State Preemption of Cable Television Regulation — Whatever Happened to the Sanctity of Contract?

California Government Code section 53066.1 as recently amended gives cable television operators the right to obtain rate increases even in the face of the city or county franchisor opposition. Since most cable franchise agreements allow the franchisor to control rates for the cable service, there is a conflict between the statute and the franchise contracts. This article examines the issue of whether the statute violates the constitutional provisions against the impairment of contracts and whether the franchisor or a subscriber of the service has the necessary standing to assert the constitutional argument

About occupational categories in collective bargaining and its changes during the last decades

El artículo presenta un análisis de la estructura y los criterios de definición de las categorías socioprofesionales en convenios colectivos de trabajo de actividades seleccionadas de la industria manufacturera a lo largo de distintas rondas negociales, desde el año 1975 hasta los años recientes. Particularmente, nos interesa analizar el modo en que el avance del capital sobre el trabajo operado en las últimas décadas del siglo XX se expresó en la estructura y los criterios de definición de las categorías socioprofesionales. El análisis de los procesos operados en las últimas décadas en relación con las categorías socioprofesionales posee gran relevancia y actualidad, en virtud de la situación que atraviesan los trabajadores tercerizados y los "fuera de convenio", así como también por su importancia en la discusión paritaria y su presencia en diversos conflictos laborales. Si bien no es posible observar tendencias homogéneas ni lineales, se observa un punto de inflexión en las negociaciones de los años ’90. El análisis realizado permite reconocer procesos de exclusión de categorías de convenio, así como también procesos de reducción del número de categorías y de redefinición de las mismas.This paper analyses the structure and the criteria of definition of occupational categories in collective agreements from selected manufactur ing activities along different periods, since 1975. In particular, we aim to analyse the way in which the advance of capital against labour in the last decades of the 20th century expressed in the definition of occupational categories in collective agreements. This analysis allows us to recognize processes of exclusion of categories, reduction in the number of categories, and redefinition of the same ones. Even when the changes in occupational categories were neither homogeneous nor linear, those processes started during the 90’s have great relevance today.Fil: Marticorena, Clara. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Oficina de Coordinación Administrativa Saavedra 15. Centro de Estudios e Investigaciones Laborales; Argentin

Sensitivity of desert dust emissions to model horizontal grid spacing during the Bodélé Dust Experiment 2005

The impact of model horizontal grid spacing on meteorology and dust emissions in the Bodélé depression was investigated during the well-documented period of the Bodélé Dust Experiment 2005 (BoDEx 2005). Five horizontal grid spacing ranging from 100 km to 5 km were tested. The main conclusion of these sensitivity tests is that the meteorology of the Bodélé depression is quite insensitive to model horizontal grid spacing below 50 km in agreement with Todd et al.'s (2008b) results. Below 50 km, dust emissions also appear relatively insensitive to model mesh size, the influence of model horizontal grid spacing on dust emissions tending towards an asymptotic behavior as model mesh size is reduced

Estanques de acero inoxidable para la industria vitivinícola

Tesis (Ingeniero Constructor)La industria vitivinícola en CHILE está en crecimiento y avanzando a un ritmo acelerado, esta industria mueve millones de dólares por año, Chile es uno de los grandes productores de vino del mundo, lo que hace necesario contar con la infraestructura adecuada para manejar los grandes volúmenes de vino que se producen, para este fin en los últimos años se ha estado implementado en la industria la utilización de estanques de acero inoxidable, debido a que este tipo de estanques entrega un sanidad elevada en comparación a otros tipos de estanques, es de fácil y rápida limpieza, también al ser un material inerte no entrega microorganismos dañinos al producto. En el mercado existe una amplia diversidad de ofertas, las cuales van desde pequeños estanques hasta estanques de grandes volúmenes llegando incluso a los 150.000 litros en algunos casos, también existe en el mercado diversidad de accesorios que se pueden incluir en este tipo de estanque, la elección de estos accesorios depende básicamente del tipo de uso que se le quiera dar al estanque. Tema importante es el tipo de soldadura y la forma de armado que se lleve a cabo en la fabricación de un estanque, ya que una falla en este proceso podría influir negativamente.The Chilean wine industry is growing and making progress at an accelerated rate, by moving millions of dollars a year. Chile is one of the largest wine producers in the world, which makes it necessary to count on the adequate infrastructure to manage the big wine volumes that are produced. Having this objective in mind, stainless steel tanks have been implemented during the last few years, keeping in mind that these tanks deliver a high level of healthiness when comparing to other types of tanks, along with their fast and easy cleaning procedures and the non delivering of harmful microorganisms to the produce as a consequence of their inert material composition. There is a wide diversity in the market, which range from small tanks to big volume ones, even reaching 150000 liters in some cases. There are also several accessories in the market that can be included in this type of tanks, the election of which will basically depend on the type of use to be given. The type of welding and the form of reinforcement to be carried out in the manufacture are two important issues, because a failure in this process might have a negative influence in the achievement of the final produce

Strategic Position and Trade Union Power: An Analysis of Trade Union Strategies in the Automotive, Chemical and Edible Oil Sectors in Argentina, 2003-2015)

The aim of this paper is to analyse empirically the importance of union strategies as a moderating variable between unions’ structural and associational power and their bargaining and mobilisation power. To this end, we selected three unions, one from each of three strategic industrial sectors in the Argentinian national economy – automotive, chemical and edible oils – and analysed their dynamics of collective bargaining and labour conflict in the 2003–2015 period. The research is based on a review of secondary sources (collective bargaining agreements and conflict databases) as well as primary sources (semi-structured interviews with managers, trade union leaders, worker representatives and activists). Whereas workers in each of these sectors have a similarly high degree of structural power, we observed differences among the sectors in working, wage and organisational conditions. These differences are associated with three different union strategies for building union power, which we identify as partnership, confrontational and combative.             KEYWORDS: strategic position; trade union power; union strategies; sectoral analysis; Argentin

Empirical Bayesian Smoothing Splines for Signals with Correlated Errors: Methods and Applications

Smoothing splines is a well stablished method in non-parametric statistics,  although the selection of the smoothness degree of the regression function is rarely addressed and, instead, a two times differentiable function, i.e.  cubic smoothing spline, is assumed. For a general regression function there is no known method that can identify the smoothness degree under the presence of correlated errors. This apparent disregard in the literature can be justified because the condition number of the solution increases with the smoothness degree of the function, turning the estimation unstable. In this thesis we introduce  an exact expression for the Demmler-Reinsch basis constructed as the solution of an ordinary differential equation, so that the estimation can be carried out for an arbitrary smoothness degree, and under the presence of correlated errors, without affecting the condition number of the solution. We provide asymptotic properties of the proposed estimators and conduct simulation experiments to study their finite sample properties. We expect this new approach to have a direct impact on related methods that use smoothing splines as a building block. In this direction, we present extensions of the method to signal extraction and functional principal component analysis. The empirical relevance to our findings in these areas of statistics is shown in applications for agricultural economics and biophysics. R packages of the implementation of the developed methods are also provided.

Structures dolméniques et territoires dans les Pyrénées nord-occidentales

Les études sur le mégalithisme semblent connaître une certaine forme de renaissance ces derniers temps. Ce nouveau souffle est notamment permis par la mise en place d’approches innovantes dans l’étude architecturale des monuments ou bien encore de réflexions à des échelles micro-régionales dans lesquelles les sépultures retrouvent leur place aux côtés des autres sites (occupations domestiques, habitats, sites d’acquisitions de matières premières...). Le Néolithique des Pyrénées nord-occidenta..

Salies-de-Béarn – Histoire du sel : une utilisation des sources salées dès le Néolithique ?

L’année 2015 a marqué la fin de notre opération sur le sel à Salies-de-Béarn après quatre années de travail. L’objectif principal de cette année était de procéder à une dernière série de carottages à la confluence Beigmau/Saleys pour tenter de mieux comprendre ce secteur clé au fort potentiel et en particulier sa formation et son fonctionnement géomorphologique. Si les études sont toujours en cours, il apparaît d’ores et déjà que la sédimentation de ce secteur est sans doute plus complexe que..