Rural credit cooperatives in spain (1890‐1935): a good start was not enough

The spread of agrarian credit cooperativism in Spain (1890‐1934) was done under a variety of ideological and economic orientations. This article focuses on the construction of a few tools and indicators to explain the characteristics of agricultural credit cooperatives. An analysis of financial operations of rural savings banks is related with socio‐political aspects that influenced their development; this analysis helps us to explain the relative success of German credit cooperative models adopted in the context of Spanish agriculture, as happened on European periphery.Agrarian credit cooperativism, rural savings banks, denominational movement.

Design and Implementation of an Embedded Control for a Recycling Machine

Mexico recycles around 60 % of all PET bottles consumed in its internal market and is the leader in food-grade recycled PET. Mexico leads this industry above the USA and Canada, and its contribution is not just economical but more so, a measure to improve our environment. The PET recycling industry faces the challenge of the inefficient process to recover a PET bottle from waste. The aim of this work is to facilitate the recovery process of a PET bottle for recycling by designing and implementing an affordable recycling machine. There are two key components devised in this work to accomplish this goal: the infrared sensor stage and the operative system; both components are embedded into the same low power microcontroller from the Cortex M4 family. The sensor stage is based on infrared pairs connected to the microcontroller ADC input, a self-calibration sequence calculates the necessary offset to compensate for the hardware bias. This calibration takes place one time during initialization. Several tests were performed to tune the sensor output so that it could be used as a threshold level to distinguish a PET bottle. A second sensor used is the E3ZM-B OMRON, this device reinforces the sensor stage as the output is connected to the microcontroller input, which determines if a PET bottle is on the conveyor. The second key component of this work is the operative system, a multi task, and fully preemptive system is embedded into the microcontroller, it manages the machine operations by means of tasks processed depending on its priorities, a high priority task can interrupt a lower priority task, this is known as preemption which is achieved by a context switch. In this work, the context switch lead to a not deterministic microcontroller behavior and the PC register was loaded with the wrong return address needed to continue with the program execution. As a result, the periodical tasks were processed correctly but they should last no longer than 1ms, as it is not possible to preempt them. On the other hand, the sensor stage worked as expected with the sole condition of avoiding a beam of light

Reinforcement Learning for Value Alignment

[eng] As autonomous agents become increasingly sophisticated and we allow them to perform more complex tasks, it is of utmost importance to guarantee that they will act in alignment with human values. This problem has received in the AI literature the name of the value alignment problem. Current approaches apply reinforcement learning to align agents with values due to its recent successes at solving complex sequential decision-making problems. However, they follow an agent-centric approach by expecting that the agent applies the reinforcement learning algorithm correctly to learn an ethical behaviour, without formal guarantees that the learnt ethical behaviour will be ethical. This thesis proposes a novel environment-designer approach for solving the value alignment problem with theoretical guarantees. Our proposed environment-designer approach advances the state of the art with a process for designing ethical environments wherein it is in the agent's best interest to learn ethical behaviours. Our process specifies the ethical knowledge of a moral value in terms that can be used in a reinforcement learning context. Next, our process embeds this knowledge in the agent's learning environment to design an ethical learning environment. The resulting ethical environment incentivises the agent to learn an ethical behaviour while pursuing its own objective. We further contribute to the state of the art by providing a novel algorithm that, following our ethical environment design process, is formally guaranteed to create ethical environments. In other words, this algorithm guarantees that it is in the agent's best interest to learn value- aligned behaviours. We illustrate our algorithm by applying it in a case study environment wherein the agent is expected to learn to behave in alignment with the moral value of respect. In it, a conversational agent is in charge of doing surveys, and we expect it to ask the users questions respectfully while trying to get as much information as possible. In the designed ethical environment, results confirm our theoretical results: the agent learns an ethical behaviour while pursuing its individual objective.[cat] A mesura que els agents autònoms es tornen cada cop més sofisticats i els permetem realitzar tasques més complexes, és de la màxima importància garantir que actuaran d'acord amb els valors humans. Aquest problema ha rebut a la literatura d'IA el nom del problema d'alineació de valors. Els enfocaments actuals apliquen aprenentatge per reforç per alinear els agents amb els valors a causa dels seus èxits recents a l'hora de resoldre problemes complexos de presa de decisions seqüencials. Tanmateix, segueixen un enfocament centrat en l'agent en esperar que l'agent apliqui correctament l'algorisme d'aprenentatge de reforç per aprendre un comportament ètic, sense garanties formals que el comportament ètic après serà ètic. Aquesta tesi proposa un nou enfocament de dissenyador d'entorn per resoldre el problema d'alineació de valors amb garanties teòriques. El nostre enfocament de disseny d'entorns proposat avança l'estat de l'art amb un procés per dissenyar entorns ètics en què és del millor interès de l'agent aprendre comportaments ètics. El nostre procés especifica el coneixement ètic d'un valor moral en termes que es poden utilitzar en un context d'aprenentatge de reforç. A continuació, el nostre procés incorpora aquest coneixement a l'entorn d'aprenentatge de l'agent per dissenyar un entorn d'aprenentatge ètic. L'entorn ètic resultant incentiva l'agent a aprendre un comportament ètic mentre persegueix el seu propi objectiu. A més, contribuïm a l'estat de l'art proporcionant un algorisme nou que, seguint el nostre procés de disseny d'entorns ètics, està garantit formalment per crear entorns ètics. En altres paraules, aquest algorisme garanteix que és del millor interès de l'agent aprendre comportaments alineats amb valors. Il·lustrem el nostre algorisme aplicant-lo en un estudi de cas on s'espera que l'agent aprengui a comportar-se d'acord amb el valor moral del respecte. En ell, un agent de conversa s'encarrega de fer enquestes, i esperem que faci preguntes als usuaris amb respecte tot intentant obtenir la màxima informació possible. En l'entorn ètic dissenyat, els resultats confirmen els nostres resultats teòrics: l'agent aprèn un comportament ètic mentre persegueix el seu objectiu individual

Comment on "Lattice Gluon and Ghost Propagators, and the Strong Coupling in Pure SU(3)SU(3) Yang-Mills Theory: Finite Lattice Spacing and Volume Effects"

The authors of ref. Phys.Rev. D94 (2016) no.1, 014502 reported about a careful analysis of the impact of lattice artifacts on the $SU(3)$ gauge-field propagators. In particular, they found that the low-momentum behavior of the renormalized propagators depends on the lattice bare coupling and interpreted this fact as the result of it being affected by finite lattice spacing artifacts. We do not share this interpretation and present here a different and more suitable explanation for these results

Are the low-momentum gluon correlations semiclassically determined?

We argue that low-energy gluodynamics can be explained in terms of semi-classical Yang-Mills solutions by demonstrating that lattice gluon correlation functions fit to instanton liquid predictions for low energies and, after cooling, in the whole range.Comment: 4 pages, revtex

Evaluación en la gestión del impacto ambiental en el humedal La Vaca- Kennedy

Práctica empresarialEl humedal la Vaca ubicado en la localidad de Bosa de la ciudad de Bogotá es uno de los ecosistemas más deteriorados en el D.C, por lo que dentro de la gestión que se realiza para la recuperación del mismo hay entidades responsables que tienen el deber de restaurar los humedales en riesgo, donde se encuentra la Empresa de Acueducto y Alcantarillado (EAAB) que ha ejecutado obras relacionadas con el mantenimiento, control, vigilancia, protección y restauración de los mismos por medio de convenios e interventorías que son evaluadas por medio del presente trabajo.INTRODUCCIÓN 1. GENERALIDADES 2. DIAGNÓSTICO DE LA SITUACION AMBIENTAL DEL HUMEDAL LA VACA 3. IDENTIFICACION DE FUENTES DE CONTAMINACIÓN 4. EVALUACION EN LA GESTION DE LA EAAB 5. CONCLUSIONES 6. RECOMENDACIONES 7. BIBLIOGRAFÍAPregradoIngeniero Civi