Measuring Social Welfare Gains in Social Assistance Programs: An Application to European Countries

This paper aims to provide a framework for a complete assessment of the overall welfare gains resulting from social assistance programs. We make use of a social welfare function that satisfies several properties that must be considered when measuring the protection provided by these programs. We propose measuring the welfare gains that a society derives from these programs by summing up them in a way that is consistent with the standard value judgements in the income inequality literature. We also propose analytical tools that accumulate the welfare gains that, apart from having the advantage of being easy to interpret, allow the ranking of different scenarios and have an associated dominance criterion. To illustrate our approach, we measure the welfare gains caused by social assistance schemes in European countries.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech

Edición universitaria en la era de la información

_Este artículo argumenta en favor de retomar la figura profesional del 'editor', y la instauracón de políticas y criterios editoriales racionales para el caso de la Secretaría de Difusión Cultural de la Universidad Autónoma del Estado de México

Supporting general education teachers in the inclusive classroom with students with autism that display challenging behaviors

Currently the federal law is focusing on educating students with disabilities in the Least Restrictive Environment (LRE); therefore, the school system has changed the way it serves students with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). Students with autism are now being placed in the general education setting and general educations teachers are expected to serve students with autism without proper training or support. A training workshop focused on increasing and enhancing strategies for general education teachers to effectively include and instruct students with ASD. A teacher-workshop was planned and developed to provide general education teachers with the information and strategies needed to help students with autism who display challenging behaviors. Results from the study indicated that teachers benefit from specific training aimed at meeting the behavioral demands that students with autism exemplify in a general education classroom. Moreover, the researcher to ensure maintenance of the workshop strategies provided added support

Context-Dependent Dual Adaptation to Opposing Visuomotor Rotations

When reaching towards objects, the human central nervous system (CNS) can actively compensate for two different perturbations simultaneously (dual adaptation), though this does not simply occur upon presentation. Dual adaptation is made more difficult when the desired trajectories and targets are identical and hence do not cue the impending perturbation. In cases like this, the CNS requires contextual cues in order to predict the dynamics of the environment. Not all cues are effective at facilitating dual adaptation. In two experiments we investigated the efficacy of hand and body posture contextual cues that are intrinsic to the CNS. For the hand posture experiment, we also look at the role of extended training. We found that how people held the tool or oriented their body while reaching is sufficient for concurrently adapting separate visuomotor mappings such that over time, reach errors significantly decrease. Extended practice did not lead to further benefits though

An empirical study of power consumption of Web-based communications in mobile phones

Currently, mobile devices are the most popular pervasive computing device, and they are becoming the primer way for Web access. Energy is a critical resource in such pervasive computing devices, being network communication one of the primary energy consuming operations in mobile apps. Indeed, web-based communication is the most used, but also energy demanding. So, mobile web developers should be aware of how much energy consumes the different web-based communication alternatives. The goal of this paper is to measure and compare the energy consumption of three asynchronous Web-based methods in mobile devices. Our experiments consider three different Web applications models that allow a web server to push data to a browser: Polling, Long Polling and WebSockets. The obtained results are analyzed to get more accurate understanding of the impact in energy consumption of a mobile browser for each of these three methods. The utility of these experiments is to show developers what are the factors that influence the energy consumption when different web-based asynchronous communication is used. With this information mobile web developers could reduce the power consumption of web applications on mobile devices, by selecting the most appropriate method for asynchronous server communication.MUniversidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech

Environmental impacts of biocides used in hydraulic fracturing

The goal of this dissertation was to better understand the environmental impacts of biocides used in unconventional oil and gas (UOG) practices. Specifically focusing on how industrial biocides may impact aquatic microbial communities, biocide degradation potential, and contribute to antimicrobial resistance propagation. Recently, the energy sector has seen a stark increase in biocide use, due to the dramatic growth in hydraulic fracturing (HF) operations. Biocides in HF are used to suppress microbial-induced corrosion, biofouling, and hydrogen sulfide production. The implications of biocide usage expansion, its impacts to antimicrobial resistance, and to environmental and public health risks are not fully understood.To understand these knowledge gaps, microcosm-based studies were used to investigate the effect of biocide addition to both HF-impacted and unimpacted streams. The two most common HF biocides, glutaraldehyde and 2-2-dibromo-3-nitrilopropionamide (DBNPA), were used in two otherwise identical experiments. Degradation of the biocides and microbial community changes were measured over time. Results suggest that glutaraldehyde is more persistent in stream waters previously impacted by HF. However, the microbial community was able to tolerate it as shown by higher microbial diversity and biomass. The DBNPA microcosms experiment showed that previous HF impact, associated with higher total organic carbon, favors a less toxic and persistent DBNPA degradation pathway. Many unidentified brominated species were detected in both HF-impacted and unimpacted conditions. Whole genome sequencing of strains belonging to environmentally relevant genera enriched during the biocide microcosm and isolated in biocide plates were investigated to find relevant genes correlated with DBNPA resistance. Thirteen orthologous genes with predicted functions such as mobile elements (recombinase and terminase), efflux pumps, and possible enzymatic deactivation of the biocide were found. Finally, the knowledge gaps that need to be addressed to perform a risk assessment of antimicrobial resistance caused by biocide usage in UOG production were identified and discussed. This work should help oil and gas operators, environmental response teams, and regulators reach convergence about the risks and aquatic microbial community response to biocides in UOG production and help with preventive strategies and better formulations to minimize the effect this practice has in the environment

Model Driven Evolution of an Agent-Based Home Energy Management System

Advanced smart home appliances and new models of energy tariffs imposed by energy providers pose new challenges in the automation of home energy management. Users need some assistant tool that helps them to make complex decisions with different goals, depending on the current situation. Multi-agent systems have proved to be a suitable technology to develop self-management systems, able to take the most adequate decision under different context-dependent situations, like the home energy management. The heterogeneity of home appliances and also the changes in the energy policies of providers introduce the necessity of explicitly modeling this variability. But, multi-agent systems lack of mechanisms to effectively deal with the different degrees of variability required by these kinds of systems. Software Product Line technologies, including variability models, has been successfully applied to different domains to explicitly model any kind of variability. We have defined a software product line development process that performs a model driven generation of agents embedded in heterogeneous smart objects with different degrees of self-management. However, once deployed, the home energy assistant system has to be able to evolve to self-adapt its decision making or devices to new requirements. So, in this paper we propose a model driven mechanism to automatically manage the evolution of multi-agent systems distributed among several devices.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech