The ambivalent political work of emotions in the defence of territory, life and the commons

The increasing focus that political ecologists are putting in the role of emotions and affect in environmental conflict, commoning and mobilisation is enriching mainstream analyses that tended to mask the everyday emotional engagements of environmental movements, collectives and communities associated to being exposed to conflict as well as being active in it. By directing attention to two different ways in which grassroots movements and communities in Chile and Mexico facilitate emotional expression in the context of the conflicts in which they are embedded in, I discuss what different roles emotion plays in the defence of the commons, and what political opportunities these different roles imply for movements and collectives. I found a persistent and unresolved tension between the role of emotions as channels for the subversion of hegemonic power, and their role in reproducing hegemonic power dynamics. I suggest that this reveals 'the emotional' as a space of power and conflict, and that acknowledging the ambivalent political work of emotions offers opportunities for both researchers and movements to better understand and transform the power inequalities associated to the defence and practice of being-in-common while being exposed to conflict and dispossession

Towards Emotion Recognition: A Persistent Entropy Application

Emotion recognition and classification is a very active area of research. In this paper, we present a first approach to emotion classification using persistent entropy and support vector machines. A topology-based model is applied to obtain a single real number from each raw signal. These data are used as input of a support vector machine to classify signals into 8 different emotions (calm, happy, sad, angry, fearful, disgust and surprised)

Affected by and affecting forest fires in Sweden and Spain: A critical feminist analysis of vulnerability to fire

Usually, vulnerability is equated to weakness and resistance to strength. Drawing on a feminist critique of this conceptualisation, this article aims to discuss how vulnerability to forest fires and local action are mutually and contradictorily related. I analyse the ways in which people in two rural communities surrounded by tree monocultures in Sweden and Spain think, feel and act after being exposed to acute forest fires in 2018 and 2017, respectively. Attentively listening to the experiences of vulnerability during and after the fire in the two cases helps to explain vulnerability to forest fires as an emotional, care-related process that opens up contradictory and transformative interconnections between peoples, nature and the state. Also, looking at the two cases together, this article shows how vulnerability to fire is mediated through unequal expectations across Europe's North-South divide. By re-signifying the implications of vulnerability, disasters such as those analysed here can be seen as facilitators of radical transformations towards new rural futures in Europe's forests

An Institutional Analysis of Cost Accounting Practices in the Spanish Eighteenth Century

A growing body of literature (Johnson, 1972; Tyson, 1990; Fleischman and Parker, 1990 and 1991; Edwards and Newell, 1991 and Fleischman et al., 1996) has evidenced that sophisticated costing techniques were used in the early stages of the Industrial Revolution for efficiency reasons. However, some scholars have questioned the role of efficiency (Hoskin and Macve, 1988; Miller, 1994, Carmona et al., 1997, 1998 and 2002 and Gutiérrez et al., 2005) and have suggested institutional explanations for the development of cost accounting. The purpose of this research is to extend this institutional explanation of accounting spreading in the second half of the 18th century, Enlightenment Century Spain. With this aim, this work explores the changes that took place in six organizations depended of the Crown. The study reveals the importance of the role played by a group of managers belonging to the Spanish Enlightenment Movement.Institutional Analysis, Cost Accounting, Spanish Eighteenth Century.

El aprendizaje de audacity para la edición y producción de contenidos didácticos digitales

En la sociedad actual resulta indispensable proporcionar una capacitación adecuada a los futuros docentes para que puedan desarrollar metodologías innovadoras, donde las TIC y los recursos didácticos digitales desempeñan un papel clave y permiten que los conocimientos y habilidades del alumno tengan un desarrollo exitoso. Esta investigación se aborda desde una metodología cuantitativa, mediante el uso de un cuestionario creado ad hoc sobre aprendizaje y la evaluación de la herramienta Audacity para la creación de recursos didácticos digitales en el Grado de Educación Infantil de la Universidad de Córdoba. Los resultados muestran una valoración positiva de la experiencia vivida, así como de la herramienta estudiada.In present society it is essential to provide the necessary training to future teachers so they can accomplish innovative teaching and learning methodologies, where ICT and digital learning resources play a key role that will enable the student’s knowledge and skills to be successfully developed. This research is approached from a quantitative methodology, by using a questionnaire created ad hoc about the learning and the assessment of the Audacity software tool for creating digital didactic resources, in the Early Childhood Education Degree from the University of Cordoba. The results obtained show a positive assessment of the tool studied and its subsequent use for audiovisual productions

Analysis of enhanced mixing by natural and forced convection with application to chemical reactor design

We looked for new designs to enhance mixing on catalytic chemical reactors. Two models were proposed. The first one, used forced convection as the mixing enhancer and consisted of a stack of corotating disks with the catalytic coating on their surface and which were enclosed in a cilyndrical cavity. Two operation modes were studied for this type of reactor, discontinuous and semicontinuous one. In the semicontinuous mode a flux is fed to the reactor through the external wall. This configuration showed good efficiency compared to other type of reactors. The second model proposed used natural convection as the mixing enhancer. In this case a cubical cavity which had the catalytic surface on the bottom wall, was heated from below which activated the convection in the system leading to the mixing of the fluid in it. It was seen efficiency is determined by flow and mass transfer within boundary layers regions.Se buscaron nuevos diseños que aumentaran el mezclado en reactores catalíticos. Dos modelos fueron propuestos. El primero, usó convección forzada como el impulsor del mezclado y consistía de una pila de discos corotatorios con el catalizador en sus superficies y los cuales se encontraban dentro de una cavidad cilíndrica. Dos modos de operación fueron estudiados para este tipo de reactor, discontinuo y semicontinuo. En el modo semicontinuo se alimentó un flujo al reactor mediante la pared exterior. Esta configuración mostró una buena eficiencia comparado con otro tipo de reactores. El segundo modelo propuesto usó la convección natural como el impulsor del mezclado. En este caso una cavidad cúbica que tenía el catalizador en su pared inferior, fue calentada por debajo, lo que activaba la convección en el sistema llevando al mezclado del fluido en el mismo. La eficiencia es determinada por la transferencia de flujo y masa dentro de las regiones de capa límite

Descubrimiento de entidades y carga cultural

En el presente trabajo se repasan las tesis de Ian Hacking acerca del descubrimiento de entidades por parte de los científicos en el marco de su singular teoría realista. Veremos que Hacking defiende un realismo de entidades que lo compromete a aceptar el descubrimiento de entidades en el mundo. Mostraremos que nuestro autor sostiene posiciones injustificadamente diferentes para el caso de las ciencias naturales y el de las sociales, llegando a afirmar que en estas últimas el conocimiento puede "partir de la nada". Argüiremos que la reconstrucción de los ejemplos ofrecida por el propio Hacking no ilustra ni justifica su conclusión de que las entidades sociales son objeto de creación ex nihilo. Señalaremos asimismo que las tesis de Hacking desconocen el papel desempeñado por la carga cultural que es trasfondo de la innovación y el descubrimiento en el campo de lo social

Scalable Inference of Gene Regulatory Networks with the Spark Distributed Computing Platform Cristo

Inference of Gene Regulatory Networks (GRNs) remains an important open challenge in computational biology. The goal of bio-model inference is to, based on time-series of gene expression data, obtain the sparse topological structure and the parameters that quantitatively understand and reproduce the dynamics of biological system. Nevertheless, the inference of a GRN is a complex optimization problem that involve processing S-System models, which include large amount of gene expression data from hundreds (even thousands) of genes in multiple time-series (essays). This complexity, along with the amount of data managed, make the inference of GRNs to be a computationally expensive task. Therefore, the genera- tion of parallel algorithmic proposals that operate efficiently on distributed processing platforms is a must in current reconstruction of GRNs. In this paper, a parallel multi-objective approach is proposed for the optimal inference of GRNs, since min- imizing the Mean Squared Error using S-System model and Topology Regularization value. A flexible and robust multi-objective cellular evolutionary algorithm is adapted to deploy parallel tasks, in form of Spark jobs. The proposed approach has been developed using the framework jMetal, so in order to perform parallel computation, we use Spark on a cluster of distributed nodes to evaluate candidate solutions modeling the interactions of genes in biological networks.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech

Defining invasive alien species from the roots up: Lessons from the ‘De-eucalyptising Brigades’ in Galicia, Spain

Social and cultural perspectives are increasingly considered in the literature on invasive alien species (IAS), after decades of being underexplored. However, within this growing body of research, there is little investigation into the role and knowledge of everyday rural and environmentalist networks in defining and engaging with or against the expansion of IAS. This paper contributes to debates on the political and spatial implications of this concept, through a critical examination of the bottom-up initiative of the 'De-eucalyptising Brigades' (Galicia, Spain), which aims to remove eucalyptus trees from community-based property lands. A survey of participants of this movement paired with semi-structured interviews show the relevance of social-cultural dynamics in defining IAS. Our results also show how investigating activism against forestry involving a potential IAS sheds light on the everyday conflicts around who defines IAS and how they are defined

MOPREDAScentury: a long-term monthly precipitation grid for the Spanish mainland

This article describes the development of a monthly precipitation dataset for the Spanish mainland (western Mediterranean basin), covering the period between December 1915 and December 2020. The dataset combines ground observational data from the National Climate Data Bank (NCDB) of the Spanish national climate and weather service (AEMET) and new data rescued from meteorological yearbooks published prior to 1951 that was never incorporated into the NCDB. The yearbooks data represented a significant improvement of the dataset, as it almost doubled the number of weather stations available during the first decades of the 20th century, the period when the dataset was more scarce. The final dataset contains records from 11,312 stations, although the number of stations with data in a given month varies largely between 674 in 1939 and a maximum of 5,234 in 1975. Spatial interpolation was used on the resulting dataset to create monthly precipitation grids. The process involved a two-stage process: estimation of the probability of zero-precipitation (dry month), and estimation of precipitation magnitude. Interpolation was carried out using universal kriging, using anomalies (ratios with respect to the 1961&ndash;2000 monthly climatology) as dependent variable and several geographic variates as independent variables. Cross-validation results showed that the resulting grids are spatially and temporally unbiased, although the mean error and the variance deflation effect are highest during the first decades of the 20th century, when the observational dataset was more scarce. The dataset is available at https://doi.org/10.20350/digitalCSIC/15136 under an open license, and can be cited as Beguer&iacute;a et al. (2023).</p