The role of the tourism sector in economic development. Lessons from the Spanish experience

Tourism is one of the most important sectors in the global economy and is considered an efficient tool with which to promote economic growth. The case of Spain's economy is well known in this respect; in fact, widespread consensus exists on the part played by tourism in enhancing the industrialisation process in Spain and the part played by foreign currency receipts from tourism in financing the imports of capital goods, which made the expansion of manufacturing possible. This paper aims to assess the real role of foreign currency receipts from tourism in Spain 's economy from 1960 to the present. The results of Spain 's experience may well help to guide policy decisions in developing countries in similar circumstances.international tourism, economic development, industrialisation, spanish experience

Professional Competence Is a Condition Precedent to Effective Management-An Argument for Practice Leaders in Legal Service Organizations

There is an unstated argument with an unsettling currency in today’s organizations: Those that can’t do, lead. The concept of management has devolved from a position that facilitates productivity and navigates workplace challenges, to a type of “bullshit job.” To adherents of this philosophy, competence in one’s vocation, profession or business is unnecessary in order to excel as a manager in that vocation, profession or business.In professional environments technical competence in one’s occupation is a condition precedent to good management. Technically competent managers come to positions of leadership with occupational gravitas. Occupational gravitas is forged from experience and imbues those who possess it with the confidence to effectively navigate the challenges confronting their organization. It is earned from experience dealing with the particular challenges of one’s occupation.Leadership skills are an adjunct to the occupational competence necessary for good management in professional environments. The concept that leadership skills are separate and apart from occupational competence, rather than ancillary to it, in the execution of good management is herein explicitly rejected.People placed in positions of authority who lack experience, or are otherwise incompetent, bring with them not gravitas, but fear. Fear is the primary element from which springs management failures, and through which such failures are expressed. Incompetent leadership is not only dangerous to legal service provider organizations and their employees, but also exposes clients to dire consequences. In a legal services environment, bad management really is a public protection issue.The model of a “practice leader,” is the paradigm through which legal service organizations can model their management style. A practice leader is both an accomplished attorney as well as a leader. Practice leaders understand the work and the environment in which it is produced. This is important because it is they and the organization that are ultimately responsible for the work of their subordinates. Failure of leadership in a legal service environment can not only lead to litigation but could also lead to professional discipline when subordinates engage in misconduct

Conditional artificial dielectric : optically controlled microwave modulator

A conditional artificial dielectric with embeddings of either CdS, GaAs or Si in PMMA form the dielectric material of a microstrip in a homodyne microwave detection system. The system consists of a Michelson or Mach-Zehnder interferometers with the microstrip placed in one arm. The index of refraction of the microstrip substrate is modulated by chopped incident light causing amplitude and phase variations in the incoming RF signal. Those variations are detected by mixing the light modulated microwave carrier(information channel) with the unmodulated carrier (reference channel) in the interferometer. The output is sensed by the square law detector and a lock-in amplifier synchronized with the light modulating frequency

MEASURMENT AND ANALYSIS OF AGRICULTURAL PRODUCTIVITY IN COLOMBIA

Worldwide agricultural commodity prices boomed from 2006 to 2011, peaking u

Training a Convolutional Neural Network for Appearance-Invariant Place Recognition

Place recognition is one of the most challenging problems in computer vision, and has become a key part in mobile robotics and autonomous driving applications for performing loop closure in visual SLAM systems. Moreover, the difficulty of recognizing a revisited location increases with appearance changes caused, for instance, by weather or illumination variations, which hinders the long-term application of such algorithms in real environments. In this paper we present a convolutional neural network (CNN), trained for the first time with the purpose of recognizing revisited locations under severe appearance changes, which maps images to a low dimensional space where Euclidean distances represent place dissimilarity. In order for the network to learn the desired invariances, we train it with triplets of images selected from datasets which present a challenging variability in visual appearance. The triplets are selected in such way that two samples are from the same location and the third one is taken from a different place. We validate our system through extensive experimentation, where we demonstrate better performance than state-of-art algorithms in a number of popular datasets