Projecting Pension Expenditures in Spain: On Uncertainty, Communication and Transparency

In this paper we suggest a set of indicators about the future performance of the Spanish public pension system and a suitable method of representing their uncertainty, in order to improve the communication to the public opinion about its main future challenges. Spain seems a particularly interesting case in Europe to illustrate our proposals, since the social security system has been in surplus for nine consecutive years, in sharp contrast to the projections made just a decade ago, but, at the same time, most projections foresee for Spain one of the highest increases in public expenditure among EU countries due to ageing. We argue that simple, transparent, credible, public and periodic indicators, which take explicitly into account the uncertainty about future demographic, economic and institutional developments, may contribute to improve the debate on the policies needed to strengthen the pension system.pensions, projections, communication, uncertainty

Epilogue: The Neighborhood of Joy

Peer Reviewe

Modelling severe paediatric aplastic anaemia using induced pluripotent stem cell technology

PhD ThesisAplastic anaemia (AA) is a disorder resulting in pancytopenia and hypocellular bone marrow. Although the immunological nature of AA pathogenesis is widely accepted, there is an increasing recognition that a significant number of AA patients might present dysfunctional haematopoietic stem or progenitor cells. In this study, induced pluripotent stem cell (iPSC) technology was used to reprogram fibroblasts from four paediatric severe AA (SAA) patients and three unaffected controls. SAA-iPSC lines were successfully differentiated into erythroid and myeloid progenitors and cells. Two key differences were observed in three of the four SAA patients: (1) SAA-iPSC generated a reduced number of erythroid and myeloid cells and (2) SAA-iPSC failed to elongate their telomeres during the reprogramming process. These deficiencies comprise two key features of AA and indicate that the iPSC model closely mimics the disease phenotype. These deficiencies also suggest that some (but not all SAA) may be characterised by an underlying genetic predisposition which impacts the proliferation and/or differentiation of erythroid and myeloid cells. A detailed flow cytometric analysis indicated a significant reduction in the fraction of proliferative iPSC-derived-haematopoietic progenitors in three SAA patients. Likewise, significant levels of replicative stress-associated DNA damage were observed in iPSC-derived-haematopoietic progenitors from one of the SAA patients, which may suggest an impaired DNA damage response in the face of replicative stress. Finally, thrombopoietin-receptor agonist eltrombopag was investigated in the iPSC model system and was shown to have no significant effect on the, proliferation, DNA repair and erythroid/myeloid colony-forming potential of SAA-iPSC derived haematopoietic progenitors under normal or stress conditions. In summary, the data generated from this study highlights the utility of patient specific iPSC in providing a disease model for SAA, in identifying likely constitutional cases for further genetic studies and predicting patient specific responses to available and future drugs

Characterization of wastewater methane emission sources with computer vision and remote sensing

Methane emissions are responsible for at least one-third of the total anthropogenic climate forcing and current estimations expect a significant increase in these emissions in the next decade. Consequently, methane offers a unique opportunity to mitigate climate change while addressing energy supply problems. From the five primary methane sources, residual water treatment provided 7% of the emissions in 2010. This ratio will undoubtedly increase with global population growth. Therefore, locating sources of methane emissions is a crucial step in characterizing the current distribution of GHG better. Nevertheless, there is a lack of comprehensive global and uniform databases to bind those emissions to concrete sources and there is no automatic method to accurately locate sparse human infrastructures such as wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs). WWTP detection is an open problem posing many obstacles due to the lack of freely accessible high-resolution imagery, and the variety of real-world morphologies and sizes. In this work, we tackle this state-of-the-art complex problem and go one step forward by trying to infer capacity using one end-to-end Deep Learning architecture and multi-modal remote sensing data. This goal has a groundbreaking potential impact, as it could help estimate mapped methane emissions for improving emission inventories and future scenarios prediction. We will address the problem as a combination of two parallel inference exercises by proposing a novel network to combine multimodal data based on the hypothesis that the location and the capacity can be inferred based on characteristics such as the plant situation, size, morphology, and proximity to water bodies or population centers. We explore technical documentation and literature to develop these hypotheses and validate their soundness with data analysis. To validate the architecture and the hypotheses, we develop a model and a dataset in parallel with a series of ablation tests. The process is facilitated by an automatic pipeline, also developed in this work, to create datasets and validate models leveraging those datasets. We test the best-obtained model at scale on a mosaic composed of satellite imagery covering the region of Catalonia. The goal is to find plants not previously labeled but present in wastewater treatment plant (WWTP) databases and to compare the distribution and magnitude of the inferred capacity with the ground truth. Results show that we can achieve state-of-the-art results by locating more than half of the labeled plants with the same precision ratio and by only using orthophotos from multispectral imagery. Moreover, we demonstrate that additional data sources related to water basins and population are valuable resources that the model can exploit to infer WWTP capacity. During the process, we also demonstrate the benefit of using negative instances to train our model and the impact of using an appropriate loss function such as Dice's loss

La variación social de S y Z como consecuencia de la inmigración rural en Granada

La variació social de s i z com a conseqüència de la immigració rural a Granada. Aquest article presenta un estudi sociolingüístic comparatiu de tres possibles realitzacions dels fonemes /s/ i /θ/ (ceceo, seseo i distinció entre els dos fonemes) en dues comunitats de parla de la província de Granada: una està constituïda per parlants nascuts i residents a la localitat granadina de Pinos Puente i l’altra està formada per subjectes procedents d’aquest municipi que han instal·lat la seva residència definitiva a la capital de la província. A més, pretenem mostrar els factors que condicionen el complex procés d’acomodació de la parla que experimenten els parlants estudiats

Reseña/Review (Espín, Manuel (Coord.) Adolescentes digitales. Revista Estudios de Juventud, Nº 92, INJUVE, Madrid, 2011)

Espín, Manuel (Coord.)(2011) Adolescentes Digitales.  Revista Estudios de Juventud, Nº 92. Marzo 2011. INJUVE, Madrid."Adolescentes digitales" se nos muestra como una obra que pretende explorar desde distintos puntos de vista la realidad de la generación conocida como “nativos digitales” (Prensky), la generación actual de adolescentes que ha crecido con internet y el mundo digital como su entorno normal de socialización

An analysis of the Okun´s law for the Spanish provinces

The inverse relationship between unemployment and Gross Domestic Product (GDP) growth, commonly known as Okun’s law, has been traditionally analysed in the economic literature. Its application for Spain has been carried out at the national level or for the autonomous communities but it has not been analysed for provinces, the territorial level closer to local labour markets. This study analyses this relationship during the period spanning from 1985 to 2011. After testing the time series properties of provincial GDP and unemployment, we specify statiic and dynamic versions of the Okun’s law using VAR and PVAR techniques. Both static and dynamic analyses lead us to determine that provinces show large differences in their unemployment sensitivity to GDP shocks. In particular, provinces where economic activity is concentrated and Southern provinces are those suffering from higher cyclical variations in unemployment rates

Desenvolupament de PSkits per l’anàlisi selectiu i ràpid de 99Tc.

Treballs Finals de Grau de Química, Facultat de Química, Universitat de Barcelona, Any: 2021, Tutors: Àlex Tarancón Sanz, José Francisco García MartínezThe dismantling of nuclear plants will experience an increase in the following years around Europe and it will require a great number of radioactive residues analysis that may imply significant economic cost. For this reason, the obtention of fast and selective identification methods for alpha and beta emitters in liquid samples is a topic of interest for the future. The aim of this project has been to design a fast and selective method for characterization of beta radionuclides by using plastic scintillator foils that, with the addition of a selective extractant, generate what is known as PSkits. Specifically, the study has been focused on the detection of 99Tc, an important residue from nuclear power plants. The synthesis of porous foils of polystyrene with fluorescent solutes has been studied in a polymerization process. Different experimental conditions have been studied in order to ensure porosity and fastening of the foils to the scintillation vials where they are prepared. In addition, with the use of a selective extractant for technetium as a recovering, the selective PSkits applicable to liquid samples have been generated. From the results, it has been seen that the purification of the monomers reduced the interference phenomenon in the scintillation process. In addition, the presence of DVB increased the rigidity of the foil and gave stability without modifying the scintillation capacity. Furthermore, heptane has been proved as an acceptable porogen and both plastic and glass scintillation vials presented selective retention capacities over 95%. Detection efficiencies in glass vials were around 20%, whereas plastic vials were rounding 50-60%, being the last mentioned the ones with better results. It can be concluded that the developed method, based on foils, has been satisfactory for the detection of beta emitters, although it will require an extensive optimization work to ensure robustnes