A propósito del 40 aniversario del Protocolo I a los Convenios de Ginebra: de la construcción del derecho a saber a la Unidad para la búsqueda de personas dadas por desaparecidas en el contexto y en razón del conflicto colombiano

Este artículo se sirve del cuarenta aniversario de la adopción del Protocolo I a los Convenios de Ginebra para realizar un análisis del nacimiento y evolución del deber de búsqueda de personas desaparecidas, cuyo momento clave puede situarse en la Sección III (artículo 32 y siguientes) del mencionado Protocolo. Bajo la general denominación del “derecho a saber” en el Derecho Internacional Humanitario, incluso en su posterior y más actual extensión y expansión en el Derecho Internacional de los Derechos Humanos, ya comúnmente bajo el rótulo de “derecho a la verdad”, la construcción propia al Protocolo I será una referencia constante que llegará hasta las experiencias más cercanas, como es la colombiana. De este modo, el análisis que se realizará en las primeras partes de este artículo permitirá también y finalmente, evaluar las medidas adoptadas en el más reciente Acuerdo de Paz de Colombia en lo que al derecho a saber y la obligación de búsqueda de personas desaparecidas corresponde

An empirical examination of exchange-rate credibility determinants in the EMS

This paper provides empirical evidence on the determinants of exchange rate credibility under the European Monetary System (EMS). To that end, we have considered both economic variables and political factors using data of eight currencies participating in the Exchange Rate Mechanism, covering the complete EMS history (1979-1998). Our results suggest that the level of international reserves, the real interest rate and right-wing governments would have positively affected the credibility of a given central parity, while the unemployment rate and the inflation rate would have negative influenced such credibility.Credibility, Political variables, Exchange rates, European Monetary System

Non-linear Plank Problems and polynomial inequalities

We study lower bounds for the norm of the product of polynomials and their applications to the so called \emph{plank problem.} We are particularly interested in polynomials on finite dimensional Banach spaces, in which case our results improve previous works when the number of polynomials is large.Comment: 19 page

Particle velocity controls phase transitions in contagion dynamics

Interactions often require the proximity between particles. The movement of particles, thus, drives the change of the neighbors which are located in their proximity, leading to a sequence of interactions. In pathogenic contagion, infections occur through proximal interactions, but at the same time the movement facilitates the co-location of different strains. We analyze how the particle velocity impacts on the phase transitions on the contagion process of both a single infection and two cooperative infections. First, we identify an optimal velocity (close to half of the interaction range normalized by the recovery time) associated with the largest epidemic threshold, such that decreasing the velocity below the optimal value leads to larger outbreaks. Second, in the cooperative case, the system displays a continuous transition for low velocities, which becomes discontinuous for velocities of the order of three times the optimal velocity. Finally, we describe these characteristic regimes and explain the mechanisms driving the dynamics.Comment: 9 pages, 5 figures, 12 supplementary figure

Spanish named entity recognition in the biomedical domain

Named Entity Recognition in the clinical domain and in languages different from English has the difficulty of the absence of complete dictionaries, the informality of texts, the polysemy of terms, the lack of accordance in the boundaries of an entity, the scarcity of corpora and of other resources available. We present a Named Entity Recognition method for poorly resourced languages. The method was tested with Spanish radiology reports and compared with a conditional random fields system.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft