Sin alternativa a la globalización

La globalización es una de las cuestiones más controvertidas en el debate económico internacional del tiempo presente, tras lo que fue el gran paso adelante de Adam Smith, al ilustrar las ventajas de un comercio universal sin barreras. Modernamente, el movimiento se manifiesta en por lo menos cuatro planos interconectados: tecnológico, político, económico y ecológico. Con el trasfondo de toda una controversia, a partir de la cual algunos pretenden que el Consenso de Washington sea el código neoliberal que sirva de panacea. Pero las soluciones no llegan automáticamente vía mercado, resultando indispensable combinar sus posibilidades con acciones de los poderes públicos; correspondiendo globalmente la máxima responsabilidad a los organismos de las Naciones Unidas. ____________________________________________Doubtless, the present trends of globalization are some of the most controversial questions in the debate on International Economics. Having started that discussion with the contributions of Adam Smith, when he emphasized the great advantages of an international trade without barriers. More in recent times, the irreversible process to globalization can be appreciated in at least four interconnected aspects: new technologies, world political organization, general framework for a global economy, and environment affairs relating to the general biosphere. Still being debated all these items, a certain number of authors are defending the so called Consensus of Washington, as a neo-liberal code that could be considered as a panacea. But solutions, indeed, cannot be afforded always through the market system, being therefore indispensable to combine those possibilities with the action of public powers. Which on an international level means that the United Nations have a roll in the search of real global solutions

Evolution of gene order conservation in prokaryotes

BACKGROUND: As more complete genomes are sequenced, conservation of gene order between different organisms is emerging as an informative property of the genomes. Conservation of gene order has been used for predicting function and functional interactions of proteins, as well as for studying the evolutionary relationships between genomes. The reasons for the maintenance of gene order are still not well understood, as the organization of the prokaryote genome into operons and lateral gene transfer cannot possibly account for all the instances of conservation found. Comprehensive studies of gene order are one way of elucidating the nature of these maintaining forces. RESULTS: Gene order is extensively conserved between closely related species, but rapidly becomes less conserved among more distantly related organisms, probably in a cooperative fashion. This trend could be universal in prokaryotic genomes, as archaeal genomes are likely to behave similarly to bacterial genomes. Gene order conservation could therefore be used as a valid phylogenetic measure to study relationships between species. Even between very distant species, remnants of gene order conservation exist in the form of highly conserved clusters of genes. This suggests the existence of selective processes that maintain the organization of these regions. Because the clusters often span more than one operon, common regulation probably cannot be invoked as the cause of the maintenance of gene order. CONCLUSIONS: Gene order conservation is a genomic measure that can be useful for studying relationships between prokaryotes and the evolutionary forces shaping their genomes. Gene organization is extensively conserved in some genomic regions, and further studies are needed to elucidate the reason for this conservation

Text Detective: a rule-based system for gene annotation in biomedical texts

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>The identification of mentions of gene or gene products in biomedical texts is a critical step in the development of text mining applications in biosciences. The complexity and ambiguity of gene nomenclature makes this a very difficult task.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>Here we present a novel approach based on a combination of carefully designed rules and several lexicons of biological concepts, implemented in the Text Detective system. Text Detective is able to normalize the results of gene mentions found by offering the appropriate database reference.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>In BioCreAtIvE evaluation, Text Detective achieved results of 84% precision, 71% recall for task 1A, and 79% precision, 71% recall for mouse genes in task 1B.</p

HUMBOLDT, Wilhelm von: Diario de viaje a España 1799-1800.

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Political economy and the ghosts of the past: revisiting the Spanish and Romanian transitions to democracy

Juan Linz and Alfred Stepan’s opus on democratic transition and consolidation put Spain and Romania at the extreme ends of these processes and paid little attention to the domestic and external economic constraints on the transition process. This paper interrogates these claims. It shows that in retrospect Spain looks a lot less exemplary and Romania a lot less hopeless than this iconic contribution suggested at the time. Moreover, while external economic shocks and local attempts to buffer them through social compensation shaped both transitions, Romanian governments faced balance of payments crises and international policy conditionality constraints, while their Spanish counterparts did not. This difference invites a greater appreciation of the role of political economy analyses when comparing the policy options of political elites ruling in times of democratic transition and consolidation

«Dame Kobold», evolución de un texto: de Calderón de la Barca a Hugo von Hofmannsthal.

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Estimating the extent of horizontal gene transfer in metagenomic sequences

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Although the extent of horizontal gene transfer (HGT) in complete genomes has been widely studied, its influence in the evolution of natural communities of prokaryotes remains unknown. The availability of metagenomic sequences allows us to address the study of global patterns of prokaryotic evolution in samples from natural communities. However, the methods that have been commonly used for the study of HGT are not suitable for metagenomic samples. Therefore it is important to develop new methods or to adapt existing ones to be used with metagenomic sequences.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>We have created two different methods that are suitable for the study of HGT in metagenomic samples. The methods are based on phylogenetic and DNA compositional approaches, and have allowed us to assess the extent of possible HGT events in metagenomes for the first time. The methods are shown to be compatible and quite precise, although they probably underestimate the number of possible events. Our results show that the phylogenetic method detects HGT in between 0.8% and 1.5% of the sequences, while DNA compositional methods identify putative HGT in between 2% and 8% of the sequences. These ranges are very similar to these found in complete genomes by related approaches. Both methods act with a different sensitivity since they probably target HGT events of different ages: the compositional method mostly identifies recent transfers, while the phylogenetic is more suitable for the detections of older events. Nevertheless, the study of the number of HGT events in metagenomic sequences from different communities shows a consistent trend for both methods: the lower amount is found for the sequences of the Sargasso Sea metagenome, while the higher quantity is found in the whale fall metagenome from the bottom of the ocean. The significance of these observations is discussed.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>The computational approaches that are used to find possible HGT events in complete genomes can be adapted to work with metagenomic samples, where a level of high performance is shown in different metagenomic samples. The percentage of possible HGT events that were observed is close to that found for complete genomes, and different microbiomes show diverse ratios of putative HGT events. This is probably related with both environmental factors and the composition in the species of each particular community.</p

The success (or not) of HUGO nomenclature

Current usage of gene nomenclature is ambiguous and impairs the efficient handling of scientific information. Therefore it is important to propose guidelines to deal with this problem. This study attempts to evaluate the success of HUGO nomenclature for human genes. The results indicate that HUGO guidelines are not supported by the scientific community

Hofmannsthal, Hugo von. Carta de Lord Chandos.

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