Live-in domestic workers : overworked, underpaid and overlooked

Live-in domestics are the housekeepers, nannies and home health care workers that live with the families they work for five to seven nights a week. Like other domestics, the live-in domestics interviewed for this report suffered restriction of movement, isolation, inadequate nutrition, physical violence, wage theft and excessive overtime, all in Texas. Moreover, live-ins are more reluctant than other domestics to exercise their rights because they may automatically find themselves homeless. Nobody knows exactly how many live-in domestic workers are in the U.S. because of the secluded nature of their work, but experts and advocates agree that many live-in domestic workers are victims of human trafficking. There are more than 300,000 victims of human trafficking in Texas, nearly 234,000 of those were adult victims of labor trafficking, according to reports. The same reports found that traffickers exploit approximately $600 million per year from victims of labor trafficking in Texas only. Since 2012, domestic work has represented the largest sector of all labor trafficking cases reported to the National Human Trafficking Hotline. Texas is the second state with the most cases of human trafficking reported to the Hotline, second only to California. Like other states, these reported cases are growing every year. Reports also show that 85 percent of domestic worker trafficking survivors said having pay withheld or being paid well below minimum wage; 81 percent have lived in abusive living conditions; and 80 percent have been tricked with false or otherwise deceptive contracts. Through the lives of four present and former live-in domestic workers, these numbers come to life and live-in domestic workers stay in the shadows no more.Journalis

Combined grazing incidence RBS and TEM analysis of luminescent nano-SiGe/SiO2 multilayers.

Multilayer structures with five periods of amorphous SiGe nanoparticles/SiO2 layers with different thickness were deposited by Low Pressure Chemical Vapor Deposition and annealed to crystallize the SiGe nanoparticles. The use of grazing incidence RBS was necessary to obtain sufficient depth resolution to separate the signals arising from the individual layers only a few nm thick. The average size and areal density of the embedded SiGe nanoparticles as well as the oxide interlayer thickness were determined from the RBS spectra. Details of eventual composition changes and diffusion processes caused by the annealing processes were also studied. Transmission Electron Microscopy was used to obtain complementary information on the structural parameters of the samples in order to check the information yielded by RBS. The study revealed that annealing at 900 °C for 60 s, enough to crystallize the SiGe nanoparticles, leaves the structure unaltered if the interlayer thickness is around 15 nm or higher

Legal Ontologies for the spanish e-Government

The Electronic Government is a new field of applications for the semantic web where ontologies are becoming an important research technology. The e-Government faces considerable challenges to achieve interoperability given the semantic differences of interpretation, complexity and width of scope. In this paper we present the results obtained in an ongoing project commissioned by the Spanish government that seeks strategies for the e-Government to reduce the problems encountered when delivering services to citizens. We also introduce an e-Government ontology model; within this model a set of legal ontologies are devoted to representing the Real-estate transaction domain used to illustrate this paper

Global economic crisis and new economic paradigms

Tras un largo período de crecimiento económico mundial, varios factores financieros y económicos han desembocado en una gran crisis del capitalismo. Dicha crisis es el resultado de los excesos cometidos desde los ochenta en cuanto a liberalización y desregulación de los mercados. Por diversos canales, la crisis inmobiliaria ha impactado en el sistema financiero y de ahí se ha contagiado a los principales sectores de actividad. La crisis ha mutado en recesión como consecuencia de la primacía concedida a las finanzas internacionales en la configuración del nuevo orden económico mundial. La salida de la crisis requiere nuevos paradigmas de actuación macroeconómica así como un esfuerzo de coordinación internacional. Pasa por redefinir las reglas del juego entre los varios agentes económicos rehuyendo las estrategias competitivas contraproducentes de la desinflación salarial.___________________________________________________After a long period of global economic growth, a number of financial and economic factors have resulted in a deep crisis of capitalism. This crisis is due to the excesses caused by liberalization and market deregulation since the Eighties. Through different channels, the crisis in the housing market has had an impact on the financial system, spreading to the main activity sectors. The crisis has evolved into a recession as a result of the importance of international finances in the new world economic order. The successful management of the crisis requires a new macroeconomic paradigm as well as internationally coordinated efforts. It also requires a new definition of the game rules agreed on by the various economic agents that avoids counterproductive competitivenessseeking measures of wage disinflation

La gobernanza económica : una necesidad para el crecimiento y la profundización de la integración europea

Según progresa la integración europea, se va imponiendo la necesidad de una gobernanza económica de la Unión. Dicha gobernanza ha de articularse en torno a las acciones del Banco Central Europeo (BCE) y a las actuaciones presupuestarias de los Estados miembros. Las concepciones restrictivas que sustentan dichas políticas han de ser reconducidas una vez se ha confirmado que las reglas rígidas de la constitución económica de la zona euro no han actuado como factores de dinamización económica. La arquitectura de la falsa gobernanza económica actual sigue concediendo la primacía a la estabilidad de los precios sobre el crecimiento y el empleo y no contribuye a estimular el crecimiento. ____________________________________________As European integration advances, the EU’s economic governance becomes more and more urgently needed. This economic governance must revolve around the European Central Bank’s performance and the budgetary action of the member States. The restrictive conception underlying such policies should be changed once it has become apparent that the rigid rules of the Eurozone’s economic constitution have not contributed to a more dynamic economy. The structure of the present false economic governance still gives the stability of prices precedence over growth and employment, without stimulating growth

Traducciones francés-español de los primeros textos técnicos del ferrocarril (1826-1831)

La importancia de las traducciones en la conformación de una serie de lenguajes específicos en español en los siglos XVIII y XIX es indiscutible. El francés se convirtió en el punto de partida 'algunas veces en filtro intermedio' en la mayoría de las obras especializadas en los campos de la ciencia y la tecnología que se publicaron en nuestro país en ese período. Varias disciplinas respaldan este punto, desde la electricidad hasta la física o la química, la fotografía, la enología o la minería. Los textos franceses son, pues, una referencia clave para las primeras traducciones al español. El campo del ferrocarril no fue ajeno a esta tendencia inicial en la traducción de textos de otros idiomas, y las primeras obras españolas que trataron aspectos técnicos sobre el ferrocarril fueron el resultado de varias traducciones. Los campos científicos y técnicos, antes referidos, tenían manuales franceses y tratados como fuentes originales, los cuales se tradujeron en el primer cuarto del siglo XIX. Estos originales franceses eran, a veces, traducciones de obras anteriores, principalmente en inglés. El léxico ferroviario no difiere lingüística o socialmente de otros ámbitos técnicos formados en los siglos XVIII y XIX. La relación entre el lenguaje, la cultura y la sociedad, junto con el desarrollo científico y técnico españoles, sobre todo en su contacto con otros países y lenguas, trajo consigo varias similitudes entre los lenguajes especializados de la época.The importance of translations in the shaping of a number of specific languages in Spanish in the 18th and 19th centuries is indisputable. The French language became the starting point ¿or sometimes an intermediate filter¿ in most of the specialized works in the fields of science and technology that were published in our country in that period. Several disciplines support this point, from electricity to physics or chemistry, photography, enology or mining. French texts are thus a key reference for the early Spanish translations. The railway field wasn¿t alien to this initial trend in the translation of texts from other languages, and the first works in Spanish dealing with the technical aspects of the railway were the result of various translations. As before, these had French manuals and treaties as original sources and they were translated in the first quarter of the 19th century. These French originals were, sometimes, translations of previous works, mainly in English. The railway lexicon doesn¿t linguistically or socially differ from other groups of technicalities shaped in the 18th and 19th centuries. The relationship between language, culture and society, together with the Spanish scientific and technical development, mainly in its contact to other countries and languages, brings along several commonalities between the specialized languages from that period