Measurement of Social Capital and Growth: an Economic Methodology

This paper develops a measure of social capital based on economic relationships and analyzes its effects on growth. Investment in social capital is modeled by using the conceptual framework for measuring physical capital services. The measure of social capital depends on expectations of income, its investment cost, inequality in society, the density of trust networks, the size of the social network and the rate of depreciation of social capital. With this methodology a database is constructed for 23 OECD countries covering the period 1970-2001 and the positive effect of social capital on economic growth is tested.Social capital, Investment, Social networks, Economic Growth

Impacts of land abandonment and climate variability on runoff generation and sediment transport in the Pisuerga headwaters (Cantabrian Mountains, Spain)

Producción CientíficaThe Atlantic mountains of Spain are suffering a strong landscape change due to a widespread and intensive emigration to urban areas since the 1950s. This process, representative of global developments in an imminent future, is dominated by urban societies and leads to deep landscape changes in which crop fields and grasslands are abandoned and progressively covered by forest and shrubs. These dynamics have caused in turn a decrease in the runoff and a general slowdown of geomorphological processes. The impacts of land cover change have been simultaneous to an irregularity in precipitation and a significant increase of temperatures. With this background, this paper assesses in detail the impact of landscape change occurred over the last decades (twentieth and twenty-first centuries) on the water and sediment yield in the Pisuerga catchment headwaters (Cantabrian Mountains, N Spain). We analyzed the different components of Global Change in a catchment of 233 km2 extent, that has passed from 15 to 2 habitants/km2, from multiple data sources. Evolution of land cover was reconstructed from aerial photographs, remote sensing and other resources. The climatic parameters have been studied through meteorological stations, and the hydrological and sedimentological responses over time are based on available runoff data and sedimentological analysis. Our results show a significant decrease in water and sediment transport mainly driven by vegetation increase occurred in a non-linear way, more intense immediately after abandonment. This fact opens the opportunity to control more accurately water resources in Mediterranean catchments through land use management.Ministerio de Economía, Industria y Competitividad - Fondo Europeo de Desarrollo Regional (project CGL2015-68144-R)Ministerio de Educación y Formación Profesional (grant FPU13/05837

Do GWAS-Identified Risk Variants for Chronic Lymphocytic Leukemia Influence Overall Patient Survival and Disease Progression?

Chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL) is the most common leukemia among adults worldwide. Although genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have uncovered the germline genetic component underlying CLL susceptibility, the potential use of GWAS-identified risk variants to predict disease progression and patient survival remains unexplored. Here, we evaluated whether 41 GWAS-identified risk variants for CLL could influence overall survival (OS) and disease progression, defined as time to first treatment (TTFT) in a cohort of 1039 CLL cases ascertained through the CRuCIAL consortium. Although this is the largest study assessing the effect of GWAS-identified susceptibility variants for CLL on OS, we only found a weak association of ten single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) with OS (p < 0.05) that did not remain significant after correction for multiple testing. In line with these results, polygenic risk scores (PRSs) built with these SNPs in the CRuCIAL cohort showed a modest association with OS and a low capacity to predict patient survival, with an area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUROC) of 0.57. Similarly, seven SNPs were associated with TTFT (p < 0.05); however, these did not reach the multiple testing significance threshold, and the meta-analysis with previous published data did not confirm any of the associations. As expected, PRSs built with these SNPs showed reduced accuracy in prediction of disease progression (AUROC = 0.62). These results suggest that susceptibility variants for CLL do not impact overall survival and disease progression in CLL patientsHorizon 2020 856620Instituto de Salud Carlos III Spanish GovernmentMarie Curie Actions PI17/02256 PI20/01845Consejeria de Transformacion Economica, Industria, Conocimiento y Universidades y FEDER PY20/01282United States Department of Health & Human Services National Institutes of Health (NIH) - USA NIH National Cancer Institute (NCI) P50 CA97274 R01 CA9215

Catalytic production of jet fuels from biomass

Concerns about depleting fossil fuels and global warming e ects are pushing our society to search for new renewable sources of energy with the potential to substitute coal, natural gas, and petroleum. In this sense, biomass, the only renewable source of carbon available on Earth, is the perfect replacement for petroleum in producing renewable fuels. The aviation sector is responsible for a significant fraction of greenhouse gas emissions, and two billion barrels of petroleum are being consumed annually to produce the jet fuels required to transport people and goods around the world. Governments are pushing directives to replace fossil fuel-derived jet fuels with those derived from biomass. The present mini review is aimed to summarize the main technologies available today for converting biomass into liquid hydrocarbon fuels with a molecular weight and structure suitable for being used as aviation fuels. Particular emphasis will be placed on those routes involving heterogeneous catalysts

Public sector wage gaps in Spanish regions

This paper provides an approximation to the measurement of public sector wage gaps in Spanish regions. By using data from the European Community Household Panel, it is shown that the balance between what private firms pay in the local market and what the public sector pays, differs substantially in different areas of the country. Public sector wage differences among Spanish regions are mostly due to differences in returns, not to differences in characteristics or to selection effects, and are not constant across gender, educational levels, or occupations. Moreover, in those regions where Regional Governments have a higher weight in public employment, public wage gaps are higher and public employers pay higher returns. There also seems to be a cross regional positive correlation between public wage gaps and unemployment, and a negative one between labour productivity and public wage gaps. Hence, a tentative conclusion is that the incentives to select into the public sector are higher in the low productivity regions, precisely those where scarcity of human capital in the private sector may be the most important factor for explaining economic backwardness

Fotosensibilización y fototerapia con furocumarinas: Un estudio mecano-cuántico.

RESUMEN La Fototerapia es uno de los campos de la Medicina que ha experimentado un mayor desarrollo en las últimas décadas, ampliándose cada vez más el rango de enfermedades que pueden ser tratadas de esta forma. Quizás esta terapia representa como ninguna otra la combinación entre la Física (radiación electromagnética) y la Química (el fármaco empleado o fotosensibilizador) para combatir enfermedades. El objeto de la presente Tesis Doctoral es el estudio teórico de compuestos empleados como fármacos en la denominada terapia PUVA, denominados furocumarinas. El estudio teórico químico-cuántico de los estados electrónicos excitados de estas moléculas permite hallar alguna de las claves del mecanismo de acción fototerapéutica, que, según la literatura, se basa en la fotoconjugación con las bases pirimidínicas del ADN por un lado y en la reacción con el oxígeno molecular del medio celular produciendo oxígeno singlete tóxico por otro (terapia fotodinámica). Nuestro estudio del mecanismo tiene como principales objetivos proponer mejores fotosensibilizadores y desentrañar el mecanismo fotoquímico subyacente en este tipo de fotoquimioterapia. Inicialmente hemos centrado nuestros cálculos, mediante la metodología CASPT2//CASSCF, en el estudio de los estados excitados singletes y tripletes cuya participación en los procesos fotoquímicos radiativos y no radiativos es más probable a fin de estudiar las principales propiedades fotofísicas de los compuestos (espectros de absorción y emisión, fuerzas de oscilador, momentos dipolares, tiempos de emisión radiativa, orígenes de banda, acoplamiento espín-órbita), en un primer paso para racionalizar su mecanismo de actuación. Una vez analizado si se puebla eficientemente el estado excitado triplete (protagonista de la acción fotosensibilizadora) de cada molécula, estudiaremos cómo interaccionan estos fármacos con la timina del ADN y con el oxígeno molecular. Por último, se ha estudiado la formación de los dímeros de timina, una de las lesiones más frecuentes en el ADN, y cuya formación sigue un mecanismo similar a la correspondiente a la interacción entre las furocumarinas y la propia timina. Para ello será clave el análisis de las hipersuperficies de energía potencial de los estados implicados en un proceso dado, así como los cruces entre las mismas y las barreras energéticas para pasar de una región a otra de la hipersuperficie. De hecho, la Fotofísica y la Fotoquímica modernas están basadas en el estudio de las hipersuperficies, las cuales pueden ser consideradas como el terreno de juego donde tienen lugar los procesos físicos y químicos. __________________________________________________________________________________________________This thesis is focused on studying the photochemical behaviour of the furocoumarins in order to propose the best photosensitizer. Firstly the photophysics of psoralen, the parent molecule, will be studied. Afterwards how the lowest triplet excited state is populated will be analized, in both psoralen and thymine, since this state is the responsible for the photosensitizing action. The next step is studying the photocycloaddition between psoralen and thymine that culminates in the formation of monoadducts and diadducts in DNA, which is the key point in the photosensitizing ability of these compounds. A parallel study of other furocoumarins (8-MOP, 5-MOP, TMP, khellin and 3-CPS) will be carried out in order to rationalize which is the best drug from a quantum-chemical viewpoint. We will consider the other side of PUVA therapy as well: the interaction of furocoumarins with molecular oxygen through energy transfer to yield singlet oxygen, which is a strong electrophilic species that reacts with some components of the cellular membrane causing cell death by apoptosis. Finally, the properties of thymine dimers, formed via another sort of photocycloaddition reaction, will be studied. The overwhelming majority of the calculations presented here will be carried out with the CASPT2//CASSCF methodology, that is, energies at CASPT2 level and geometries at CASSCF level. Specifically, we will compute the lowest-lying singlet and triplet excited states, in order to rationalize the photophysical (electronic energies, oscillator strengths, dipole moments, radiative lifetimes, band origins, spin-orbit coupling) and photochemical properties (photocycloaddition, energy transfer) of furocoumarins

Impacto de la implementación de un sistema SAP Business One en una empresa del sector de la distribución

Las herramientas de gestión son fundamentales actualmente en el funcionamiento diario de cualquier empresa, y una de las más importantes es SAP, aplicación sobre la que basamos nuestro trabajo. Los objetivos de nuestro trabajo son conocer, a nivel teórico, las ventajas e inconvenientes que se derivan de la implementación de una herramienta de estas características, y el impacto que supone la implementación de una de las versiones de SAP, concretamente SAP Business One, en una PYME del sector de la distribución, que, en nuestro caso, es Distribuciones Pérez Palacios, S.L. Para este último objetivo, realizamos una serie de encuestas a los principales grupos de interés de la empresa, a través de las cuales hemos obtenido sus opiniones, entre otras, sobre las ventajas que les ofrece el sistema y el nivel de satisfacción con su empleo. Por otra parte, se han puesto de manifiesto ventajas desde el punto de vista financiero-contable como son, por una parte, reducción del coste de material de oficina y, por otra, mejoras en aspectos como: conciliación bancaria, variación de existencias, análisis de rentabilidades, gestión de los retornables y gestión de las amortizaciones.Universidad de Sevilla. Grado en Finanzas y Contabilida

Vía crucis: (Variaciones en torno al erotismo)

Como ópera prima de su autor, y como resultado de un proceso desarrollado en el marco del Énfasis en Dramaturgia de la Maestría en Escrituras Creativas de la Universidad Nacional de Colombia, Vía Crucis refleja la aprehensión de algunos problemas por parte de su autor, aprehensión que se da en medio de una aproximación a... y un enfrentamiento con… la tradición de la dramaturgia. Se trata del llamado modelo aristotélico: representación, identificación, estructura en "tres actos", un protagonista dotado de un objetivo cuya consecución (o no) marca el clímax de la obra... Pero, además, se trata de ese hito llamado Bertolt Brecht, cuyo aporte se caracteriza principalmente por la noción de distanciamiento y la estructura episódica, opuestas a la identificación y a la correlativa estructura en tres actos del modelo clásico. Así pues, Vía Crucis es, ante todo, el escenario en el que la confrontación del autor con esos dos hitos tiene lugar.Abstract. As the first work of its author, and as a result of a process developed in the framework of the Emphasis on Dramaturgy of the Master Program in Creative Writings of the National University of Colombia, The Way reflects the apprehension of some problems by its author, apprehension that occurs in the middle of an approach to, and confrontation with, the tradition of dramaturgy. This is the so-called Aristotelian model: representation, identification, "three acts" structure, a protagonist provided with a goal whose achievement (or not) marks the climax of the play... But, also, is this landmark called Bertolt Brecht, whose contribution is mainly characterized by the notion of estrangement and the episodic structure, opposed to the identification and the correlative structure in three acts by the classical model. The Way is therefore, first and foremost, the scenario in which the confrontation of the author with these two milestones has place.Maestrí

Electrochemical reduction of CO2: overcoming chemical inertness at ambient conditions

Electroreduction allows for the transformation of a chemically inert molecule such as CO2 into a wide variety of useful carbon products. Unlike other approaches operating at higher temperatures, electrochemical reduction holds great promise since it achieves reduction under ambient conditions, thereby providing more control over the reaction selectivity. By controlling basic parameters such as the potential and the composition of the electrode, CO2 can be transformed into a variety of products including carbon monoxide, syngas (CO/H2), methane, and methanol. This reduction process takes place without external hydrogen, since water can be used as a source of both electrons and protons. Furthermore, this technology, when combined with renewable wind- or solar-derived electricity, has the potential to serve as a storage system for excess electricity. Despite these advantages, a number of challenges need to be overcome before reaching commercialization. New (and cheaper) electrocatalyst formulations with high faradaic selectivities are required. Impressive progress has been made on carbon-doped materials, which, in certain cases, have outperformed expensive noble metal-based materials. Research is also needed on new electrochemical reactor configurations able to overcome kinetic/mass transport limitations, which are crucial to reduce overpotentials. Fine control over the nature of the active sites and the reaction conditions is important to avoid parasitic reactions such as the hydrogen evolution reaction (HER), and therefore increases the faradaic e ciency towards the desired products

Recent advances in the electroreduction of CO2 over heteroatom-doped carbon materials

Ever-growing anthropogenic activity has increased global energy demands, resulting in growing concentrations of greenhouse gases such as CO2 in the atmosphere. The electroreduction of CO2 has been proposed as a potential solution for reducing anthropogenic CO2 emissions. Despite the promising results obtained so far, some limitations hinder large-scale applications, especially those associated with the activity and selectivity of electrocatalysts. A good number of metal catalysts have been studied to overcome this limitation, but the high cost and low earth abundance of some of these materials are important barriers. In this sense, carbon materials doped with heteroatoms such as N, B, S, and F have been proposed as cheaper and widely available alternatives to metal catalysts. This review summarizes the latest advances in the utilization of carbon-doped materials for the electroreduction of CO2, with a particular emphasis on the synthesis procedures and the electrochemical performance of the resulting materials