Epistemología de la comunicación en India: Una aproximación histórica más allá del “desarrollo”

This paper attempts to outline various recent contributions that can illustrate in developing an epistemological understanding of Communication in India, which is a country that could be considered as a continent due to its demography and territorial extension; but more importantly, due to its multiculturality, multilingualism, and strong cultural roots that transcend beyond colonising and neocolonising processes. It is assumed that conventional contemporary understanding of Communication is oriented toward the conquest of modernity and Western development from principles of Eurocentric rationality. Certain divergences and contradictions are observed here by drawing evidences from the indigenous cultures of the Indian society. The recent writings and contributions provide enormous intellectual resources to formulate a knowledge perspective that emerges from the critique of the conventional utilitarian understanding of communication and helps to formulate a critical epistemological perspective of communication in India. In this paper, we describe various contributions to the communication research in India, and the influence that development as an economic concept had on culture, resulting from the influence exerted by communication. Additionally, this article documents participatory approaches that are also original in the search for holistic and endogenous solutions in communication in India, and that follow a critical cultural perspective of their own.En este trabajo se intentan esbozar diversas contribuciones recientes que pueden ilustrar en el desarrollo de una comprensión epistemológica de la Comunicación en India, un país que en sí mismo es un continente por demografía y extensión territorial, pero sobre todo por su multiculturalidad, multilingüismo y sus fuertes raíces culturales que trascienden más allá de los procesos colonizadores y neocolonizadores. Entendiendo que la comprensión convencional contemporánea de la comunicación está orientada a la conquista de la modernidad y el desarrollo occidental desde principios de racionalidad eurocéntrica, observamos divergencias y contradicciones evidenciadas desde la cultura autóctona de la sociedad india. Los escritos y contribuciones recientes proporcionan enormes recursos intelectuales para formular una perspectiva del conocimiento desde la crítica de la comprensión utilitarista de la comunicación y a formular una perspectiva crítica epistemológica de la Comunicación en India. En este artículo se describen las contribuciones de la investigación en comunicación en India y la influencia que el desarrollo como concepto económico tuvo en la cultura desde la influencia ejercida por la comunicación. A partir de ahí se documentan enfoques participativos originales en la búsqueda de soluciones holísticas y endógenas en la comunicación en India desde una perspectiva cultural crítica y propia

Valuations of Skew Quantum Polynomials

In this paper we extend some results obtained by Artamonov and Sabitov for quantum polynomials to skew quantum polynomials and quasi-commutative bijective skew PBW extensions. Moreover, we find a counterexample to the conjecture proposed in [6]Comment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1309.0483, arXiv:1402.2321, arXiv:1310.6639 by other author

The Conflictive Relationship between Satisfaction and Income

This paper makes use of the 2006 Gallup World Survey, which includes opinions on satisfaction with various aspects of life in 130 countries. Although a very solid relationship is found between satisfaction and income (both across and within countries), raising doubts regarding the well-known Easterlin Paradox, a new paradox arises: “unhappy growth,” where faster growth rates are accompanied by lower levels of satisfaction. The losses of satisfaction associated with growth are more pronounced in the material domains of life and are greater in richer and more urban societies. At the individual level, although higher incomes tend to be reflected in greater satisfaction, an increase in the income of the social group to which an individual belongs has the opposite effect. The conflictive relationship between satisfaction and income has implications for political economy. In particular, it suggests a simple mechanism for explaining various characteristic traits of economic and social populism.

Boosting plant immunity with CRISPR/Cas

CRISPR/Cas has recently been transferred to plants to make them resistant to geminiviruses, a damaging family of DNA viruses. We discuss the potential and the limitations of this method.See related Research: http://www.genomebiology.com/2015/16/1/238

Managing the national road network maintenance in Spain

The Spanish Ministry of Public Works manages the National Road Network, which consists in 27,000 km. In 1992, the average age of pavements was 7.2 years, whereas at present it has increased to 9 years. The great heterogeneity of pavements, the constant increase in the network length and its gradual aging demand important budgets but also agile technical, economic and administrative management models. The Subdirectorate of Maintenance and Operation is responsible of management systems for this network, now helped by the engineering consultancy GETINSA. This communication shows the actual state of the pavement management that consists in an Integrated Database System comprising many parameters both about technical values and administrative follow-up of actions. It is connected to various pavement evolution models that allow managers to predict the future state of the roads, then to establish a maintenance policy. Finally, the Management System calculates a maintenance plan, detailing actions to be done in each section in a multi-year scenario, so that the investment and the road quality are optimised. The Management System software combines analytical formula with geographical information, used for representing results as well as part of the forecast and optimisation models, using the modern technology of “dynamic segments”. Attention has been paid to conciliate the operational organisation of maintenance works with the fact that optimal needs are detailed for each road section in too short distances to be executed separately. The communication starts analysing other existing Pavement Management Systems, then describes the Spanish situation and justifies which Pavement Management System is needed. The body of the text covers the description of the functionalities and design assumptions of the new System. Finally, the conclusions present some future evolutions for the Spanish Management Systems and the possibility to generalise its use to other road networks, either for pavement or other assets.

Neighbourhood deprivation and biomarkers of health in Britain: the mediating role of the physical environment

Background: Neighborhood deprivation has been consistently linked to poor individual health outcomes; however, studies exploring the mechanisms involved in this association are scarce. The objective of this study was to investigate whether objective measures of the physical environment mediate the association between neighborhood socioeconomic deprivation and biomarkers of health in Britain. Methods: We linked individual-level biomarker data from Understanding Society: The UK Household Longitudinal Survey (2010–2012) to neighborhood-level data from different governmental sources. Our outcome variables were forced expiratory volume in 1 s (FEV1%; n=16,347), systolic blood pressure (SBP; n=16,846), body mass index (BMI; n=19,417), and levels of C-reactive protein (CRP; n=11,825). Our measure of neighborhood socioeconomic deprivation was the Carstairs index, and the neighborhood-level mediators were levels of air pollutants (sulphur dioxide [SO2], particulate matter [PM10], nitrogen dioxide [NO2], and carbon monoxide [CO]), green space, and proximity to waste and industrial facilities. We fitted a multilevel mediation model following a multilevel structural equation framework in MPlus v7.4, adjusting for age, gender, and income. Results: Residents of poor neighborhoods and those exposed to higher pollution and less green space had worse health outcomes. However, only SO2 exposure significantly and partially mediated the association between neighborhood socioeconomic deprivation and SBP, BMI, and CRP. Conclusion: Reducing air pollution exposure and increasing access to green space may improve population health but may not decrease health inequalities in Britain

Una aproximación al estudio de las motivaciones culturales de la práctica musical

Este trabajo pretende ser una aproximación al estudio de las motivaciones dentro del marco de las nuevas tendencias del campo de la etnomusicología en cuanto al reconocimiento de la importancia de abordar la experiencia individual en el "hacer musical". El ejercicio se realiza desde la fenomenología de Schutz, como marco interpretativo de la dimensión subjetiva de las prácticas musicales indígenas

Human Factors & Going Green: Study Abroad on Sustainability and Transportation

The Northern European countries have been leaders in sustainability efforts, and support of alternative modes of transportation, focusing on implementation, design and strategies that make these efforts easier to adopt by the broader community. Human Factors (HF) is a discipline that studies human behavior and capabilities with the purpose of applying to the design of products, equipment and systems to maximize safety, effectiveness, and user satisfaction. Three senior faculty in the ERAU human factors department are sponsoring a summer study abroad merging sustainability and human factors. The focus of this study abroad program is on understanding Human Factors as it relates to sustainability as well as first-hand experience with alternative modes of transportation, including trains, trams, bikes, scooters, electric vehicles and others. Three classes – HF and Sustainability, HF and Transportation, and User Experience (UX) will be integrative, each dovetailing into the others. Supplementing the classroom experience will be professional tours of organizations that are known for design and implementation of sustainability (government officials in each country who design and implement sustainability efforts, Volvo etc.) as well as visits to cultural locations that have provided the foundation for the development of these efforts in each country. Locations that will be visited include Amsterdam, Netherlands; Hamburg, Germany; Copenhagen, Denmark; Gothensburg, Sweden; and Oslo, Norway