Being an (in)Formal Afro-Descendant Entrepreneur in Medellín, Colombia: A Case Study

Many Afro-descendants residing in Medellin seek to have an impact on their territories to achieve and guarantee minimum economic conditions for a better communities’ quality of life and the preservation of their cultural identity. Using a propositional and qualitative approach, this chapter analyzes the process of inception and development of these black entrepreneurships, from the study of three specific cases. Entrepreneurship processes carried out by the Afro-descendant population of the District 13 in Medellin have been surrounded by an institutional context that these entrepreneurs have taken advantage of to develop their entrepreneurial activities. The entrepreneurs who participated in the study move continuously between the formal and the informal economy. While they look for opportunities to generate income through informal ways (subsistence strategies such as food preparation, cleaning, and masonry), they also use formal ways (participation in institutional programs of business entrepreneurship promotion). © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019

Treatment of posterior pelvic ring injuries with minimally invasive percutaneous plate osteosynthesis

From January 2004 to July 2007, 21 patients with injuries at the posterior pelvic ring were treated with locking compression plate osteosynthesis through a minimally invasive approach and followed up for a mean of 12.2 months. Preoperative and postoperative radiography was conducted to assess the reduction and union. The mean operation time was 60 minutes (range: 40–80). Intraoperative blood loss was 50–150 ml. All patients achieved union at the final follow-up. The overall radiological results were excellent or good in 17 patients (85%). The functional outcome was excellent or good in 18 patients (90%). There was no iatrogenic nerve injury, deep infection or failure of fixation. We believe that fixation with a locking compression plate is an effective method for the treatment of injuries of the posterior pelvic ring in view of its convenience, minimal traumatic invasion and lower morbidity

Integrating Induction and Deduction for Finding Evidence of Discrimination

Automatic Decision Support Systems (DSS) are widely adopted for screening purposes in socially sensitive tasks, including access to credit, mortgage, insurance, labor market and other benefits. While less arbitrary decisions can potentially be guaranteed, automatic DSS can still be discriminating in the socially negative sense of resulting in unfair or unequal treatment of people. We present a reference model for finding (prima facie) evidence of discrimination in automatic DSS which is driven by a few key legal concepts. First, frequent classification rules are extracted from the set of decisions taken by the DSS over an input pool dataset. Key legal concepts are then used to drive the analysis of the set of classification rules, with the aim of discovering patterns of discrimination. We present an implementation, called LP2DD, of the overall reference model integrating induction, through data mining classification rule extraction, and deduction, through a computational logic implementation of the analytical tools