The New Services Directive of the European Union – Hopes and Expectations from the Angle of a (further) Completion of the Internal Market: Spanish Report

This work deals with the legal problems and expectations of the transposition of the Directive 2006/123/EC (Services Directive) in Spain. This contribution reviews the national debates on the implementing rules, the constitutional repercussions arising from its transposition, and the scope and effects of the Services Directive in Spanish law, taking into account both its substantive and procedural provisions. The major legal consequence of the implementation of the Services Directive in Spain will be administrative simplification. The Spanish services market suffers from legal opacity and complexity due to the mixture of regulating competencies of different Administrations. From a general point of view, this is the most important entry barrier for foreign providers of services. The establishment of points of single contact, accessible by electronic means, if successfully achieved, will represent a revolutionary progress in a traditionally burdensome and bureaucratic set of Administrations. It will also reduce the economic inefficiencies derived from political decentralisation. From a material point of view, the evaluation process may help to detect regional and local norms which have to be reconciled with Community law, and that have passed unnoticed in the past, because of their limited territorial scope of application

The Regulation of Financial Markets and the European Social Model

The regulation of financial markets generates very relevant consequences for inequality and produces important distributional effects. First, public funds used to restore financial stability and to rescue troubled financial institutions cannot be assigned to finance better infrastructures or health care. Second, financial crises destabilize productive industries, reduce investment and increaseunemployment, deterioratingmore sharplythe welfare of theweaker sections of the population.Third, depending on the regulatory framework, consumers and retail investors may see their position weakenedor suffer unexpected losses more easily. Thus it is obviousthat the regulation of financial markets significantly conditions the social model

Transparency in International Financial Institutions

This work provides a comparative analysis of international financial institutions’ transparency policies and denounces their shortcomings and excessive prudence, and in the case of less formal cooperation bodies (such as the G-20 or the Financial Stability Board), the lack of attention to basic transparency concerns. The study shows that a higher degree of institutionalization calls for a more coherent and open transparency policy, as more structured institutions have at their disposal the appropriate resources and are more easily subject to pressure by the civil society. The IMF and the World Bank are clearly more transparent than informal cooperation fora such as the G-20 or the Financial Stability Board. As a development institution, the World Bank gets more benefits from transparency and it has achieved a remarkable level of procedural guarantees that could be set as an example for other international financial institutions, including the IMF. However, in practice, even in the World Bank there is excessive latitude for opaqueness

A Critical Assessment of the Implementation of Security Council Resolution 1373

This work studies the content of Security Council Res 1373, its organic and procedural structure, and later explores the path travelled during more than a decade of implementation with its main achievements and shortcomings. The singular organic structure established to supervise the implementation of the Resolution offers an interesting testing ground to analyse future trends of global governance to safeguard common universal interests. This contribution concludes with some reflections on the future of counter-terrorist cooperation in the United Nations (UN) and a proposal to create a UN Counter-Terrorist Agency

Reduced kinetic mechanisms for modelling LPP combustión in gas turbines

Reduced kinetic mechanisms for modelling LPP combustión in gas turbine

Coupling single molecule magnets to quantum circuits

In this work we study theoretically the coupling of single molecule magnets (SMMs) to a variety of quantum circuits, including microwave resonators with and without constrictions and flux qubits. The main results of this study is that it is possible to achieve strong and ultrastrong coupling regimes between SMM crystals and the superconducting circuit, with strong hints that such a coupling could also be reached for individual molecules close to constrictions. Building on the resulting coupling strengths and the typical coherence times of these molecules (of the order of microseconds), we conclude that SMMs can be used for coherent storage and manipulation of quantum information, either in the context of quantum computing or in quantum simulations. Throughout the work we also discuss in detail the family of molecules that are most suitable for such operations, based not only on the coupling strength, but also on the typical energy gaps and the simplicity with which they can be tuned and oriented. Finally, we also discuss practical advantages of SMMs, such as the possibility to fabricate the SMMs ensembles on the chip through the deposition of small droplets.Comment: 23 pages, 12 figure

Hypoxic Cell Waves around Necrotic Cores in Glioblastoma: A Biomathematical Model and its Therapeutic Implications

Glioblastoma is a rapidly evolving high-grade astrocytoma that is distinguished pathologically from lower grade gliomas by the presence of necrosis and microvascular hiperplasia. Necrotic areas are typically surrounded by hypercellular regions known as "pseudopalisades" originated by local tumor vessel occlusions that induce collective cellular migration events. This leads to the formation of waves of tumor cells actively migrating away from central hypoxia. We present a mathematical model that incorporates the interplay among two tumor cell phenotypes, a necrotic core and the oxygen distribution. Our simulations reveal the formation of a traveling wave of tumor cells that reproduces the observed histologic patterns of pseudopalisades. Additional simulations of the model equations show that preventing the collapse of tumor microvessels leads to slower glioma invasion, a fact that might be exploited for therapeutic purposes.Comment: 29 pages, 9 figure