The social fabric of Jeans': Assessing the social: Coupling social simulation and assessment methods

International audienceThe culture and manufacturing of the cotton fabric used to make your Jeans’ may have implied the use of fertilizers or pesticides polluting a water basin, have led to relocating people and even of children labour at different stages of its fabrication. As a consumer you probably didn’t take all these consequences into account (for your sake most of the information is not available, or value-wise you feel unconcerned) and you surely preferred to buy the cheapest one or to follow the fashion trend. Basically, every economic or public activity has repercussions directly, or through a chain of consequences on the environment and the society. In order to try and measure those impacts, or to valuate one choice (Jeans’ L) compared to another (Jeans’ P&J), several assessment methods have been developed and are frequently used. As a self-evident truth, assessment methods are instruments used to evaluate something. These could include measuring a performance on a specific case. In terms of evaluating policies and strategies, their possible outcomes are intended to evaluate their potential impacts. This refers to impact assessment in which past (already implemented actions) or future (ex-ante analysis) performances are studied

N,N′-(1,4-Phenyl­ene)bis­(4-chloro­butanamide)

The title mol­ecule, C14H18Cl2N2O2, lies on a crystallographic inversion center and the each 4-chloro­butanamide group adopts an anti-staggered conformation. In the crystal, adjacent mol­ecules are linked through N—H⋯O contacts, forming infinite ribbons extending parallel to the a axis

Análisis de las exportaciones rumanas

Este trabajo realiza un análisis de las exportaciones rumanas durante el periodo comprendido entre 2000 y 2013. El objetivo es identificar los factores que han llevado a que Rumania gane cuota de exportaciones en el mercado mundial. Para ello hemos utilizado la técnica de cambio de cuota, que, además de los indicadores de precios y costes relativos, añade factores como la especialización productiva y geográfica. Los resultados que obtenemos tras aplicarla señalan que el principal factor que ha hecho que Rumania gane cuota en el mercado mundial es el factor de competitividad, mientras que el factor de intensidad de la demanda y el factor de localización han contribuido negativamente. Los índices de competitividad (tipos de cambio efectivo reales) que hemos elaborado para Rumania en relación con sus principales socios comerciales confirman la relevancia del factor de competitividad

Decisiones sobre salud preventiva en España

El objetivo del trabajo es determinar los factores ligados a la decisión de optar por prácticas preventivas en salud. Se construye un marco teórico de carácter dinámico que pone de relieve que el nivel de ingresos, la edad en la que se lleva a cabo la práctica preventiva y el estado de salud auto-percibida por el individuo son factores que influyen en la decisión óptima. Las predicciones del modelo teórico son contrastadas haciendo uso de datos de corte transversal obtenidos de la Encuesta Europea de Salud (EES) llevada a cabo en España para el año 2014. Entre los resultados obtenidos, destaca la asociación entre la variable ingresos y un mayor uso de ciertas prácticas de salud preventivas, en especial, la revisión bucodental, única práctica preventiva no cubierta por la sanidad pública española. Adicionalmente, se encuentra que aquellos con mayor nivel de estudios parecen participar en mayor grado de prácticas preventivas de detección temprana del cáncer. Ambos resultados indican que las instituciones públicas sanitarias españolas tienen cierto recorrido de mejora del acceso a ciertas medidas de salud preventiva a colectivos con menores ingresos o con un menor nivel educativo

Envisioning Climate Change Adaptation Futures Using Storytelling Workshops

Engaging people in preparing for inevitable climate change may help them to improve their own safety and contribute to local and national adaptation objectives. However, existing research shows that individual engagement with adaptation is low. One contributing factor to this might be that public discourses on climate change often seems dominated by overly negative and seemingly pre-determined visions of the future. Futures thinking intends to counter this by re-presenting the future as choice contingent and inclusive of other possible and preferable outcomes. Here, we undertook storytelling workshops with participants from the West Yorkshire region of the U.K. They were asked to write fictional adaptation futures stories which: opened by detailing their imagined story world, moved to events that disrupted those worlds, provided a description of who responded and how and closed with outcomes and learnings from the experience. We found that many of the stories envisioned adaptation as a here-and-now phenomenon, and that good adaptation meant identifying and safeguarding things of most value. However, we also found notable differences as to whether the government, local community or rebel groups were imagined as leaders of the responsive actions, and as to whether good adaptation meant maintaining life as it had been before the disruptive events occurred or using the disruptive events as a catalyst for social change. We suggest that the creative futures storytelling method tested here could be gainfully applied to support adaptation planning across local, regional and national scales

Defining transformative climate science to address high-end climate change

Unidad de excelencia María de Maeztu MdM-2015-0552High-end climate change requires transformative solutions, as conventional strategies and solutions will not be enough if major disruptions in social-ecological systems are to be avoided. However, conventional climate assessment approaches and methods show many limitations if they are to provide robust knowledge and support to the implementation of such solutions in practice. To this end, we define transformative climate science as the open-ended process of producing, structuring, and applying solutions-oriented knowledge to fast-link integrated adaptation and mitigation strategies to sustainable development. In particular, based on our experiences within regional cases in Central Asia, Europe, Iberia, Scotland, and Hungary, we have selected 12 dimensions that scientists and practitioners can use as a checklist to design transformative-oriented climate assessments. While it is possible to talk both about transformative adaptation and transformative mitigation, in this paper, we make the case that societal transformation does not depend on mitigation or adaptation policies and actions, mostly because they are related to sustainability innovations, which are endogenous developments derived from deliberate social learning

Turbidimetric determination of raw fat in crop seeds

A variant of a turbidimetric method of raw fat determination from seed, which proved to be simple, fast, and accurate, was described in this paper. The method was based on the extraction of lipids from 20 mg samples into acetone followed by their treatment with 1.5% solution of sulfosalicylic acid and spectral measurement at 440 nm against a blank of the reagents. Suitable volumes of acetone extracts should be taken for oily seed samples such as flax, sunflower, or soybean. A standard curve was made with raw fat extracted from the species being analysed. For analysing a large number of samples, the standardization of the turbidimetric method with a few representative Soxhlet values was recommended. Possible interferences, as well as the real results obtained within large scale analyses ,are also shown