Preferences for Regional Redistribution in Multi-Tiered Politics: The Role of Information and Survey Evidence

What explains individual support for redistribution among regions within a country? Building on extant models, we hypothesize that such preferences are affected by regional income, conditioned by individual income and political ideology. We test hypotheses with an experiment embedded in a nationally representative survey in Spain, where we randomly inform some citizens of the true relative income of their region. The effect of this information is therefore akin to changes in relative regional income. We find that citizens' learning about a region's relative position affects preferences for redistribution; specifically, low-income respondents in relatively well-off regions become particularly against inter-regional redistribution. The effects of regional income are moderated by political ideology and priming of "out group" regions. The findings have implications for debates about the applicability of economic models to explaining support for regional arrangements, and about the role of second-dimensional "identity" politics.This project has been funded by the Càtedra Pasqual Maragall d’Economia i Territori (University of Barcelona), and by the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) (project number: 200910I070). For comments on previous versions of this paper, we thank Sabine Flamand, Mark Kayser, Johannes Lindvall, as well as partici-pants at the MPSA 2013, EPSA 2013, CES 2013 and the Moscow Mini-Conference on Culture, Diversity and Development. The usual disclaimer applies

Territory, identity, and federalist preferences: Survey and experimental evidence

What explains citizen preferences for redistribution across regions within a country? Around the world, countries vary greatly in how much central governments tax wealthier regions to redistribute to poorer ones in order to reduce inequality across regions. In many federations or multi-tiered polities, these issues are salient, electorally contested, and at times polarizing; they have sometimes led to demands for or attempts at secession from disaffected regions. Such issues have been politicized in wealthy countries including Belgium, Canada, Italy, Spain, the United Kingdom, as well as in poorer or middle-income states including Argentina, Brazil, China, India, Mexico, and Russia. Yet the recent growth in research on the causes and consequences of different federal arrangements and fiscal federalism have not studied in depth the roots of individual preferences over basic issues related to federal institutions and fiscal federalism. This omission is surprising given the high salience of this package of issues in such countries

La educación moral

Máster en Formación del Profesorado de E.S.O. y Bachillerato, F.P. y Ens

Control kernel based adaptive control implementation

[EN] A control system with distributed computing resources always should guarantee the safe control of the plant. In this contribution, the concept of control kernel is used for that purpose. Two types of nodes with different resources are defined: the powerful server node and the resource-constrained light node. This architecture allows to split the control tasks into two blocks. Those demanding strong computing resources are allocated in the server nodes and those compelling tasks required to ensure the safety of the controlled plant are allocated in the light nodes. Resource limitations lead to control adaptation. Two simple applications illustrate some of the benefits of this architecture with one server node and one light node, even the architecture can be extended to several nodes. In the first case, an adaptive control is implemented in the server node, providing the control algorithm to the light node, which is also able to compute a local safe control action. In the second experiment, two different control tasks requiring different resources are implemented in a mobile robot control. To keep bounded the computing time at the local level, the supervisor decides the time allocated to each activity, providing the resulting controller to the light node.This work has been partially granted by Conselleria de Educación Generalitat Valenciana, under PROMETEO project number 2008-088, and Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovaci´on under COBAMI project DPI2011-28507-C02-01/02.Simarro Fernández, R.; Albertos Pérez, P.; Simó Ten, JE. (2013). Control kernel based adaptive control implementation. SIGBED review. 10(1):24-28. doi:10.1145/2492385.2492389S242810

La ciudadanía democrática ante las nuevas desigualdades

Los autores analizan en este artículo los efectos de lo que se denominan las nuevas desigualdades, es decir formas específicas que están adquiriendo las brechas económicas en las sociedades posindustriales contemporáneas. Lo cual es clave para entender la naturaleza de los conflictos políticos de nuestras democracias

Secession and Social Polarization: Evidence from Catalonia

Inequality and governance in unstable democracies — the mediating role of trustDoes secessionism lead to social polarization? Despite much research on independence movements, their relationship to polarization, a key mechanism theorized as increasing the chances of violent conflict, remains less understood. We argue that secessionist conflicts can polarize along both policy and ethnic group lines even when they take the form of non-violent disputes. However, polarization does not necessarily lead to violence. We explore the case of Catalonia, a region that experienced a deep secessionist crisis in the last months of 2017, using novel data from a panel survey fielded across two key time periods and embedded experiments. We find a society with great levels of affective polarization in that pro- and anti-independence advocates have strong negative views of one another. In addition, there is spillover in terms of the assessment of associated language groups. However, there is a group of moderates in between the two policy poles that limit the extent of this polarization. Contrary to common wisdom, these moderates have very stable preferences. Our results contribute to the understanding of the underexplored polarization dynamics of secessionist movements, particularly in places where high-intensity violence (i.e. terrorism, civil war) has not yet occurred

Event based localization in Ackermann steering limited resource mobile robots

“© 2013 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.”This paper presents a local sensor fusion technique with an event-based global position correction to improve the localization of a mobile robot with limited computational resources. The proposed algorithms use a modified Kalman filter and a new local dynamic model of an Ackermann steering mobile robot. It has a similar performance but faster execution when compared to more complex fusion schemes, allowing its implementation inside the robot. As a global sensor, an event-based position correction is implemented using the Kalman filter error covariance and the position measurement obtained from a zenithal camera. The solution is tested during a long walk with different trajectories using a LEGO Mindstorm NXT robot.This work was supported by FEDER-CICYT projects with references DPI2011-28507-C02-01 and DPI2010-20814-C02-02, financed by the Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovacion (Spain). This work was also supported by the University of Costa Rica.Marín, L.; Vallés Miquel, M.; Soriano Vigueras, Á.; Valera Fernández, Á.; Albertos Pérez, P. (2014). Event based localization in Ackermann steering limited resource mobile robots. IEEE/ASME Transactions on Mechatronics. 19(4):1171-1182. doi:10.1109/TMECH.2013.2277271S1171118219

Neuroprotective Effects of Tauroursodeoxicholic Acid Involves Vascular and Glial Changes in Retinitis Pigmentosa Model

Purpose: Retinitis pigmentosa is primarily characterized by a massive photoreceptor loss. But a global retinal remodeling occurs in later stages of the disease. At that phase, glial cells and retinal vasculature are also strongly affected. The main aim of the present work is to assess if the bile acid Tauroursodeoxicholic acid (TUDCA), which has a demonstrated neuroprotective effect in numerous neurodegenerative diseases, is able to prevent glial and vascular degeneration in the P23H rat retina. Methods: Homozygous P23H (line 3) animals were injected weekly with a TUDCA (500 mg/kg, i.p.) or vehicle solution, from the postnatal day (P) 21 to P120. Sprague-Dawley rats (SD) were used as control. Retinal cross-sections and wholemounts were immunostained using different glial and vascular markers and visualized with confocal microscopy. Retinal blood vessels were stained with nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide phosphate (NADPH) diaphorase histochemistry and retinal vascular networks were drawn by hand using a camera lucida. Results: At P120, the photoreceptor degeneration observed in P23H rats was accompanied by a reduction in the vascular network density and complexity at the deep capillary plexus. In addition, astrocytes showed gliotic features and the outer processes of Müller cells displayed an aberrant distribution in ring-shaped structures. When treated with TUDCA, P23H rats displayed better-preserved vessels and capillary loops in the deep capillary plexus which are associated with the partial preservation of photoreceptors. TUDCA treatment also increased the number of astrocytes and reduced the presence of Müller cell process clusters in the outer retina. Conclusion: This work suggests that, besides its neuroprotective effect on photoreceptor cells, TUDCA treatment also protects from vascular and glial degeneration, a fact that encourages the use of TUDCA as a powerful therapy for neurodegenerative diseases.The authors also acknowledge support from grants funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (FEDER-PID2019-106230RB-I00), Spanish Ministry of Universities (FPU18/02964), National Institute of Health Carlos III (RETICS-FEDER RD16/0008/0016), and Generalitat Valenciana (IDIFEDER/2017/064, PROMETEO/2021/024, GV/2020/028, and APOSTD/2020/245)