'Thinking of Spain in a flat way:' visiting Spain and Spanish cultural heritage through contemporary Japanese anime

This article contextualizes the representation of Spain and Spanish culture among Japanese cultural producers, particularly through the production of Japanese commercial animation (commonly named anime). Toward that goal, it provides a historical background of Japan-Spain relations within the context of the tourism industry, as well as some examples of the diverse forms of representation within several creative industries. Subsequently, the article reviews the ways in which popular culture has been contributed to national branding. There is special attention to the Spanish case and the proliferation of such images sometimes resulting in the (mis)representation of Spain's tangible and intangible cultural heritage. Internationally-distributed anime productions will be examined as a reflection of Spanish national branding on Japanese audiences and this global industry. Three cases among contemporary anime productions have been selected due to the combination of fictional and misrepresented Spanish cultural features in their narratives

A more resilient financial system but… Basel III and the FSB

At the request of the recent G20 Summits held in the last two years in Washington, London,Pittsburgh and Seoul, different international organizations, such as the IMF, BIS, WB, ECB, WTO, FSB, etc... have engaged to collaborate in the preparation of a new regulatory frame for a sounder global financial system; in particular the BCBS (Basel Committee on Banking Supervision) at BIS (Bank of International Settlements) and the FSB(Financial Stability Board) have reached agreements or will presumably do so in the near future in crucial issues such capital requirements, liquidity, leverage, systemic risk, etc. This paper tries to summarize the new regulatory standards, how they will be phased so that banks can meet the new requirements without impairing the economic recovery and our assessment on its macro and micro implications at the financial systems and real economies.Resilience, Supervision, Regulation, Micro prudential, Capital, Liquidity, Leverage, Macro-prudential, Procyclical, Systemic, Rating, Derivatives

Copyright Protection of Color Imaging Using Robust-Encoded Watermarking

In this paper we present a robust-encoded watermarking method applied to color images for copyright protection, which presents robustness against several geometric and signal processing distortions. Trade-off between payload, robustness and imperceptibility is a very important aspect which has to be considered when a watermark algorithm is designed. In our proposed scheme, previously to be embedded into the image, the watermark signal is encoded using a convolutional encoder, which can perform forward error correction achieving better robustness performance. Then, the embedding process is carried out through the discrete cosine transform domain (DCT) of an image using the image normalization technique to accomplish robustness against geometric and signal processing distortions. The embedded watermark coded bits are extracted and decoded using the Viterbi algorithm. In order to determine the presence or absence of the watermark into the image we compute the bit error rate (BER) between the recovered and the original watermark data sequence. The quality of the watermarked image is measured using the well-known indices: Peak Signal to Noise Ratio (PSNR), Visual Information Fidelity (VIF) and Structural Similarity Index (SSIM). The color difference between the watermarked and original images is obtained by using the Normalized Color Difference (NCD) measure. The experimental results show that the proposed method provides good performance in terms of imperceptibility and robustness. The comparison among the proposed and previously reported methods based on different techniques is also provided