The Spanish economy in EMU : the first ten years

This paper has been prepared to mark the tenth anniversary of Economic and Monetary Union (EMU). It seeks to give an overview of the Spanish economy's experience in this new institutional setting. It should be viewed as the result of a joint effort by a sizeable group of researchers from the Banco de España Directorate General Economics, Statistics and Research to rationalise the implications of a structural change on this scale.

Concentration of fecal coliforms in marine waters using satellite images in the vicinity of Pucusana. Bay, Peru.

Water quality monitoring in coastal areas is challenging due to cost and time constraints. Identifying and selecting sampling sites accurately and effectively is crucial for efficient monitoring. The need for efficient monitoring of marine waters has led to exploring the use of remote sensing as one helpful alternative. Remote sensing is practical in several applications based on pattern recognition and information processing of large terrestrial and aquatic surface areas. Collected information is processed with various image processing techniques to identify objects such as microorganisms. Fecal coliforms are microorganisms that are indicators of sanitary quality and are present in human and animal wastes discharged into water bodies reaching coastal regions. The present study estimated the presence of fecal coliforms as an indicator of contamination in coastal marine waters. Satellite data from two sensors, Landsat 7 ETM+ and Landsat 8 OLI, were used to evaluate the reflectance of fecal coliforms in marine waters. Then, statistical analysis and four regression models were tested to establish a functional correlation between the spectral bands and historical in situ fecal coliform measurement. In this research, satellite imagery in the vicinity of Pucusana Bay helped estimate the concentration of fecal coliforms in marine waters. As a result, a significant relationship was found between the shortwave infrared band splitting (SWIR 2) with the blue band and fecal coliforms presence. The relationship was used to estimate coliform concentration from the reflectance of the aquatic surface in Pucusana Bay. Finally, spatial distribution maps of fecal coliform concentrations were generated to compare the increase of these microorganisms over different years in the area. The methodology and results can be calibrated to other water body locations where fecal coliform is a concern

Prevalence of and Factors Associated with Negative Microscopic Diagnosis of Cutaneous Leishmaniasis in Rural Peru.

Cutaneous leishmaniasis is endemic to South America where diagnosis is most commonly conducted via microscopy. Patients with suspected leishmaniasis were referred for enrollment by the Ministry of Health (MoH) in Lima, Iquitos, Puerto Maldonado, and several rural areas of Peru. A 43-question survey requesting age, gender, occupation, characterization of the lesion(s), history of leishmaniasis, and insect-deterrent behaviors was administered. Polymerase chain reaction (PCR) was conducted on lesion materials at the Naval Medical Research Unit No. 6 in Lima, and the results were compared with those obtained by the MoH using microscopy. Factors associated with negative microscopy and positive PCR results were identified using

Experimental and numerical study of wind flow behind windbreaks

The shelter effect of a windbreak protects aggregate piles and provides a reduction of particle emissions in harbours. RANS (Reynolds-averaged Navier–Stokes equations) simulations using three variants of k–ε (standard k–ε, RNG k–ε and realizable k–ε) turbulence closure models have been performed to analyse wind flow characteristics behind an isolated fence located on a flat surface without roughness elements. The performance of the three turbulence models has been assessed by wind tunnel experiments. Cases of fences with different porosities (φ) have been evaluated using wind tunnel experiments as well as numerical simulations. The aim is to determine an optimum porosity for sheltering effect of an isolated windbreak. A value of 0.35 was found as the optimum value among the studied porosities (φ=0, 0.1, 0.24, 0.35, 0.4, 0.5)

Organización Automática del Conocimiento: la geografía en la Wikipedia

The Information Technologies drive an unprecedented growth of information, which raises the problem of the organization of it. As it is digital information, it is possible to approach her organization through automated procedures. On the other hand, Network Analysis Techniques are a powerful tool that allows us to model different phenomena and then apply automatic techniques. In this paper we describe the application of these Network Analysis Techniques to model and process an important number of documents, such as the one constituted by Wikipedia articles. The subsequent application of community detection algorithms allows grouping the articles based on their hyperlinks and their thematic affinity. This work focuses, after having applied these techniques, on the geographical relationship of the articles, on their network communities and the connections between them.Las tecnologías de la información propician un crecimiento sin precedentes de la información, lo cual plantea el problema de la organización de ésta. Al tratarse de información digital es posible abordar su organización mediante procedimientos automatizados. De otro lado, las Técnicas de Análisis de Redes son un poderoso instrumento que permite modelar diferentes fenómenos y aplicar después técnicas automáticas. En este trabajo se describe la aplicación de estas Técnicas de Análisis de Redes para modelar y procesar una masa importante de documentos, como la constituida por los artículos de la Wikipedia. La aplicación posterior de algoritmos de detección de comunidades permite agrupar los artículos en función de sus hiperenlaces y su afinidad temática. Este trabajo se centra, después de haber aplicado estas técnicas, en la relación geográfica de los artículos, en sus comunidades de red y las conexiones entre ellas

Asynchronous processing for latent fingerprint identification on heterogeneous CPU-GPU systems

Latent fingerprint identification is one of the most essential identification procedures in criminal investigations. Addressing this task is challenging as (i) it requires analyzing massive databases in reasonable periods and (ii) it is commonly solved by combining different methods with very complex data-dependencies, which make fully exploiting heterogeneous CPU-GPU systems very complex. Most efforts in this context focus on improving the accuracy of the approaches and neglect reducing the processing time. Indeed, the most accurate approach was designed for one single thread. This work introduces the fastest methodology for latent fingerprint identification maintaining high accuracy called Asynchronous processing for Latent Fingerprint Identification (ALFI). ALFI fully exploits all the resources of CPU-GPU systems using asynchronous processing and fine-coarse parallelism for analyzing massive databases. Our approach reduces idle times in processing and exploits the inherent parallelism of comparing latent fingerprints to fingerprint impressions. We analyzed the performance of ALFI on Linux and Windows operating systems using the well-known NIST/FVC databases. Experimental results reveal that ALFI is in average 22x faster than the state-of-the-art algorithm, reaching a value of 44.7x for the best-studied case