Not all paths lead to Rome: Analysing the network of sister cities

This work analyses the practice of sister city pairing. We investigate structural properties of the resulting city and country networks and present rankings of the most central nodes in these networks. We identify different country clusters and find that the practice of sister city pairing is not influenced by geographical proximity but results in highly assortative networks.Comment: 7 pages, 4 figure

Where mining takes place, food production takes a hit in Ghana

The device you are using to read this blog contains at least a dozen different types of minerals, many of which most likely come from modern large-scale mines in developing countries. As these mining operations tend to be located in poor rural locations, the question of how neighbouring populations are affected by their expansion becomes an interesting one. The answers can be varied and very policy-relevant

Jointly they edit: examining the impact of community identification on political interaction in Wikipedia

In their 2005 study, Adamic and Glance coined the memorable phrase "divided they blog", referring to a trend of cyberbalkanization in the political blogosphere, with liberal and conservative blogs tending to link to other blogs with a similar political slant, and not to one another. As political discussion and activity increasingly moves online, the power of framing political discourses is shifting from mass media to social media. Continued examination of political interactions online is critical, and we extend this line of research by examining the activities of political users within the Wikipedia community. First, we examined how users in Wikipedia choose to display (or not to display) their political affiliation. Next, we more closely examined the patterns of cross-party interaction and community participation among those users proclaiming a political affiliation. In contrast to previous analyses of other social media, we did not find strong trends indicating a preference to interact with members of the same political party within the Wikipedia community. Our results indicate that users who proclaim their political affiliation within the community tend to proclaim their identity as a "Wikipedian" even more loudly. It seems that the shared identity of "being Wikipedian" may be strong enough to triumph over other potentially divisive facets of personal identity, such as political affiliation.Comment: 33 pages, 5 figure

Interactions of cultures and top people of Wikipedia from ranking of 24 language editions

Wikipedia is a huge global repository of human knowledge, that can be leveraged to investigate interwinements between cultures. With this aim, we apply methods of Markov chains and Google matrix, for the analysis of the hyperlink networks of 24 Wikipedia language editions, and rank all their articles by PageRank, 2DRank and CheiRank algorithms. Using automatic extraction of people names, we obtain the top 100 historical figures, for each edition and for each algorithm. We investigate their spatial, temporal, and gender distributions in dependence of their cultural origins. Our study demonstrates not only the existence of skewness with local figures, mainly recognized only in their own cultures, but also the existence of global historical figures appearing in a large number of editions. By determining the birth time and place of these persons, we perform an analysis of the evolution of such figures through 35 centuries of human history for each language, thus recovering interactions and entanglement of cultures over time. We also obtain the distributions of historical figures over world countries, highlighting geographical aspects of cross-cultural links. Considering historical figures who appear in multiple editions as interactions between cultures, we construct a network of cultures and identify the most influential cultures according to this network.Comment: 32 pages. 10 figures. Submitted for publication. Supporting information is available on http://www.quantware.ups-tlse.fr/QWLIB/topwikipeople

Desigualdad y crisis ecológica: el caso del cambio climático

La grave situación de crisis ecológica a la que nos enfrentamos obliga a modificar profundamente el funcionamiento de los sistemas socioeconómicos actuales. Para ello, resulta fundamental comprender la dimensión social de los problemas medioambientales y, a su vez, desentrañar el rol que juega la desigualdad en ambos extremos del nexo socio-ecológico. Este análisis trata de esclarecer las relaciones entre crisis ecológica y desigualdad mostrando, además, cómo la elevada desigualdad puede entorpecer el proceso de transición hacia la sostenibilidad. No obstante, la gestión rigurosa, democrática e inclusiva del proceso puede abrir un importante abanico de posibilidades para lograr alcanzar una sociedad más justa y sostenibleThe serious situation of ecological crisis we face forces us to deeply change the dynamics of our socio-economic systems. To this end, it is essential to understand the social dimension of environmental problems and, in turn, to figure out the role played by inequality at both sides of the socio-ecological nexus. This analysis tries to clarify the link between ecological crisis and inequality as well as prove how high inequality can hamper the transition towards sustainability. However, the rigourous, democratic and inclusive manage of the process can provide an important wide of opportunities to achieve a fairer and sustainable society.Departamento de economía aplicadaGrado en Economí

Elaboración de un protocolo de recogida y análisis de muestras coprológicas para la detección de parásitos

El ganadero es consciente de la importancia que tiene la prevención y correcto tratamiento de las enfermedades producidas por parásitos en el ganado. Conoce el deterioro que produce en su salud y las mermas económicas que pueden suponer en su explotación. Sin embargo se le da muy poca importancia a la detección de los agentes causantes de los procesos utilizándose, de forma generalizada, antiparasitarios indiscriminadamente. Por esto se ha decidido elaborar un protocolo de actuación para la recogida y análisis de muestras coprológicas. En la primera parte del TFC se describen y clasifican los parásitos más habituales en el ganado y algunas de las enfermedades que producen. Se describen las técnicas laboratoriales más utilizadas para su diagnóstico especialmente en heces. El trabajo se complementa con un diccionario de la terminología más frecuente que se puede encontrar en el campo de la parasitología. Se ha realizado una serie de recogidas y analíticas de muestras en diferentes explotaciones de carácter extensivo, por ser más vulnerables a las parasitosis que las de carácter intensivo, y de todo tipo de ganado, aviar, equino, bovino, ovino y porcino. Se ha enfocado el trabajo fin de carrera más hacia el ganado porcino, pero las técnicas en este trabajo descritas son perfectamente validas para cualquier especie. Se han analizado las muestras con diferentes técnicas de observación. En el trabajo solo se han utilizado las técnicas más sencillas, económicas y de las que se sabía se disponía del material necesario en la Escuela. Se han aislado e identificado formas larvarias y huevos de diferentes grupos de parásitos. Se ha elaborado un protocolo de recogida, transporte, análisis y comunicación de resultados.Ingeniería Técnica AgrícolaNekazaritza Ingeniaritza Tekniko