Trade and Migration with Renewable Natural Resources: Out-of-Steady-State Dynamics

Commodity price increases associated with the entry of China, India and other countries into the world economy has led to increased pressure on common-property renewable natural resources (NR). The problem is particularly worrisome for economies that obtain a large share of their income from the exploitation of NR in the production of an exportable commodity. This paper contributes to the analysis by examining the issue in the framework of a general equilibrium dynamic model and by solving for both the steady state and the transition dynamics. We show that i) a resource-rich, capital-poor economy is more likely to be subject to a "natural resource curse" and complete (irreversible) NR depletion; ii) the latter's likelihood rises with the relative commodity price and labor inflow; iii) a labor inflow under internal equilibrium results in a higher steady-state capital-labor ratio and manufacturing output, and unchanged NR and commodity output; iv) import and export taxes result in a larger steady-state NR and commodity output and a smaller capital stock and manufacturing output, and may prevent complete NR depletion; and v) the latter may also be prevented through capital inflows (foreign aid) and labor outflow (openness by the North), improved regulation, technical change and a production tax.renewable natural resources, depletion, transition dynamics, steady state, trade, migration, capital flows

URBANO: A Tour-Guide Robot Learning to Make Better Speeches

—Thanks to the numerous attempts that are being made to develop autonomous robots, increasingly intelligent and cognitive skills are allowed. This paper proposes an automatic presentation generator for a robot guide, which is considered one more cognitive skill. The presentations are made up of groups of paragraphs. The selection of the best paragraphs is based on a semantic understanding of the characteristics of the paragraphs, on the restrictions defined for the presentation and by the quality criteria appropriate for a public presentation. This work is part of the ROBONAUTA project of the Intelligent Control Research Group at the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid to create "awareness" in a robot guide. The software developed in the project has been verified on the tour-guide robot Urbano. The most important aspect of this proposal is that the design uses learning as the means to optimize the quality of the presentations. To achieve this goal, the system has to perform the optimized decision making, in different phases. The modeling of the quality index of the presentation is made using fuzzy logic and it represents the beliefs of the robot about what is good, bad, or indifferent about a presentation. This fuzzy system is used to select the most appropriate group of paragraphs for a presentation. The beliefs of the robot continue to evolving in order to coincide with the opinions of the public. It uses a genetic algorithm for the evolution of the rules. With this tool, the tour guide-robot shows the presentation, which satisfies the objectives and restrictions, and automatically it identifies the best paragraphs in order to find the most suitable set of contents for every public profil

New Technique to Enhance the Performance of Spoken Dialogue Systems by Means of Implicit Recovery of ASR Errors

This paper proposes a new technique to implicitly correct some ASR errors made by spoken dialogue systems, which is implemented at two levels: statistical and linguistic. The goal of the former level is to employ for the correction knowledge extracted from the analysis of a training corpus comprised of utterances and their corresponding ASR results. The outcome of the analysis is a set of syntactic-semantic models and a set of lexical models, which are optimally selected during the correction. The goal of the correction at the linguistic level is to repair errors not detected during the statistical level which affects the semantics of the sentences. Experiments carried out with a previouslydeveloped spoken dialogue system for the fast food domain indicate that the technique allows enhancing word accuracy, spoken language understanding and task completion by 8.5%, 16.54% and 44.17% absolute, respectively.Ministerio de Ciencia y Tecnología TIN2007-64718 HAD

Entropy-energy inequalities for qudit states

We establish a procedure to find the extremal density matrices for any finite Hamiltonian of a qudit system. These extremal density matrices provide an approximate description of the energy spectra of the Hamiltonian. In the case of restricting the extremal density matrices by pure states, we show that the energy spectra of the Hamiltonian is recovered for $d=2$ and $3$. We conjecture that by means of this approach the energy spectra can be recovered for the Hamiltonian of an arbitrary finite qudit system. For a given qudit system Hamiltonian, we find new inequalities connecting the mean value of the Hamiltonian and the entropy of an arbitrary state. We demonstrate that these inequalities take place for both the considered extremal density matrices and generic ones.Comment: 12 pages, 4 figures Accepted for publication in Journal of Physics A: Mathematical and Theoretica

El programa de diversificación de ciencias sociales: una propuesta ante la futura ley orgánica de educación.

Las propuestas del MEC respecto a la futura LOE (Ley Orgánica de Educación) contemplan la aplicación de un Programa de Diversificación. Este artículo quiere aportar una propuesta sobre cuál debería ser la actitud de los docentes ante este programa específico, cuáles las materias que se deben explicar en el aula, pero sobre todo cómo se debe impartir esta enseñanza y cómo se debe llevar a cabo el control del trabajo de los alumnos y la evaluación de su curso. Se presentan unos Objetivos Logísticos, es decir, para conseguir en el aula a lo largo del curso, con independencia de cuáles sean los contenidos. Asimismo, se propone una metodología específica para este curso y se invita a los docentes a aplicar criterios didácticos adecuados, que pasan por la selección del material a impartir, muy diferente al de los demás grupos convencionales.Governement´s proposal about the new General Education Law (LOE) look at a specific program of Educative Diversification. This paper should bring a proposal about which shuold be teacher's attitude dealing with this specific Program; which should be subjects of classes, and anyway, which sholud be te method: how to deal with learning and teaching and how to follow students' dialy work, and how to evaluate it. This paper presents several logistic aims, that's to say, several objetives to achieve in the classroom during the academic year, instead of the course subject contents. This paper presents, furthermore, a specific Method for this Program, and teachers are invited to applie the adecuate didactic criteria, which include the selection of course subjects, very diferrent to the same of ussual groups of students

Mejoras sociales y negociación colectiva

La regulación de la negociación colectiva, al igual que otros aspectos de la legislación laboral, ha sido objeto de diferentes reformas en los últimos años. Reformas que han tenido diferente repercusión a la hora de fijar posibles límites a la libertad negociar de las partes, tanto formales, como materiales. Argumentos que se han tendido a justificar en base a que así era posible afrontar mejor la crisis económica existente. Argumentos que han servido de freno al desarrollo de las materias y contenidos propios de las denominadas «cláusulas sociales» e, incluso, a la desaparición de las mismas. Es cierto que no se trata de una tendencia general, pero sí bastante generalizada. Sobre todo a nivel de convenios y acuerdos de empresa, amén de que la materia haya pasado a tener cada vez menor importancia en fórmulas de negociación supraempresarial. Tendencia en la que ahonda el hecho de acudir en el ámbito empresarial a fórmulas más flexibles y visualmente más positivas sobre el protagonismo de la empresa o grupo, como ocurre con las acciones propias de las empresas socialmente responsables.The collective bargaining regulation, as other aspects of labor law, has been under several reforms in the last years. The impact of these reforms has been different due to the fact that the limits to the negotiation freedom for both parts, have been affected, not only in a formal way but also in a material sense. This kind of arguments has tended to be justified as a mechanism to improve the way for affording the economic crisis. However, it also meant a slow-down in the development of what has been known as «clausulas Sociales» (Social Clauses), or even its disappearance. Although it is not a general tendency, it is true that it is even more extended, specially in the matter of collective agreements, without mentioning the subjects that had been released to a less relevant position in the business groups bargaining. This situation has been motivated companies to search new and a more positive corporate image. An example of this might be the socially responsible entrepreneurship