Tourism and productivity: Case study of the hotel and catering industry in the Andalusian region

The object of this paper is to analyse the situation and evolution of the productivity of the tourism industry in the Andalusian region, and more specifically of the hotel and catering branch, relating it to the organisational structure of its businesses. First of all, the issue of the definition and limitation of the concept of productivity applied to the services sector is addressed, as traditionally this concept is focused on manufacturing, and the different ways of measuring and the analysis methods are reviewed. Then, using the accounting information provided by the Balances Centre of Andalusia (CBA), the general features of the organisational structure of the hotel and catering industry in de Andalusian region, stratifying the samples by the size of the companies and examining the medium size of the Andalusian hotel and catering businesses. Once the organisational structure of the sector is analysed, it is related to the state and evolution of its productivity, using a simple ratio between the brute added value and the personnel expenses, and completing this analysis with a relative efficiency index, the Baldwin efficiency index, with which the technical efficiency of each company is compared to the mass of most efficient companies. As a result of this research it is observed that the productivity indexes increase as web as the size of the companies and during the considered period, especially in the case of the medium sized and large companies. Nevertheless, these productivity increases are less relevant than the increase of employment, especially in case of smaller companies.

La última aplicación de la doctrina norteamerica del «strict scrutiny» en el derecho de la libertad religiosa: González V. o Centro espiritista

In its last term 2005-2006, the United States Supreme Court (USSC) decided its first case regarding religious freedom under the Roberts Court on February 21, 2006. The USSC (Gonzales v. o Centro Espirita) applied again the doctrine of the strict scrutiny (Sherbert-Yoder), and affirmed the federal application of the RFRA '93. This controversy did not enter in the USSC's contradictions on the free exercise of religion. Thus, we have to wait a new USSC's decision that affirms the strict scrutiny (Sherbert) or the neutrality standard (Smith), overrulling one or another precedent and defining the doctrine of «free exercise exemptions». But, the «free exercise exemptions», are a legal or a constitutional..

Stochastic resource allocation with a backhaul constraint for the uplink

We propose a novel stochastic radio resource alloca- tion strategy for the uplink that achieves long-term fairness in terms of similar bitrates considering backhaul and air-interface capacity limitations. We focus on a single cell scenario based on WCDMA technology. We propose to use a maximin criteria to introduce fairness among the different users’ throughputs. An stochastic approximation is implemented to obtain an online algorithm where the Lagrange multipliers are estimated at each scheduling period. Our results show that the proposed scheme achieves higher fairness among the users and, in some cases, a higher sum-rate compared with the well-known proportional fair scheduler.Postprint (author's final draft

El material silíceo MSU-1 como adsorbente para la extracción analítica de compuestos de benzalconio en aguas residuales urbanas

III Encuentro sobre Nanociencia y Nanotecnología de Investigadores y Tecnólogos Andaluce

Procedimiento de obtención de micro-, submicro- y nanocápsulas basado en proteínas del suero de la leche

La presente invención se refiere a un procedimiento de obtención de cápsulas basado en proteínas del suero de la leche que comprende las siguientes etapas: a. diluir el producto de las proteínas de la leche; b. adición a la disolución de la etapa a) de: i. ingredientes a encapsular solubles en agua o en disolventes polares; o ii. una disolución del ingrediente a encapsular; y c. electroestirado o electroesprayado o estirado por soplado o esprayado por soplado de la disolución resultante de la etapa b). Estas cápsulas generadas pueden usarse como vehículos de encapsulación de ingredientes y aditivos funcionales para su incorporación en preparados farmacéuticos o alimentarios.Peer reviewedConsejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (España)A1 Solicitud de patente con informe sobre el estado de la técnic

Effect of labour flexibility on productivity in the andalusian hotel industry

In this work, we analyze the effect of labour flexibility on productivity in the Andalusian hotel industry. For this purpose, we use the data obtained by the Quality, Productivity and Competitiveness in the Hospitality Industry for Andalusia project (PO7/SEJ-02889). Using a expanded version of the Cobb-Douglas production function, the model distinguishes two employment shares: full-time permanent (standard work) and temporary plus part-time employees (non-standard work). Our results indicate that productivity in Andalusian hotels is lower the higher the percentage of temporary and part-time workers. Furthermore, there are no statistically significant differences between the negative impact on productivity of both types of labour contract. However, since the costs associated with both temporary and part-time workers are lower than those of workers with full-time permanent contracts, future studies should analyze the differential impact of all the types of contracts discussed on the mean cost per employee in hotels.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech

Meta-Revisiones: Concepto y Desarrollo

Background: In the last years, overviews of systematic reviews, or umbrella reviews, have seen a dramatic increase in their use. An overview aims to provide a summary of the included reviews and will often examine research questions beyond those addressed in the systematic reviews being synthesised. The purpose of this article is to provide some recommendations on how overviews should be conducted and reported. Method: A literature review was performed to identify relevant papers on both methodological and applied overviews. Results: The current literature recommends carrying out overviews by following similar steps to those of systematic reviews: (a) Defining the overview research question; (b) inclusion and exclusion criteria; (c) literature search; (d) data extraction; (e) assessment of risk of bias and reporting quality; (f) overview results; and (g) reporting the overview. Of special interest is how to address dependencies between the systematic reviews. Conclusions: Overviews allow evidence to be efficiently combined from multiple systematic reviews. This offers the possibility of translating and summarizing large amounts of information. As in primary studies and systematic reviews, conducting and reporting of overviews must meet appropriate quality standards.Antecedentes: en los últimos años, las meta-revisiones, o revisiones paraguas, han incrementado exponencialmente su uso. Una meta-revisión proporciona un resumen de las revisiones incluidas y, a menudo, aborda preguntas más allá de las planteadas en las revisiones sistemáticas sintetizadas. El propósito de este artículo fue proporcionar recomendaciones sobre cómo deben hacerse y reportarse las meta-revisiones. Método: se llevó a cabo una revisión de la literatura para identificar artículos relevantes sobre meta-revisiones, tanto metodológicos como aplicados. Resultados: a día de hoy la literatura sobre meta-revisiones recomienda seguir los mismos pasos que en las revisiones sistemáticas: (a) definición de la pregunta de investigación; (b) criterios de inclusión y exclusión; (c) búsqueda de la literatura; (d) extracción de datos; (e) valoración del riesgo de sesgo y de la calidad del reporte; (f) presentación de resultados; y (g) reporte de la meta-revisión. De especial interés es cómo abordar los problemas de dependencia entre las revisiones sistemáticas sintetizadas. Conclusiones: las meta-revisiones permiten combinar evidencia de múltiples revisiones sistemáticas de una forma eficiente. Esto permite transformar y resumir grandes cantidades de información. Al igual que en los estudios primarios y las revisiones sistemáticas, las meta-revisiones deben realizarse y reportarse cumpliendo con estándares mínimos de calidad.This study was funded by Agencia Estatal de Investigación (Government of Spain) and by FEDER Funds, AEI/10.13039/501100011033, grants no. PID2019-104033GA-I00 and PID2019-104080GB-I00

Fluctuations and Instabilities of Ferromagnetic Domain Wall pairs in an External Magnetic Field

Soliton excitations and their stability in anisotropic quasi-1D ferromagnets are analyzed analytically. In the presence of an external magnetic field, the lowest lying topological excitations are shown to be either soliton-soliton or soliton-antisoliton pairs. In ferromagnetic samples of macro- or mesoscopic size, these configurations correspond to twisted or untwisted pairs of Bloch walls. It is shown that the fluctuations around these configurations are governed by the same set of operators. The soliton-antisoliton pair has exactly one unstable mode and thus represents a critical nucleus for thermally activated magnetization reversal in effectively one-dimensional systems. The soliton-soliton pair is stable for small external fields but becomes unstable for large magnetic fields. From the detailed expression of this instability threshold and an analysis of nonlocal demagnetizing effects it is shown that the relative chirality of domain walls can be detected experimentally in thin ferromagnetic films. The static properties of the present model are equivalent to those of a nonlinear sigma-model with anisotropies. In the limit of large hard-axis anisotropy the model reduces to a double sine-Gordon model.Comment: 15 pages RevTex 3.0 (twocolumn), 9 figures available on request, to appear in Phys Rev B, Dec (1994

A meta-review of transparency and reproducibility-related reporting practices in published meta-analyses on clinical psychological interventions (2000–2020)

Meta-analysis is a powerful and important tool to synthesize the literature about a research topic. Like other kinds of research, meta-analyses must be reproducible to be compliant with the principles of the scientific method. Furthermore, reproducible meta-analyses can be easily updated with new data and reanalysed applying new and more refined analysis techniques. We attempted to empirically assess the prevalence of transparency and reproducibility-related reporting practices in published meta-analyses from clinical psychology by examining a random sample of 100 meta-analyses. Our purpose was to identify the key points that could be improved, with the aim of providing some recommendations for carrying out reproducible meta-analyses. We conducted a meta-review of meta-analyses of psychological interventions published between 2000 and 2020. We searched PubMed, PsycInfo and Web of Science databases. A structured coding form to assess transparency indicators was created based on previous studies and existing meta-analysis guidelines. We found major issues concerning: completely reproducible search procedures report, specification of the exact method to compute effect sizes, choice of weighting factors and estimators, lack of availability of the raw statistics used to compute the effect size and of interoperability of available data, and practically total absence of analysis script code sharing. Based on our findings, we conclude with recommendations intended to improve the transparency, openness, and reproducibility-related reporting practices of meta-analyses in clinical psychology and related areas.This research has been funded with a grant from the Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación and by FEDER funds (Project n° PID2019-104080GB-I00)

Pixel Features for Self-organizing Map Based Detection of Foreground Objects in Dynamic Environments

Among current foreground detection algorithms for video sequences, methods based on self-organizing maps are obtaining a greater relevance. In this work we propose a probabilistic self-organising map based model, which uses a uniform distribution to represent the foreground. A suitable set of characteristic pixel features is chosen to train the probabilistic model. Our approach has been compared to some competing methods on a test set of benchmark videos, with favorable results.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech