An agenda-setting model of electoral competition

This paper presents a model of electoral competition focusing on the formation of the public agenda. An incumbent government and a challenger party in opposition compete in elections by choosing the issues that will key out their campaigns. Giving salience to an issue implies proposing an innovative policy proposal, alternative to the status-quo. Parties trade off the issues with high salience in voters’ concerns and those with broad agreement on some alternative policy proposal. Each party expects a higher probability of victory if the issue it chooses becomes salient in the voters’ decision. But remarkably, the issues which are considered the most important ones by a majority of votes may not be given salience during the electoral campaign. An incumbent government may survive in spite of its bad policy performance if there is no sufficiently broad agreement on a policy alternative. We illustrate the analytical potential of the model with the case of the United States presidential election in 2004.Agenda, elections, political competition, issues, salience, agreement.

Los problemas docentes en historia de bachillerato: la gran diversidad bajo la aparente uniformidad

El enunciado expresado arriba podría ser el que resumiera esta investigación: la multiplicidad de soluciones que los docentes han dado, y están dando, a los problemas de enseñanza, desde lo cotidiano1 y desde el anonimato. El estudio de las más de 40.000 descripciones de cerca de 1.500 alumnos, que habían cursado Historia en COU o en el Bachillerato LOGSE, permite observar una multiplicidad de experiencias vividas. El recuerdo de las mismas nos ha permitido acumular un amplio conjunto de datos con los cuales mostrar la variedad de factores que influyen en una clase de Historia, en la cual cobra especial protagonismo la figura del profesor

Next-Generation Sequencing Identifies Potential Actionable Targets in Paediatric Sarcomas

Background: Bone and soft-tissue sarcomas represent 13% of all paediatric malignancies. International contributions to introduce next-generation sequencing (NGS) approaches into clinical application are currently developing. We present the results from the Precision Medicine program for children with sarcomas at a reference centre. Results: Samples of 70 paediatric sarcomas were processed for histopathological analysis, reverse transcriptase polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) and next-generation sequencing (NGS) with a consensus gene panel. Pathogenic alterations were reported and, if existing, targeted recommendations were translated to the clinic. Seventy paediatric patients with sarcomas from 10 centres were studied. Median age was 11.5 years (range 1-18). Twenty-two (31%) had at least one pathogenic alteration by NGS. Thirty pathogenic mutations in 18 different genes were detected amongst the 22 patients. The most frequent alterations were found in TP53, followed by FGFR4 and CTNNB1. Combining all biological studies, 18 actionable variants were detected and six patients received targeted treatment observing a disease control rate of 78%. Extrapolating the results to the whole cohort, 23% of the patients would obtain clinical benefit from this approach. Conclusions: Paediatric sarcomas have a different genomic landscape when compared to adult cohorts. Incorporating NGS targets into paediatric sarcomas' therapy is feasible and allows personalized treatments with clinical benefit in the relapse setting

A framework for variable content document generation with multiple actors

“NOTICE: this is the author’s version of a work that was accepted for publication in Information and Software Technology. Changes resulting from the publishing process, such as peer review, editing, corrections, structural formatting, and other quality control mechanisms may not be reflected in this document. Changes may have been made to this work since it was submitted for publication. A definitive version was subsequently published in Information and Software Technology, Volume 56, Issue 9, September 2014, Pages 1101–1121 DOI10.1016/j.infsof.2013.12.006Context - Advances in customization have highlighted the need for tools supporting variable content document management and generation in many domains. Current tools allow the generation of highly customized documents that are variable in both content and layout. However, most frameworks are technology-oriented, and their use requires advanced skills in implementation-related tools, which means their use by end users (i.e. document designers) is severely limited. Objective - Starting from past and current trends for customized document authoring, our goal is to provide a document generation alternative in which variants are specified at a high level of abstraction and content reuse can be maximized in high variability scenarios. Method Based on our experience in Document Engineering, we identified areas in the variable content document management and generation field open to further improvement. We first classified the primary sources of variability in document composition processes and then developed a methodology, which we called DPL based on Software Product Lines principles to support document generation in high variability scenarios. Results - In order to validate the applicability of our methodology we implemented a tool DPLfw to carry out DPL processes. After using this in different scenarios, we compared our proposal with other state-of-the-art tools for variable content document management and generation. Conclusion - The DPLfw showed a good capacity for the automatic generation of variable content documents equal to or in some cases surpassing other currently available approaches. To the best of our knowledge, DPLfw is the only framework that combines variable content and document workflow facilities, easing the generation of variable content documents in which multiple actors play different roles.This work has been partially funded by the Spanish Ministerio de Economia y Competitividad under Grant TIPEx (TIN2010-19859-C03-03).Gómez Llana, A.; Penadés Gramage, MC.; Canos Cerda, JH.; Borges, MR.; Llavador Campos, M. (2014). A framework for variable content document generation with multiple actors. Information and Software Technology. 56(9):1101-1121. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.infsof.2013.12.006S1101112156

The Coevolution of Economic and Political Development

This paper establishes a simple model of long run economic and political development, which is driven by the inherent technical features of di¤erent production factors, and political con‡icts among factor owners on how to divide the outputs. The main capital form in economy evolves from land to physical capital and then to human capital, which enables their respective owners (landlords, capitalists, and workers) to gain political powers in the same sequence, shaping the political development path from monarchy to elite ruling and …nally to full su¤rage. When it is too costly for any group of factor owners to repress others, political compromise is reached and economic progress is not blocked; otherwise, the political con‡icts may lead to economic stagnation