Labor Productivity, Capital Accumulation, and Aggregate Efficiency Across Countries: New Evidence for an Old Debate

This article studies the proximate sources of labor productivity differences across countries. Using a panel dataset for 74 countries covering the 1960-2010 period, it first documents that, relative to the US, labor productivity of the median country has been mostly stagnant, while cross-country disparities have drastically increased. Next, through the lens of a production function framework, it evaluates the proximate sources of labor productivity: physical capital, human capital, and aggregate efficiency. Results show stagnation and increasing disparities in physical capital, growth and decreasing disparities in human capital, and decline and increasing disparities in aggregate efficiency. By including the commonly unaccounted covariance between capital and aggregate efficiency into the analysis, disparities in aggregate efficiency explain most of the disparities in labor productivity across countries

Cartographic records in the 1878 General Reforestation Reports: forest and agronomic sketches and drafts

Las Memorias Generales de Repoblación surgen con las disposiciones que desarrollan la Ley de 11 de julio de 1877 sobre repoblación, fomento y mejora de los montes públicos. Elaboradas por el personal de los distritos forestales, se envían al Ministerio de Fomento entre 1878 y 1884. Además de contener los objetivos y las actuaciones repobladoras propuestas por cada distrito, también reflejan, desde el punto de vista de los ingenieros del ramo, la situación de los montes españoles e incluyen en ocasiones, dentro de esta lógica descriptiva, una cartografía básica de contenido forestal, agronómico y geológico. Ésta es conocida en unos pocos casos a través de los originales publicados a mayor escala; pero en otros no se tenía constancia de su existencia más que por referencias documentales. Unos y otros ejemplos se enmarcan dentro del esfuerzo cartográfico español que caracteriza la segunda mitad del siglo XIX.General Reforestation Reports emerge as part of the July 11 1877 Law on reforestation, promotion, and improvement of public forest. These reports were elaborated by the forest districts personnel and sent to the Ministry of Public Works between 1878 and 1884. They include both the objectives and reforestation works proposed by the forestry enginneers as well as information relative to the situation of the Spanish woodlands and, in particular, a basic forest, agronomic and geologic cartography. This cartography is to be framed within the Spanish cartographic effort that characterized the second half of the XIXth century.Este texto se incluye dentro de los trabajos desarrollados en los proyectos de investigación Estudio de los paisajes arquetipo de la agricultura en Castilla y León. Cartografía de los paisajes agrarios de Castilla y León (Referencia VA038A09, Junta de Castilla y León), Las unidades básicas de paisaje agrario en España: identificación, delimitación, caracterización y valorización. La España interior, septentrional y occidental (Referencia CS02009-12225-C05-01, Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación) y en el Grupo de Investigación de Excelencia GRE156 de la Junta de Castilla y León, además de las exploraciones documentales realizadas a cargo de la XI Beca de Investigación del Museu del Suro de Palafrugell con el trabajo En los márgenes del mundo corchero: la producción, transformación y comercialización del corcho en el noroeste de España

El FSM 2015, un nou impuls per a canviar el món

Abstract not availabl

Improving the Generation of Labeled Network Traffic Datasets Through Machine Learning Techniques

The problem of detecting malicious behavior in network traffic has become an extremely difficult challenge for the security community. Consequently, several intelligence-based tools have been proposed to generate models capable of understanding the information traveling through the network and to help in the identification of suspicious connections as soon as possible. However, the lack of high-quality datasets has been one of the main obstacles in the developing of reliable intelligence-based tools. A well-labeled dataset is fundamental not only for the process of automatically learning models but also for testing its performance. Recently, RiskID emerged with the goal of providing to the network security community a collaborative tool for helping the labeling process. Through the use of visual and statistical techniques, RiskID facilitates to the user the generation of labeled datasets from real connections. In this article, we present a machine learning extension for RiskID, to help the user in the malware identification process. A preliminary study shows that as the size of labeled data increases, the use of machine learning models can be a valuable tool during the labeling process of future traffic connections.VI Workshop de Seguridad Informática (WSI).Red de Universidades con Carreras en Informática (RedUNCI

Analysis of the astroclimate parameters associated with the tropospheric conditions and their time evolution at Roque de Los Muchachos Observatory

The early 1970's saw the start of a new era in astronomy with the rst approach to building large telescopes (2 to 5 meters class telescope) and locating them in the right places. The astronomical community started to evaluate these sites using the sky quality "seeing" parameters as one the major constraints to decide where to place the observatory in the world and where is the best location in the observatory. Taking a few words from one of the rst site testing works by Merle Walker (Walker,1971) that considered the Islands like as: Canary Islands, Hawaiian islands or Crete, a possible ideal place for Astronomy. "The best seeing occurs at sites on peaks near sea coasts having cold ocean currents oshore that reduce the height of the [temperature] inversion layer, and where the laminar air-flow set up over the ocean still persists". (....) "Mountain peaks on (small) islands in warm oceans may be good sites, provided that the peaks are suciently high to place the observer above the inversion layer". It is in this new era when many engineers, physicist, meteorologists and astronomers started to search for new places and to develop new instruments to measure the sky quality. Please see the site testing report for La Palma from Mcinees (Mcinnes,1973). Astronomy is now becoming more sophisticated, with new observatories and new adaptive optics instruments that can compensate the atmosphere to the difraction limit of the telescopes. The newer Adaptive Optics require more information about the optical parameters that aect image quality and it is also becoming more important to manage the technical and human resources in the observatory for high resolution observations. To obtain the information needed, a new set of instruments have been developed and used, such as: MASS-DIMM, DIMM, SCIDAR, SLODAR,Lusci, etc to mention only a few. They have been the main contributor to analyzing potential new sites for the future extremely large telescopes. They also provide new data for the analysis of the expected performances of the new generation of AO instruments for the TMT or E-ELT. The purpose of this thesis is to establish the influence of the upper atmosphere, monitored using tropospheric wind speed and temperature, on the local sky conditions, measured by the refractive index parameter C2n and the astroclimate parameters (seeing, isoplanatic angle and coherence time), and their evolution through the years. The meteorological data used come from a launch site located about 150 km away from the observatory and which provides data for meterological forecasting agencies. It has been determined that the best yearly period for the seeing was the year 2005, which corresponds with the year with lower upper wind speed periods. The use of these meteorological data and the good agreement found with the local sky conditions, provide the rst step to constructing a simple parametric optical turbulence model (Trinquet model) of the Observatory Roque de Los Muchachos. This in turn opens the way to performing a nowcast of the astroclimate parameters and the refractive index parameter C2n using the meteorological forecasting data. It can also be used to help design the AO instrumentation capabilities at the ORM (and perhaps by extension elsewhere). Due to the importance of the knowledge of the vertical C2n distribution and how this aacts the Laser Guide Star (LGS) AO observations, an instrument was proposed based on the DIMM technique and using a range-gated CCD detector to measure the backscattered laser light at dierent altitudes. This can then produce a vertical distribution of the Fried parameter r0 and the seeing. A simple prototype was built but due to the lack of time and various faults the rst experiments could not full the proposed requirements. The preliminary prototype design and the initial on-sky results are provided in appendices of this thesis in order to suggest and support future work

Multimodal eye\u27s optical quality (MEOQ)

This document summarizes the work done during the implementation of the Multimodal Eye\u27s Optical Quality (MEOQ) system, a measurement device that integrates a double-pass (DP) instrument and a Hartmann-Shack (HS) sensor. The system has been used to quantify scattering in the human eye. Moreover, the configurable properties of the system have been used to explore a method for reducing speckle in systems that rely on reflections of light in the ocular fundus