“Honouring the king and extolling the count‐duke”: the journey of Felipe IV in Andalucia (1624)

El tema central de este trabajo es el viaje de Felipe IV a Andalucía y cómo fue festejado por los lugares que visitó, centrándonos en los casos de Córdoba, Sevilla y Doñana, todo ello en el contexto del afianzamiento en el poder del conde-duque de Olivares.The main topic of this work is the journey of Felipe IV in Andalucía and how he was celebrated in the places he stopped in, focusing in the cases of Cordoba, Seville and Doñana, everything in the context of the establishment in the power of the Count-duke of Olivare

Automatic system for the detection and recognition of phytoplankton in digital microscope imaging

[Abstract] The quality of water can be compromised by the proliferation of toxic species of phytoplankton. When these blooms occur in rivers and reservoirs used for the water supply, this event can have a negative impact on human health. Currently, to determine the existence of risk, experts rudimentarily monitor phytoplankton populations by sampling and analysing the water. This analysis consits on the identification of dangerous species and its biologic volume. All in all, this process is long and tedious when the amount of samples that need to be analysed in order to obtain a quality and representative measure is taken into account, which also needs to be carried out periodically for each water source. The taxonomic process requires broad experience and training for the personnel involved. The automation of these tasks is highly desirable as it would free the experts from part of the work at the same time as that eliminates subjective factors that may impact in the overall quality of the process. In this work the intention is to help experts starting from images obtained directly from a conventional microscope, differentiating it from other similar works in the state of the art that use specific hardware. Computer vision techniques will be used to detect candidate individuals and artificial intelligence methods to recognise relevant phytoplankton species, that is, the toxic ones, distinguishing them from the rest of objects in the images like, for example, inorganic materials. Finally, the phytoplankton organisms will be classified to obtain a metric that counts the dangerous ones and so be able to analyse the quality of the water.[Resumo] A calidade da auga pode verse ameazada pola proliferación de especies tóxicas de fitoplancto. Cando estas proliferacións ocorren en ríos e encoros utilizados na subministración de auga potable este feito pode ter impactos negativos na saúde humana. Actualmente, para determinar a existencia de risco, os expertos monitorizan, de forma rudimentaria, as poboacións de fitoplancto mediante a recolección de mostras e a súa correspondente análise. Esta análise consiste na identificación das especies perigosas e o rexistro do seu volume biolóxico. Con todo, este proceso resulta longo e tedioso se se ten en conta a cantidade de mostras a analizar para poder ofrecer unhas métricas fiables e representativas, as cales se deben realizar periodicamente para cada unha das fontes de auga destinadas ao consumo. Así mesmo, o proceso taxonómico require unha ampla experiencia e formación específica do persoal involucrado. A automatización destas tarefas é moi desexable xa que libera aos expertos de parte do traballo, á vez que evita factores subxectivos que poidan influír na calidade global do proceso. Neste traballo preténdese axudar aos expertos partindo de imaxes obtidas directamente do microscopioconvencional, diferenciándoo de traballos similares do estado do arte que requiren hardware específico. Empregaranse técnicas de procesado de imaxe e visión artificial para detectar individuos candidatos e técnicas de intelixencia artificial para recoñecer as especies de fitoplancto relevantes, é dicir, as tóxicas, distinguíndoas do resto de obxectos nas imaxes, como, por exemplo, materiais inertes ou inorgánicos. Por último, os microogranismos de fitoplancto son clasificados para obter unha métrica que contabilice os perigosos e poder, así, analizar a calidade da auga.Traballo fin de grao (UDC.FIC). Enxeñaría informática. Curso 2018/201

Reputation systems and secure communication in vehicular networks

A thorough review of the state of the art will reveal that most VANET applications rely on Public Key Infrastructure (PKI), which uses user certificates managed by a Certification Authority (CA) to handle security. By doing so, they constrain the ad-hoc nature of the VANET imposing a frequent connection to the CA to retrieve the Certificate Revocation List (CRL) and requiring some degree of roadside infrastructure to achieve that connection. Other solutions propose the usage of group signatures where users organize in groups and elect a group manager. The group manager will need to ensure that group members do not misbehave, i.e., do not spread false information, and if they do punish them, evict them from the group and report them to the CA; thus suffering from the same CRL retrieval problem. In this thesis we present a fourfold contribution to improve security in VANETs. First and foremost, Chains of Trust describes a reputation system where users disseminate Points of Interest (POIs) information over the network while their privacy remains protected. It uses asymmetric cryptography and users are responsible for the generation of their own pair of public and private keys. There is no central entity which stores the information users input into the system; instead, that information is kept distributed among the vehicles that make up the network. On top of that, this system requires no roadside infrastructure. Precisely, our main objective with Chains of Trust was to show that just by relying on people¿s driving habits and the sporadic nature of their encounters with other drivers a successful reputation system could be built. The second contribution of this thesis is the application simulator poiSim. Many¿s the time a new VANET application is presented and its authors back their findings using simulation results from renowned networks simulators like ns-2. The major issue with network simulators is that they were not designed with that purpose in mind and handling simulations with hundreds of nodes requires a massive processing power. As a result, authors run small simulations (between 50 and 100 nodes) with vehicles that move randomly in a squared area instead of using real maps, which rend unrealistic results. We show that by building tailored application simulators we can obtain more realistic results. The application simulator poiSim processes a realistic mobility trace produced by a Multi-agent Microscopic Traffic Simulator developed at ETH Zurich, which accurately describes the mobility patterns of 259,977 vehicles over regional maps of Switzerland for 24 hours. This simulation runs on a desktop PC and lasts approximately 120 minutes. In our third contribution we took Chains of Trust one step further in the protection of user privacy to develop Anonymous Chains of Trust. In this system users can temporarily exchange their identity with other users they trust, thus making it impossible for an attacker to know in all certainty who input a particular piece of information into the system. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time this technique has been used in a reputation system. Finally, in our last contribution we explore a different form of communication for VANETs. The vast majority of VANET applications rely on the IEEE 802.11p/Wireless Access in Vehicular Environments (WAVE) standard or some other form of radio communication. This poses a security risk if we consider how vulnerable radio transmission is to intentional jamming and natural interferences: an attacker could easily block all radio communication in a certain area if his transmitter is powerful enough. Visual Light Communication (VLC), on the other hand, is resilient to jamming over a wide area because it relies on visible light to transmit information and ,unlike WAVE, it has no scalability problems. In this thesis we show that VLC is a secure and valuable form of communication in VANETs

ESTIMACIÓN CURVA J EN NICARAGUA: APLICACIÓN MODELO ECONOMÉTRICO REZAGOS DISTRIBUIDOS ALMON

El presente ensayo tiene como finalidad, evidenciar empíricamente la curva J y determinar el efecto de la devaluación del tipo de cambio en el saldo de la balanza comercial en Nicaragua. Para este propósito, se desarrolló un modelo econométrico, cimentado en los modelos de rezagos distribuidos “Almon” para series temporales. En correspondencia, este ensayo emplea la estructura de cálculo propuesta por Shirley Almon (1965), y sigue la propuesta de estimación mínimos cuadrado ordinario restringido implementado por Schmidt y Waud (1973), y Giles (1975). El resultado se puede afirmar la presencia de la curva J para la economía nicaragüense, cuyo efecto dura aproximadamente dos periodos, el impacto volumen se presenta en los trimestres uno, dos y tres después de generarse una devaluación en el tipo de cambio, finalizados los trimestres que comprenden el efecto volumen, se suscitan efectos negativos, muy significativos. En consecuencia, el modelo propuesto es idóneo para estimar la curva J en la economía nicaragüense y el tipo de cambio real sigue una distribución polinómica de cuarto grado y la política actual cambiara de deslizamiento de 5 por ciento anual, no ha tenido un efecto positivo en el saldo de la balanza comercial en el largo plazo

Identifying potential for fisheries-induced evolution on behavioral traits of a Skagerrak cod (Gadus morhua) population.

Fisheries activities and the development of more efficient fishing gear, have had detrimental effects in commercial stocks. This occurs largely as a result of negative selection acting on certain individuals during the harvesting process. Empirical observations show that fishing mortality and/or selective fishing pressure, leads to reductions in age and size at maturity of fish. Research shows that this is not only driven by phenotypic plasticity, but also by an evolutionary mechanism. Similarly, behavior is a trait subject to harvest selection and is subject to genetic changes at the population level. This is expected to have negative consequences derived from depletion of genotypes specialized to a particular food and habitat use. A loss of such adaptive capacity could potentially cause diminished resilience of the stock. The impact of fisheries on behavior has gained attention in the last decades but few approaches have studied wild commercial fish. The objective of the present work was to characterize the relationship between two behavioral variables related with fisheries and reproductive success to detect potential for harvest selection in behavior of Skagerrak cod. Contrary to what was expected, no relationship between the variables and reproductive success was found suggesting either, lack of potential or, poor sampling. Further experiments should consider the role of the area where the experimental fish come from and the capture methods used

Un Modelo de Gravedad Aplicado a las Exportaciones en Nicaragua

El presente ensayo tiene como fin aplicar un modelo gravitacional para las exportaciones y determinar el impacto de algunos acuerdos comerciales suscritos por Nicaragua desde el año de 1994 al periodo 2013, para evaluar empíricamente se utilizó la metodología de datos a panel con estimación de efectos fijos. Los hallazgos establecen que las variables que capturan el efecto de los acuerdos comerciales tienen una gran relevancia en el incremento de las exportaciones, siendo el acuerdo ALBA el que resulto de mayor magnitud. Ahora, bien la evidencia empírica demuestra que las exportaciones en Nicaragua, son muy sensibles a los costos de transporte; significa que una aumento de 1 por ciento en estos reduce en 15.6 por ciento el valor de las exportaciones del país de origen. El incremento en el PIB real tanto de país de origen como el de destino genera un impacto marginal de 0.58 por ciento para explicar las exportaciones nicaragüenses

Relación del El Tipo de Cambio Real y las Exportaciones en Nicaragua: una Aplicación de Vectores Autorregresivos (VAR)

El presente estudio tiene como objetivo evaluar la relación entre las exportaciones nicaragüense y la evolución del Tipo de Cambio Real (TCR), se aplicó técnicas cuantitativas y de series de tiempo mensual, para el periodo 2006-2016. Los resultados indican que mediante el modelo VAR, se logra comprobar que la variable tipo de cambio real impacta significativamente en las exportaciones de Nicaragua. Sin embargo la magnitud del impacto dependerá en gran medida de la política comercial que adopte Nicaragua para promover un nivel de diversificación de mercado y de productos para exportacione