participant observation method of research was employed. The framework formed composed of three components, the socio-cultural elements,the environmental elements and the multi-stakeholders collaborating strategies. Each of the fiesta observed has its own strengths and weaknesses. The framework linked the fiestas together and elements for sustainability were identified. For any fiesta to thrive, it has to resolve its threats and be able to identify and respond to the requisites of sustainability. Keywords: Cultural, Environmental, Social, Sustainability, Town Fiest

La construcción del "espacio turístico" y el desarrollo regional, un primer acercamiento al caso del municipio de Jacatepec, Oaxaca

Esta ponencia tiene como objetivo presentar los avances preliminares del proyecto de investigación “Análisis sociocultural-económico que permita el desarrollo turístico sustentable en la Chinantla”, de manera muy puntual, nos limitamos al municipio de Jacatepec, Oaxaca, para este documento nos interesa contestar las siguientes preguntas ¿cómo se construye la región como espacio turístico? y ¿de qué manera impacta la construcción de espacios turísticos en el desarrollo local considerando la trayectoria histórica material de la región? Exponemos que la construcción del espacio turístico pasa por un complejo entramado donde la disposición discursiva puede ser dominante y no incluir a la totalidad de los actores, además se identifican las diferencias entre la construcción de la región como espacio turístico y el desarrollo histórico como región económica, ya que el primero no considera las relaciones de colonialismo interno que han sido la causa de la pobreza y marginación y por tanto vuelve ineficaces los planes de desarrollo a partir de la actividad turística pues parte de un análisis equivocado de la región. Destacamos que los espacios turísticos se construyen no sólo con elementos naturales e infraestructura, sino también con la articulación entre discurso y desarrollo histórico material que determinará cierto tipo de relaciones sociales actuales

Concurrent focal-plane generation of compressed samples fromtime-encoded pixel values

Compressive sampling allows wrapping the relevant content of an image in a reduced set of data. It exploits the sparsity of natural images. This principle can be employed to deliver images over a network under a restricted data rate and still receive enough meaningful information. An efficient implementation of this principle lies in the generation of the compressed samples right at the imager. Otherwise, i. e. digitizing the complete image and then composing the compressed samples in the digital plane, the required memory and processing resources can seriously compromise the budget of an autonomous camera node. In this paper we present the design of a pixel architecture that encodes light intensity into time, followed by a global strategy to pseudo-randomly combine pixel values and generate, on-chip and on-line, the compressed samples.Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad TEC 2015-66878-C3-1-RJunta de Andalucía TIC 2338-2013Office of Naval Research (USA) N000141410355CONACYT (Mexico) MZO-2017-29106

Heat Waves: Health Effects, Observed Trends and Climate Change

According to climate change scenarios, the average annual temperature will increase by around 4°C if current trends continue. Maximum temperatures, however, have already registered higher values in different regions of the world, increasing the number, duration and intensity of heat waves. With the increase of maximum temperatures and the increase of significance of heat wave events, reports of mortality episodes due to heat effects have been increasing. According to the information from the Centre for Research on Epidemiology of Disasters (CRED), 5 of the 20 deadliest disasters between 1996 and 2015 were heat wave events. This chapter analyzes heat wave events, the criteria for determining dangerous temperature thresholds, as well as trends already observed, and those expected due to climate change. Heat wave events are correlated with observed increases on mortality rates, and recommendations are suggested to prevent their effects on human health

EDUCATION, POVERTY AND THE TRAP OF POOR COUNTRIES IN THE FACE OF DEVELOPMENT

This article aims to identify the level of incidence of social and economic variables on education, considering the existence of a cumulative circular causation, in order to point out public policy recommendations to improve people's well-being and thus increase Indicators of development, especially in educational matters. An econometric analysis integrates available information from 128 countries between the period 2010-2015. The results show different effects on the level of incidence of social and economic variables between rich and poor countries

Pre-Harvest Factors Optimization Using Genetic Algorithm for Lettuce

The agricultural sector is facing problems on crop development due to climate change and global warming. Crops such as rice, tomato, corn, lettuce, potato, wheat, soybeans and others are affected. Through analyzing the graphical representation of data, no optimum values are observed. In this study, the suitability of the genetic algorithm in finding the best condition for producing high quality lettuce crop was determined. The parameters that were optimized are the light intensity, temperature and CO2. These parameters were essential preharvest factors for lettuce. The system selected the 50 fittest individuals based on the fitness score and then proceeds to the recombination process. A mutation has been applied to test if the solution is the global one. When the iterations had reached the required number of generation, the system stopped and gave the best condition for lettuce. Critical design on GA was done and the best fitness plot was obtained. The GA results showed that the optimum conditions for a highquality lettuce crop needs a light intensity of 175.22296 μmol/m2/s, a temperature of 19.36228 ºC and a CO2 level of 803.01855 ppm

Control of hydraulically–actuated manipulators with dead–band and time–delay uncertainties

The research behind this article is motivated by robotic operations in radiologically contaminated environments, notably for nuclear decommissioning. However, the experiments reported within are based on a recently reconfigured, hydraulically-actuated, dual manipulator robot that is being used for R&D into both tele-operation and autonomy in a non-active laboratory setting. One element of this research concerns the development of novel control systems to address time-delay and deadband uncertainties. The article briefly discusses some preliminary results and plans in this regard. Recent improvements to the hardware demonstrator are also described

Gabor-enhanced histogram of oriented gradients for human presence detection applied in aerial monitoring

In UAV-based human detection, the extraction and selection of the feature vector are one of the critical tasks to ensure the optimal performance of the detection system. Although UAV cameras capture high-resolution images, human figures' relative size renders persons at very low resolution and contrast. Feature descriptors that can adequately discriminate between local symmetrical patterns in a low-contrast image may improve a human figures' detection in vegetative environments. Such a descriptor is proposed and presented in this paper. Initially, the acquired images are fed to a digital processor in a ground station where the human detection algorithm is performed. Part of the human detection algorithm is the GeHOG feature extraction, where a bank of Gabor filters is used to generate textured images from the original. The local energy for each cell of the Gabor images is calculated to identify the dominant orientations. The bins of conventional HOG are enhanced based on the dominant orientation index and the accumulated local energy in Gabor images. To measure the performance of the proposed features, Gabor-enhanced HOG (GeHOG) and other two recent improvements to HOG, Histogram of Edge Oriented Gradients (HEOG) and Improved HOG (ImHOG), are used for human detection on INRIA dataset and a custom dataset of farmers working in fields captured via unmanned aerial vehicle. The proposed feature descriptor significantly improved human detection and performed better than recent improvements in conventional HOG. Using GeHOG improved the precision of human detection to 98.23% in the INRIA dataset. The proposed feature can significantly improve human detection applied in surveillance systems, especially in vegetative environments

Degradation of di-, tri-, tetra-, and pentachlorophenol mixtures in an aerobic biofilter

Chlorophenols are highly toxic xenobiotic compounds, normally found in the effluents of many industries. Due to the high toxicity of these compounds, it is difficult to treat effluent streams containing high concentrations of chlorophenols. The aim of this work is to demonstrate the capabilities of an aerobic submerged filter previously characterized in the degradation of phenol and chlorophenols in the treatment of highly toxic di-, tri-, tetra- and penta- chlorophenols mixtures (200 - 800 mgL-1 as total phenols concentration). It is shown that the system is capable of treating up to 600 mgL-1 of total chlorophenols with excellent reduction values, and biodegradation rates (BDRs) between 87 - 97%, and 34 - 157 mgL-1 day-1, respectively (total organic carbon, TOC degradations up to80%). In the case of the 800 mgL-1, a strong inhibition due to the high toxicity of the mixture was observed. The system reduced the influent toxicity (EC50 or toxic units) by 48 - 76%, even when the initial toxicities of the mixtures were in the range of 40 - 358 toxic units (classified as very toxic). The kinetics of the phenol and TOC degradation were characterized through a first order kinetic expression. The values of TPho, TOCo, k1 and k2 are reported for the biodegradation of the total phenols and for the TOC, respectively. A system with powerful capabilities in the treatment ofindustrial streams, contaminated aquifers or accidentally contaminated municipal wastewaters containing high quantities of chlorophenols, is described