De qué manera los principios de la Responsabilidad Social Empresarial pueden contribuir a una mejora de la seguridad en nuestro país

La Responsabilidad Social Empresarial ha dejado de ser una moda para convertirse en una necesidad y obligación para todas aquellas empresas que buscan ser competitivas en el futuro, a través de la puesta en práctica de un modelo de valor compartido, donde tanto empresas como sociedad en su conjunto se benefician de los aportes entregados a la misma por parte del sector privado. Sin embargo, ¿qué ocurre en el campo de la seguridad? ¿Es posible que la empresa privada contribuya significativamente al mejoramiento de la seguridad a través de la puesta en marcha de iniciativas enmarcadas en lineamientos de la Responsabilidad Social Empresarial? Como veremos a continuación existen múltiples ejemplos de empresas en Latinoamérica que lo han hecho con total éxito y en el caso específico del Ecuador, existen diversas áreas en las cuales las compañías podrían implementar estrategias que contribuyan a una mejora de nuestra seguridad; todo dependerá de que estén en capacidad de identificar aquellas acciones de alto impacto, que las beneficien tanto a ellas como a la sociedad en su conjunto, procurando siempre priorizar el bien común y una visión prospectiva de largo plazo.La Responsabilidad Social Empresarial ha dejado de ser una moda para convertirse en una necesidad y obligación para todas aquellas empresas que buscan ser competitivas en el futuro, a través de la puesta en práctica de un modelo de valor compartido, donde tanto empresas como sociedad en su conjunto se benefician de los aportes entregados a la misma por parte del sector privado. Sin embargo, ¿qué ocurre en el campo de la seguridad? ¿Es posible que la empresa privada contribuya significativamente al mejoramiento de la seguridad a través de la puesta en marcha de iniciativas enmarcadas en lineamientos de la Responsabilidad Social Empresarial? Como veremos a continuación existen múltiples ejemplos de empresas en Latinoamérica que lo han hecho con total éxito y en el caso específico del Ecuador, existen diversas áreas en las cuales las compañías podrían implementar estrategias que contribuyan a una mejora de nuestra seguridad; todo dependerá de que estén en capacidad de identificar aquellas acciones de alto impacto, que las beneficien tanto a ellas como a la sociedad en su conjunto, procurando siempre priorizar el bien común y una visión prospectiva de largo plazo

Towards a New Competition Law: Some Comments on the Reform. Interview with Dr. Alejandro Falla Jara

La presente entrevista busca dar algunos puntos de vista respecto a la reforma a la Ley de Competencia. En esa línea, el entrevistado nos da su opinión general sobre la reforma, los aportes que brinda y aquellos aspectos que considera faltaron regularse, centrando su opinión en aquellos temas de combate de prácticas anticompetitivas y control de regulaciones anticompetitivas.The present interview seeks to give some points of view about the reform of Competency regulation. In that line, the interviewee give us his general opinion about the reform, the main contribution to the matter and those aspects that were missed, focusing his opinion on anti-competitive practice and negative regulation of anticompetitive practices

Dynamics of water flow and sediments in the upper Paraná River between Porto Primavera and Itaipu dams, Brazil

The following paper aims to quantify the bedload transport in the Paraná river in the Porto São José cross section (22°45’52”S; 53°10’34”W), between Porto Primavera and Itaipu dams, Brazil. In the used method, the bedload transport is estimated from the height and the displacement of the dunes along a longitudinal profile. The results were compared with those obtained from classical bedload transport equations. In the Porto São José cross section, the estimated average bedload transport applying the Dune Displacement Method (DDM) was 3,157 t d-1, which corresponds to an average annual bedload transport of 1,152,325 t yr-1. Applying the Van Rijn equation the average bedload transport was calculated in 2,830 t d-1 (1,032,950 t yr-1), while using the Engelund-Fredsøe equation the average bedload transport found was 3,135 t d-1 (1,144,378 t yr-1). The obtained values using different methods presented some coherence each other, which means that these results can be used as a starting point to establish bedload transport estimations in the Upper Paraná river

Reuse policy: a study on available reuse implementing instruments and licensing considerations

The European Commission's reuse policy acknowledges that certain instruments are capable of contributing towards the overall effective implementation of the Reuse Decision. Instruments such as open licences fall within this purview and can serve in furthering the Institution's policy objectives. The purpose of this document is to assess a range of implementing instruments which could be used by the Commission within the context of its reuse policy. To this end, four main instruments have been selected for assessment. The first instrument is the Reuse Notice currently used by the Commission on most online and print media. The three other alternative instruments are the Creative Commons licensing suite, the Open Data Commons licensing suite, and a bespoke licence (i.e. a tailor-made open licence drafted and maintained by the Commission).JRC.I.4-Intellectual Property and Technology Transfe

From representing views to representativeness of views: illustrating a new (Q2S) approach in the context of health care priority setting in nine European countries

Governments across Europe are required to make decisions about how best to allocate scarce health care resources. There are legitimate arguments for eliciting societal vales in relation to health care resource allocation given the roles of the general public as payers and potential patients. However, relatively little is known about the views of the general public on general principles which could guide these decisions. In this paper we present five societal viewpoints on principles for health care resources allocation and develop a new approach, Q2S, designed to investigate the extent to which these views are held across a range of European countries. An online survey was developed, based on a previously completed study Q methodology, and delivered between November 2009 and February 2010 across nine countries to 33,515 respondents. The largest proportion of our respondents (44%), were found to most associate themselves with an egalitarian perspective. Differences in views were more strongly associated with countries than with socio-demographic characteristics. These results provide information which could be useful for decision makers in understanding the pluralistic context in which they are making health care resource allocation decisions and how different groups in society may respond to such decisions

International consensus guideline for reporting transmission electron microscopy results in the diagnosis of Primary Ciliary Dyskinesia (BEAT PCD TEM Criteria)

Primary Ciliary Dyskinesia (PCD) is a heterogeneous genetic condition. European and North American diagnostic guidelines recommend transmission electron microscopy (TEM) as one of a combination of tests to confirm a diagnosis. However, there is no definition of what constitutes a defect or consensus on reporting terminology. The aim of this project was to provide an internationally agreed ultrastructural classification for PCD diagnosis by TEM. A consensus guideline was developed by PCD electron microscopy experts representing 18 centres in 14 countries. An initial meeting and discussion were followed by a Delphi consensus process. The agreed guideline was then tested, modified and retested through exchange of samples and electron micrographs between the 18 diagnostic centres. The final guideline a) Provides agreed terminology and a definition of class 1 defects which are diagnostic for PCD; b) Identifies class 2 defects which can indicate a diagnosis of PCD in combination with other supporting evidence; c) Describes features which should be included in a ciliary ultrastructure report to assist multidisciplinary diagnosis of PCD d) Defines adequacy of a diagnostic sample. This tested and externally validated statement provides a clear guideline for the diagnosis of PCD by TEM which can be used to standardise diagnosis internationally.</p

The Eighth Data Release of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey: First Data from SDSS-III

The Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) started a new phase in August 2008, with new instrumentation and new surveys focused on Galactic structure and chemical evolution, measurements of the baryon oscillation feature in the clustering of galaxies and the quasar Ly alpha forest, and a radial velocity search for planets around ~8000 stars. This paper describes the first data release of SDSS-III (and the eighth counting from the beginning of the SDSS). The release includes five-band imaging of roughly 5200 deg^2 in the Southern Galactic Cap, bringing the total footprint of the SDSS imaging to 14,555 deg^2, or over a third of the Celestial Sphere. All the imaging data have been reprocessed with an improved sky-subtraction algorithm and a final, self-consistent photometric recalibration and flat-field determination. This release also includes all data from the second phase of the Sloan Extension for Galactic Understanding and Evolution (SEGUE-2), consisting of spectroscopy of approximately 118,000 stars at both high and low Galactic latitudes. All the more than half a million stellar spectra obtained with the SDSS spectrograph have been reprocessed through an improved stellar parameters pipeline, which has better determination of metallicity for high metallicity stars.Comment: Astrophysical Journal Supplements, in press (minor updates from submitted version

Identification of Genetic Factors that Modify Clinical Onset of Huntington’s Disease

SummaryAs a Mendelian neurodegenerative disorder, the genetic risk of Huntington’s disease (HD) is conferred entirely by an HTT CAG repeat expansion whose length is the primary determinant of the rate of pathogenesis leading to disease onset. To investigate the pathogenic process that precedes disease, we used genome-wide association (GWA) analysis to identify loci harboring genetic variations that alter the age at neurological onset of HD. A chromosome 15 locus displays two independent effects that accelerate or delay onset by 6.1 years and 1.4 years, respectively, whereas a chromosome 8 locus hastens onset by 1.6 years. Association at MLH1 and pathway analysis of the full GWA results support a role for DNA handling and repair mechanisms in altering the course of HD. Our findings demonstrate that HD disease modification in humans occurs in nature and offer a genetic route to identifying in-human validated therapeutic targets in this and other Mendelian disorders.PaperCli

The Ninth Data Release of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey: First Spectroscopic Data from the SDSS-III Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey

The Sloan Digital Sky Survey III (SDSS-III) presents the first spectroscopic data from the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS). This ninth data release (DR9) of the SDSS project includes 535,995 new galaxy spectra (median z=0.52), 102,100 new quasar spectra (median z=2.32), and 90,897 new stellar spectra, along with the data presented in previous data releases. These spectra were obtained with the new BOSS spectrograph and were taken between 2009 December and 2011 July. In addition, the stellar parameters pipeline, which determines radial velocities, surface temperatures, surface gravities, and metallicities of stars, has been updated and refined with improvements in temperature estimates for stars with T_eff<5000 K and in metallicity estimates for stars with [Fe/H]>-0.5. DR9 includes new stellar parameters for all stars presented in DR8, including stars from SDSS-I and II, as well as those observed as part of the SDSS-III Sloan Extension for Galactic Understanding and Exploration-2 (SEGUE-2). The astrometry error introduced in the DR8 imaging catalogs has been corrected in the DR9 data products. The next data release for SDSS-III will be in Summer 2013, which will present the first data from the Apache Point Observatory Galactic Evolution Experiment (APOGEE) along with another year of data from BOSS, followed by the final SDSS-III data release in December 2014.Comment: 9 figures; 2 tables. Submitted to ApJS. DR9 is available at http://www.sdss3.org/dr

LSST: from Science Drivers to Reference Design and Anticipated Data Products

(Abridged) We describe here the most ambitious survey currently planned in the optical, the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST). A vast array of science will be enabled by a single wide-deep-fast sky survey, and LSST will have unique survey capability in the faint time domain. The LSST design is driven by four main science themes: probing dark energy and dark matter, taking an inventory of the Solar System, exploring the transient optical sky, and mapping the Milky Way. LSST will be a wide-field ground-based system sited at Cerro Pach\'{o}n in northern Chile. The telescope will have an 8.4 m (6.5 m effective) primary mirror, a 9.6 deg$^2$ field of view, and a 3.2 Gigapixel camera. The standard observing sequence will consist of pairs of 15-second exposures in a given field, with two such visits in each pointing in a given night. With these repeats, the LSST system is capable of imaging about 10,000 square degrees of sky in a single filter in three nights. The typical 5$\sigma$ point-source depth in a single visit in $r$ will be $\sim 24.5$ (AB). The project is in the construction phase and will begin regular survey operations by 2022. The survey area will be contained within 30,000 deg$^2$ with $\delta<+34.5^\circ$, and will be imaged multiple times in six bands, $ugrizy$, covering the wavelength range 320--1050 nm. About 90\% of the observing time will be devoted to a deep-wide-fast survey mode which will uniformly observe a 18,000 deg$^2$ region about 800 times (summed over all six bands) during the anticipated 10 years of operations, and yield a coadded map to $r\sim27.5$. The remaining 10\% of the observing time will be allocated to projects such as a Very Deep and Fast time domain survey. The goal is to make LSST data products, including a relational database of about 32 trillion observations of 40 billion objects, available to the public and scientists around the world.Comment: 57 pages, 32 color figures, version with high-resolution figures available from https://www.lsst.org/overvie