Acción Política No Violenta : una guía para estudiosos y practicantes

Este breve trabajo ha sido escrito para todas las personas que, como estudiosos y/o practicantes incursionan en el tema de la acción política no violenta. Es una carta de navegación que expone algunos conceptos y debates claves en el tema, al igual que importantes fuentes bibliográficas e instrumentos para la práctica política. También, de manera más implícita, se sugieren algunas preguntas para futuras investigaciones. Ésta es una síntesis y un punto de entrada en relación con un amplio tema de investigación emprendido por el autor desde hace más de siete años. Recoge parte del contacto con autoridades académicas y políticas nacionales e internacionales, y la participación (como organizador y/o ponente) en siete seminarios internacionales organizados con varias universidades e instituciones públicas en Bogotá sobre temas afines. Se destacan los contactos con Jon Elster, Roger Petersen, Stathis Kalyvas, Sthepen Holmes y Roberto Gargarella quienes han ayudado en el entendimiento de los microfundamentos de la guerra civil, el constitucionalismo, las libertades individuales y la acción colectiva. Igualmente han sido significativos los contactos con varios estudiosos y practicantes de la acción colectiva no violenta, destacando a Gene Sharp, Robert Helvey, Peter Ackerman, Jack Duvall, María Stephan, Kurt Schock, Srdja Popovic, Jenny Pearce, Antonino Drago, Jorgen Johansen, Vegar Jordanger, J. M. Muller y Mario López. Ha sido de gran importancia haber conocido las propuestas desde la economía solidaria de Muhammad Yunus y Antonio Elizalde. En el ámbito nacional han sido invaluables las discusiones con Antanas Mockus, al igual que la incursión en la práctica de la resistencia civil durante su segunda administración como Alcalde Mayor de Bogotá. Del mismo modo son valiosos los fugaces encuentros con investigadores como Jorge Hernández, Luisa Ortiz, Diana Britto, Esperanza Hernández, Oscar Mejía Q., y Nelson Molina. Este proceso de investigación queda parcialmente consignado en cinco libros colectivos de los que he sido coautor y compilador; tres publicados por la Editorial de la Universidad del Rosario que son Cante y Ortiz (2005, 2006), y Cante (2007), uno publicado por la Editorial Unibiblos de la Universidad Nacional (Cante y Mockus, 2006), y otro publicado con apoyo de la Secretaría de Gobierno Distrital de Bogotá, Cante (2006)

Mediating anti-political peace in Abidjan: Radio, place and power

After a decade of conflict (1999–2011), peace-building in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire, focused on the local as a primary site of reconciliation. In addition to being local, peace was anti-political, seeking to separate place from politics as autonomous realms of public life. Through the example of local radio peace programmes, this article offers a critical, ethnographic account of anti-political peace as a spatial process. It links local peace and its justifications to the operations of governmental power, emphasising continuities of anti-political mediation and political domination. Such a historicised perspective challenges the framing of anti-political peace as the opposite of politics-as-conflict: they have long been two sides of the same coin in Abidjan and, as a binary “choice,” prevent the search for more democratic alternatives. Simultaneously, I argue that anti-political peace it is best approached as a field of contest. An ethnographic approach acknowledges the widespread rejection of politics in the Ivoirian metropolis, while resisting the collapse of institutional and everyday perspectives into a self-reinforcing consensus. I show that radio producers and Abidjanais residents could not quite pin down the meaning of politics, as that which ought to be shunned. Rather than bypass these hesitations through normative or ontological reasoning, I suggest (following others) that we might treat politics' irreducible polysemy as a source of continued struggle

Libertades individuales y acción colectiva

Este libro resulta de una lectura crítica de la historia y la evolución que han tenido importantes discusiones teoricas acerca del liberalismo y la acción colectiva. Se destacan algunas relaciones entre los aportes de diversos autores de la economía, la sociología, la filosofía, la ciencia política y la psicología. En especial se ofrece una presentación analítica de algunas de las relaciones más relevantes entre las libertades individuales y las oportunidades factibles en procesos de escogencia y de acción individual y colectiva. La propia cosecha del autor permite seguir tres hallazgos, los cuales pueden generar nuevas perspectivas para investigadores interesados en estos temas, estos son: una propuesta conceptual sobre las características y los requerimientos de la libertad individual

Book review: urban revolt: state power and the rise of people's movements in the global south, edited by Trevor Ngwane, Luke Sinwell and Immanuel Ness

Fabien Cante says this book is an exciting and hopeful compendium of urban struggles across the Global South

Everyday peace in a 'post-conflict' African metropolis: Radio encounters, indeterminacy, fugitivity

Drawing on the ethnography of a multi-ethnic local radio listeners' club in post-war Abidjan, Côte d'Ivoire, the article provides an original account of everyday peace in an African metropolis. It bridges peace geographies and African urban studies to document the informal and often invisibilised practices through which residents re-make the city in the wake of war. In doing so, the article expands existing understandings of everyday peace while reaffirming the concept's radical, decolonial proposition: to seek peace in subaltern lifeworlds, rather than in institutional and interventionist programmes that too often reproduce violent power asymmetries. Through the story of the UFARA listeners' club, emerging out of radio encounters, the article shows how everyday peace articulates a response to different forms of conjunctural and structural violence, including precarity and territorial control. It also points to indeterminacy and fugitivity as lived, affective and political figurations of peace which, while eschewing the trappings of resistance, nonetheless point to the need to imagine peace otherwise

Análisis de las finanzas públicas de 2006 a 2013 en el municipio de Valladolid, Estado de Yucatán

En este trabajo, se recabó información financiera longitudinal de los ingresos y gastos del municipio de Valladolid Yucatán se deflactaron los datos y se obtuvieron conclusiones acerca del comportamiento de las finanzas públicas municipales con base a un esquema sistemático. El objetivo alcanzado permitió determinar el comportamiento histórico de los ingresos y egresos en términos de porcentajes; el comportamiento de las participaciones federes, así como del Análisis porcentual de ingresos ordinarios y extraordinarios y la medida en que los ingresos ordinarios directos cubren los egresos corrientes. También se determinaron los años de mayor o menor dependencia financiera asociada con la proporción del gasto corriente municipal que es cubierta a través de recursos no propios del municipio

Development of processes for the production of postbiotic functional foods

Several techniques were developed in order to enhance the content of bioactive compounds or promote their production in food products. Lactic acid fermentation is one of the most important food processing technologies used to produce functional probiotic foods. A novel category of fermented functional foods is gaining increasing interest and is represented by postbiotic products, consisting of inactivated microorganisms and molecules (enzymes, peptides, organic acids) produced in the final or intermediate stage of the metabolic process of these probiotic bacteria. Although postbiotics do not contain live microorganisms, they show a beneficial health effect through similar mechanisms that are characteristic of probiotics, minimizing the risks associated with their intake. For this reason, they could be considered a safer alternative to clinical application for immune-deficient patients or infants. This research, in collaboration with Kraft Heinz Company, consisted of the development of processes for the production of wet and dried functional foods with a postbiotic effect, intended for categories of people with high pathological vulnerability, such as children, elderly people and pregnant women. The purpose of this project was to investigate the effect of fermentation process, carried out using Lactobacillus paracasei CBA L74, patented by Kraft Heinz, heat treatments and drying processes on the postbiotic properties of the semi-finished products obtained, choosing as raw materials milk, rice flour and leguminous (beans) suspensions. The processes were examined and optimized at laboratory scale and then implemented at pilot scale with a successful and efficient scaling up, except for beans that had been an unexplored food matrix to be fermented until then and required a further optimization of protocols at laboratory scale before performing the trials on the pilot plant. At lab scale, rice and milk fermentation were carried out with and without pH control and in both cases an improvement in the terms of kinetic performance of the process was observed when pH control was implemented. The fermentation process was characterized in terms of bacterial growth (maximum values of 1.9 × 10^8 ± 1.2 × 10^8 CFU/mL after 20 h and 5.3 × 10^8 ± 4.7 × 10^8 CFU/mL after 18 h were achieved for milk and rice flour fermentations, respectively), lactic acid concentration (maximum values of 1.2 ± 0.3 g/L and 4.4 ± 0.21 g/L were achieved after 24 h of fermentation process for milk and rice flour, respectively) and production of a selected functional metabolite, considered as responsible of the immunomodulatory activity of the postbiotics obtained (6.93 ± 0.5 mg/L and 17.23 ± 0.28 mg/L after 24 h of fermentation, for milk and rice flour,respectively). An aqueous suspension of cooked beans was fermented without pH control in two different mixing conditions. The mixing system was improved by designing an impeller that guarantees a higher homogeneity of the medium inside the reactor: the results showed better performances in terms of growth rate and lactic acid production, reaching a microbial charge of approximately 1 × 10^9 CFU/mL after 14 h and a lactic acid content of 2 g/L after 16 h of process. The functional peptide was not detected in the fermenting bean suspension, so a further optimization of the protocol will be necessary for this purpose. A thermal treatment at 90°C for 1 min, for rice and milk, and at 90°C for 15 min, for beans, was sufficient to reduce the bacterial charge in the fermented product without negatively affecting the products quality; freeze drying and spray drying technologies had the same impact on the food products, not altering their organoleptic and chemical properties: a promising result since spray drying technology is usually used at larger scale. The results obtained at pilot scale for milk and rice flour were completely overlapped. During milk fermentation, a maximum bacterial load of 6.7 × 10^8 ± 2.65 × 10^8 CFU/mL was reached after 20 h of process; a lactic acid content of 2.1 ± 0.25 g/L and a peptide concentration of 14.20 ± 0.80 mg/L were observed at the end of fermentation. As for rice flour, a maximum bacterial growth of 1.27 × 10^9 ± 6.9 × 10^8 after 18 h of process, a maximum lactic acid production of 6.03 ± 0.7 g/L after 24 h and a maximum functional peptide content of 22.60 ± 4.10 mg/L after 20 h of fermentation were obtained. For both scales, rice flour fermentation gave better results in terms of bacterial growth, lactic acid and functional peptide production, probably for the rice prebiotic components. Also, at pilot scale, a thermal treatment of 90°C for 1 min was sufficient to reduce the bacterial charge in the fermented products and it was confirmed that spray drying technology had a low impact on the product. Moreover, a shelf-life analysis of the products obtained at pilot scale was performed at three different storage temperatures (4°C, 20°C and 37°C) for six months to evaluate the food product stability over time: dried fermented rice resulted more stable than milk

Análisis económico de los derechos académicos

Al releer las consideraciones del fallo delConsejo de Estado que hemos mencionado, endonde advierte que a las Comisiones se les handado funciones legislativas que pertenecen allegislativo, solo se nos puede hacer el cargo dehaber actuado con excesiva buena fe. La mejormanera de probar un modelo institucional es consu implementación completa, con ello se lograevaluar su funcionalidad, lo que no ocurre cuandose implementa a medias porque sus amigos yenemigos terminan atacándola por igual. Pero,transcurridos seis años de funcionamiento de laCREG, pienso que ya contamos con elementossuficientes para hacer una evaluación completade su conveniencia y sugerir los correctivospertinentes. En tal sentido, estoy presto a escucharlos análisis, críticas, conclusiones y recomendacionessobre el particular; pero creo convenienteseñalar que, en lo posible, se deben intentar losajustes a la CREG utilizando los mecanismos másexpeditos, tales como: decretos reglamentarios,resoluciones ministeriales, resoluciones de lapropia CREG, documentos CONPES, directivaspresidenciales, entre otros, procurando no recurrira las notificaciones mediante ley sino como últimainstancia.Cada vez que se tramita un proyecto de leysobre el sector energético se produce una señalparalizante para los inversionistas, ya que a éstosles asalta el temor de que las reglas de juego lessean cambiadas.En todo caso, si agotados los mecanismos quedependen del ejecutivo no se ha logrado definirlos ajustes que requiera el sistema de regulación,habrá que armar un proyecto de ley, para lo cualcontarán con el concurso de este servidor y, a nodudarlo, del Congreso en general.Por último, hago un llamado a todos losagentes económicos que han pedido la liberacióndel mercado energético y que voluntariamentehan aceptado participar en el negocio con todaslas reglas de juego ya sabidas para que, por favor,aprendan tanto a ganar como a saber perder. Deverdad que Colombia lo necesita a todo nivel;con ello también se construye la paz.

Variational approach to relaxed topological optimization: closed form solutions for structural problems in a sequential pseudo-time framework

The work explores a specific scenario for structural computational optimization based on the following elements: (a) a relaxed optimization setting considering the ersatz (bi-material) approximation, (b) a treatment based on a non-smoothed characteristic function field as a topological design variable, (c) the consistent derivation of a relaxed topological derivative whose determination is simple, general and efficient, (d) formulation of the overall increasing cost function topological sensitivity as a suitable optimality criterion, and (e) consideration of a pseudo-time framework for the problem solution, ruled by the problem constraint evolution. In this setting, it is shown that the optimization problem can be analytically solved in a variational framework, leading to, nonlinear, closed-form algebraic solutions for the characteristic function, which are then solved, in every time-step, via fixed point methods based on a pseudo-energy cutting algorithm combined with the exact fulfillment of the constraint, at every iteration of the non-linear algorithm, via a bisection method. The issue of the ill-posedness (mesh dependency) of the topological solution, is then easily solved via a Laplacian smoothing of that pseudo-energy. In the aforementioned context, a number of (3D) topological structural optimization benchmarks are solved, and the solutions obtained with the explored closed-form solution method, are analyzed, and compared, with their solution through an alternative level set method. Although the obtained results, in terms of the cost function and topology designs, are very similar in both methods, the associated computational cost is about five times smaller in the closed-form solution method this possibly being one of its advantages. Some comments, about the possible application of the method to other topological optimization problems, as well as envisaged modifications of the explored method to improve its performance close the workPeer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

A plasticity model for simulation of industrial powder compaction processes

A constitutive model, based on large strain plasticity, for simulation of industrial powder compaction processes is presented. The elastic response is stated in terms of a hyperelastic model based on a hookean elastic free energy. Plastic response is defined in terms of a two parameter yield surface that evolves in terms of the relative density. Two different flow rules are considered and tested in front of some available experimental results. Application to the simulation of an actual powder-metallurgy compaction process is also shown