On the Relationship between Export Activity and Size

Together with the general and sector environment and various internal factors, firm size is one of the main groups of factors determining export activity. However, few works have examined this aspect, with the studies of Alonso and Donoso (1994, 1998) standing out in the Spanish case. The objective of this empirical work is, on the one hand, to describe the size of non-consolidated exporting Spanish SMEs or those not exporting but interested in export and, on the other hand, to assess the possible relationships between export activity and the size and other demographic characteristics of the firms participating in this study.Internationalization of businesses, export, small and medium firms, firm size

Studies on post-synthetic treatments of micro- and mesoporous zeolites:Impact on their physicochemical and catalytic properties

Zeolites have a very wide application range, including the use as catalysts. Actually, zeolites constitute a large portion of the solid catalysts used to date in industry. The major challenge nowadays is the fine-tuning of these materials to a specific application, either by direct synthesis or by a combination with post-synthesis treatments. A well-known post synthesis treatment method is calcination, typically used to remove the organic template and/or to introduce Brønsted acid sites in the zeolite framework. However, calcination has some major drawbacks, such as a (partly) collapse of the structure and a reduction of the OH groups on the surface. In this thesis, the use of milder post-treatment techniques is described, with an emphasis on Fenton detemplation. The suitability of this methodology was determined for a number of relevant micro- and meso-porous zeolites and quantitative template removal was observed in most cases. Relevant material properties were determined and it was shown that the structure of the zeolite after the mild detemplation procedure resembles that of the zeolite after synthesis. The catalytic cracking of low-density polyethylene (LDPE) was used as model reaction to test performance of the various detemplated zeolites. It was shown that zeolites prepared using the mild Fenton approach were more active than those prepared using the conventional calcination technique

Assessment of coercive persuasion: the Scale of Detection of Coercive Persuasion in Group Contexts (EDPC)

Comunicación presentada en las Jornadas Internacionales ICSA 2017 sobre Dinámicas sectarias y radicalizaciónCoercive persuasion refers to the control and manipulation developed by abusive groups, through different aggressive strategies that influence changes in the environment of its members, distorting cognition, altering emotions and generating significant psychosocial damage. It is a subtle, gradual and powerful force that affects around 500,000 Spanish victims of cultic groups (Cuevas & Perlado, 2011; Cuevas, 2012). Attaining power is one of the main goals of these groups, being the control and exploitation of the individual a part of the process. This derives to individuals giving up their own goals, freedom, material possessions, family and social networks, health or even life itself (Rodríguez-Carballeira, Saldaña, Almendros, Martin-Peña, Escartín, & Porrúa-Garcia, 2015). Such strategies are often implemented in a planned, graduate way and using deceit, difficulting that people who targeted are able to detect their evident aggressiveness and the generated damage. If there is an obvious shortage of instruments measuring psychological abuse in different fields (partner violence, harassment, bullying, etc.), the development of tools to assess the presence of such strategies in group contexts is even more scarce (Almendros, Gámez-Guadix, Carrobles & Rodríguez Carballeira, 2011). One of those assessment tools, the Interview for Detection of Coercive Persuasion (Cuevas & Canto, 2006) contains a wide range of coercive and abusive practises taking place within manipulative group. It has been applied in Spain in the forensic field in prosecutions of abusive groups (Dharma Tradición, Casa Yoga, Miguelianos, Revelance, etc.). The main objective of this recently validated tool (Cuevas, 2016) was to identify and provide evidences of the systematic application of coercive persuasion techniques on victims of abusive groups (Cuevas, 2012, 2016). Deriving from this instrument, sharing objectives, a new scale of 40 items and validated in Spanish population: the Scale of Detection of Coercive Persuasion in Group Contexts, or EDPC (Cuevas, 2016 ). To validate the EDPC, a Spanish sample of 134 people who identified themselves as having been abused or having been overly controlled by a group was selected. To assess criterion validity of the instrument, other different instruments (BSI MOS-SSS, RSE, SLEQ, ICP and EDS) were used. The group psychological abuse scale GPA (Chambers, Langone, Dole, & Grice, 1994), Spanish modified version (Almendros et al.,2004; Almendros et al., 2009) was used to assess the convergent validity of the instrument. The EDPC showed appropriate psychometric properties. In respect to reliability, the standardized Cronbach alpha coefficient reached a value of 0.97. The exploratory factorial analysis indicated the presence of a factor (coercive persuasion), establishing the suitability of a one-dimensional model. This scale aims to be useful in clinical and forensic fields, in order to assess the control and manipulation exercised in group contexts. Using it could be relevant to provide evidences of coercive groups practises, helping at trying to determinate the relationship between damage on the victims and the specific actions taken by groups or individuals who perform the abusive behaviors.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech

Interpreting in the media : organisational, interactional and discursive aspects of dialogue interpreting in radio settings. A study of Spain's Radio 3.

This thesis aims to uncover and explain how interpreter-mediated live interviews work in radio broadcasting, from organisational, interactional and discursive points of view. The methodology I use in order to fulfil my aims and objectives involves a mixed model which is applied to five interpreter-mediated interviews broadcast on Radio 3's El Séptimo Vicio (ESV) (from the Spanish State Broadcasting Company, RNE). This model includes a descriptive framework of types of interpreter-mediated interviews, to which Conversation Analysis (CA) is applied, in order to shed light on the organisation of such events, as well as specific interactional phenomena and patterns arising in this particular type of interpreter-mediated event. AV recordings of one of the broadcasts and a semistructured interview with the host of ESV are used as corroboration for the CA. Findings and concluding remarks of the thesis focus on the “unique fingerprint” (Heritage and Greatbach, 1991:95-96; Heritage and Clayman, 2010:18) of practices and interactions analysed in my data. Within the limits of what can be generalised from the analysis of a specific (and to a certain extent always limited) set of data, avenues for future research are sketched, and implications for public engagement in the form of training and knowledge exchange activities which help to consolidate the study and practice of radio interpreting as a discipline in its own right are discussed. Likewise, future training and practice possibilities emerging from a deeper and critical knowledge of this media interpreting context are suggested

El efecto de la volatilidad del peso mexicano en los rendimientos y riesgo de la Bolsa Mexicana de Valores

El efecto de las colas pesadas originado por los eventos extremos y los diferentes niveles de asimetría asociados a la alta volatilidad en aglomeraciones en los mercados financieros de economías emergentes requieren de modelos más sofisticados para su modelación. El objetivo de esta investigación es aplicar la teoría de valores extremos (TVE) para cuantificar el riesgo de la cola de los rendimientos diarios de la Bolsa Mexicana de Valores bajo la agregación del riesgo del tipo de cambio durante el periodo de enero de 1971 a diciembre de 2010. Este análisis sugiere el uso de la distribución de valor extremo generalizada y la técnica de bloques máximos para explicar el comportamiento asintótico de los rendimientos extremos. Los resultados empíricos muestran el potencial de la medida VaR basada en la TVE para capturar las propiedades de colas pesadas en los rendimientos de los mercados accionarios altamente volátiles a diferencia de los modelos VaR convencionales. Además, la evidencia empírica demuestra que los inversionistas internacionales con posiciones financieras largas están más propensos a experimentar pérdidas más grandes que los que toman posiciones cortas en el mercado accionario mexicano durante periodos de crisis financieras y depreciaciones de la moneda local

TOURISM AND HISTORY WORLD HERITAGE – CASE STUDIES OF IBERO-AMERICAN SPACE

In 2010 traditional Mexican cuisine was declared an Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity by UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization). This event was significant because it presented the opportunity to commercially capitalise on heritage cuisine (Laborde and Medina, 2015), and it served as a mechanism to promote Mexican cuisine on a global level; while at the same time represented the obligation to create policies for its preservation. Within these preservation efforts, tourism has been conceived as an effective tool for the valuation of this cuisine. Traditional Mexican cuisine is seen as a tourist attraction based on the resources and expertise of the countryǯs principal regional cuisines. (owever, this tourism does not always integrate all the different social actors directly involved with heritage cuisine. On the contrary, the development of an elitist gastronomic tourism may be observed, directed to global or Dzworld-classdz markets.The purpose of this essay is to analyse the relationship between heritage cuisine and tourism, along with its sociocultural implications within the framework of contemporary food consumption. Through an analysis of the language used in tourism advertising platforms and tourism policies, contrasted with ethnographic data, this essay examines the interaction between the actors, products and territories in Mexicoǯs eight gastronomic regions which have become attractions for tourists due to the inclusion of traditional Mexican cuisine in the UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity List. We conclude that the tourist valuation of cuisine heritage promoted by Mexican institutions reflects a two-fold phenomenon, straddling the divide between economic valuation of agricultural food products and the cultural meaning of regional cuisines

Percepción de la violencia psicológica en parejas jóvenes en función del sexo del agresor y del tipo de violencia ejercida

El estudio de la violencia psicológica es uno de los tipos de violencia más presentes en el inicio de las relaciones de noviazgo. Una de las principales variables estudiadas es la percepción de la violencia de pareja en función del sexo de quién la ejerce, encontrando que la violencia es percibida de forma más grave cuando la ejercen los hombres que cuando la ejercen las mujeres. La percepción de diferentes tipos de violencia psicológica ha sido menos abordada. El principal objetivo del presente estudio es profundizar en las diferencias a la hora de percibir la responsabilidad del agresor y la gravedad del suceso en función del sexo del agresor y del tipo de violencia psicológica ejercida. Para lo anterior se ha realizado un diseño 2 X 3 (sexo del agresor x tipo de violencia psicológica. En el presente estudio participaron 694 personas de edades comprendidas entre los 17 y los 25 años. Los participantes, tras leer un escenario de violencia psicológica, respondieron a preguntas sobre la percepción del grado de violencia del suceso y sobre la responsabilidad del agresor y de la víctima. Los resultados mostraron que las puntuaciones en gravedad del suceso fueron más altas cuando el hombre es el agresor que cuando era una mujer. También se observó un efecto de interacción sexo del agresor x tipo de violencia. En la VD culpabilización del agresor se observan un efecto principal del tipo de violencia, siendo la violencia tipo 3. También es significativa la interacción sexo del agresor x del tipo de violencia psicológica, observando las puntuaciones más altas en la violencia tipo 1 cuando el agresor es un hombre. El presente trabajo permite concluir que la violencia psicológica es percibida de forma diferente en función de si la ejerce un hombre o una mujer pero también que estas variables se perciben de forma diferente en función del tipo de violencia psicológica ejercida.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech

The expression of sentiment in user reviews of hotels

The linguistic expression of sentiment, understood as the polarity of an opinion, is known to be domain-specific to a certain extent (Aue & Gamon, 2005; Choi et al., 2009). Even though many words and expressions convey the same evaluation across domains (e.g., “excellent”, “terrible”), many others acquire a more precise semantic orientation within a specific domain. For example, features such as size or location (and the lexical expressions that are used to express them) may or may not convey semantic orientation depending on the topic. In Sentiment Analysis (SA), it is critical that domain-specific expressions of sentiment be accounted for (Tan et al., 2007) if the system is to be useful to those who wish to explore the polarity of texts belonging in that domain. The software tool Lingmotif (Moreno-Ortiz, 2016) will be used to explore a corpus of hotel reviews in the English language. Lingmotif is a lexicon-based, linguistically-motivated, user-friendly, GUI-enabled, multi-platform, Sentiment Analysis desktop application. Lingmotif can perform SA on any type of input texts, regardless of size and topic. The analysis is based on the identification of sentiment-laden words and phrases contained in the application's rich core lexicons, and employs context rules to account for sentiment shifters. It offers easy-to-interpret visual representations of quantitative data (text polarity, sentiment intensity, sentiment profile), as well as a detailed, qualitative analysis of the text in terms of its sentiment. Lingmotif can also take user-provided plugin lexicons in order to account for domain-specific sentiment expression. In this paper, we describe our procedure to identify domain-specific lexical cues for the domain of user reviews of Spanish hotels. We made use of a recently compiled corpus of reviews from the online travel agency booking site booking.com. This corpus was analyzed entirely with Lingmotif using only its core (i.e., general-language lexicon), and then manually analyzed the results to find errors and omissions produced by the lack of specialized language cues. We then encoded the identified lexical cues as a Lingmotif plugin lexicon and reran the analysis with it. This methodology allowed us, first, to obtain a very concrete description of the expression of sentiment in this domain, and, from a practical perspective, to precisely measure to what extent this expression is domain-dependent.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech

Antioxidants in Kidney Diseases: The Impact of Bardoxolone Methyl

Drugs targeting the renin-angiotensin-aldosterone system (RAAS) are the mainstay of therapy to retard the progression of proteinuric chronic kidney disease (CKD) such as diabetic nephropathy. However, diabetic nephropathy is still the first cause of end-stage renal disease. New drugs targeted to the pathogenesis and mechanisms of progression of these diseases beyond RAAS inhibition are needed. There is solid experimental evidence of a key role of oxidative stress and its interrelation with inflammation on renal damage. However, randomized and well-powered trials on these agents in CKD are scarce. We now review the biological bases of oxidative stress and its role in kidney diseases, with focus on diabetic nephropathy, as well as the role of the Keap1-Nrf2 pathway and recent clinical trials targeting this pathway with bardoxolone methyl