A proposal to incorporate the context and the affective

It is proposed the addition to the epistemological V of the affective domain of knowledge production and the context in which it is produced, using J. Novak´s theory of education as frame of reference. This approach has been tested with some students and has shown to be useful

The Gravity of R&D FDIs.

The negative effect of distance is justified by the existence of transport costs which hamper the international exchange of final and intermediate goods, and by higher uncertainty about local markets. We submit that distance plays a remarkably different role in the case of R&D FDIs since they mainly involve the international transfer, absorption and use of knowledge. Using data on bilateral investment projects in R&D, manufacturing and other business activities between 58 countries, we find that geographic distance does not hinder R&D FDIs as much as in the case of production and other investment activities. Furthermore, once we control for institutional and psychic distance, in particular language and religious differences, the negative effect of geographic distance vanishes.Multinational Firms, International Business, Technological Change, Choices and Consequences, Diffusion Processes.

Transport of non-thermal deposition particles in an argon plasma at low pressures, in connection with the thin film nanostructure

Presentación invitada en el 17th International Colloquium on Plasma ProcessesPeer reviewe

Al2O3/ZrO2/Y3Al5O12 composites. A high-temperature mechanical characterization

An Al2O3/5 vol%·ZrO2/5 vol%·Y3Al5O12 (YAG) tri-phase composite was manufactured by surface modification of an alumina powder with inorganic precursors of the second phases. The bulk materials were produced by die-pressing and pressureless sintering at 1500 °C, obtaining fully dense, homogenous samples, with ultra-fine ZrO2 and YAG grains dispersed in a sub-micronic alumina matrix. The high temperature mechanical properties were investigated by four-point bending tests up to 1500 °C, and the grain size stability was assessed by observing the microstructural evolution of the samples heat treated up to 1700 °C. Dynamic indentation measures were performed on as-sintered and heat-treated Al2O3/ZrO2/YAG samples in order to evaluate the micro-hardness and elastic modulus as a function of re-heating temperature. The high temperature bending tests highlighted a transition from brittle to plastic behavior comprised between 1350 and 1400 °C and a considerable flexural strength reduction at temperatures higher than 1400 °C; moreover, the microstructural investigations carried out on the re-heated samples showed a very limited grain growth up to 1650 °C

Aharonov-Bohm effect for an exciton in a finite width nano-ring

We study the Aharonov-Bohm effect for an exciton on a nano-ring using a 2D attractive fermionic Hubbard model. We extend previous results obtained for a 1D ring in which only azimuthal motion is considered, to a more general case of 2D annular lattices. In general, we show that the existence of the localization effect, increased by the nonlinearity, makes the phenomenon in the 2D system similar to the 1D case. However, the introduction of radial motion introduces extra frequencies, different from the original isolated frequency corresponding to the excitonic Aharonov- Bohm oscillations. If the circumference of the system becomes large enough, the Aharonov-Bohm effect is suppressed

Impulse-induced localized nonlinear modes in an electrical lattice

Intrinsic localized modes, also called discrete breathers, can exist under certain conditions in one-dimensional nonlinear electrical lattices driven by external harmonic excitations. In this work, we have studied experimentally the efectiveness of generic periodic excitations of variable waveform at generating discrete breathers in such lattices. We have found that this generation phenomenon is optimally controlled by the impulse transmitted by the external excitation (time integral over two consecutive zerosComment: 5 pages, 8 figure