Book review: accelerating democracy: transforming governance through technology

John O. McGinnis demonstrates how new technologies combine to address a problem as old as democracy itself: how to help citizens better evaluate the consequences of their political choices. Ana Polo Alonso thinks we can support or dismiss McGinnis’s proposals, but we cannot deny that the author makes a major effort to bring forth ingenious measures to really ‘accelerate democracy.’ Accelerating Democracy: Transforming Governance through Technology. John O. McGinnis. Princeton University Press. December 2012

Acts or events? A perspective from the marketing mix

La literatura existente en torno a las relaciones píublicas, el ceremonial y el protocolo alterna como sinónimos los términos actos y eventos. A través de una revisión teóricoconceptual, el principal objetivo de este trabajo es demostrar que ambos términos obedecen a realidades diferentes. Los resultados demuestran que, mientras que la organización de actos responde, desde la perspectiva de las relaciones públicas, a las necesidades comunicativas de las organizaciones; los eventos son herramientas que, desde la perspectiva del Mix de Marketing, permiten satisfacer las necesidades económicas, fundamentalmente, de las empresas.The existing public relations, ceremonial and protocol literature alternates the terms acts and events as synonyms. Through a theoretical-conceptual revision, the main objective of this work is to demonstrate that both terms obey different realities. The results show that, while the organization of acts responds, from the perspective of public relations, to the communicative needs of the organizations; Events are tools that, from the perspective of the Marketing Mix, allow meeting, mainly, the economic needs of companies

Book review: The violent image: insurgent propaganda and the new revolutionaries

"The Violent Image: Insurgent Propaganda and the New Revolutionaries." Neville Bolt. Hurst. May 2012. --- Fast-moving, self-propelled ‘violent images’ have radically changed the nature of insurgency in the modern world. The global media has revolutionised the way ideas, messages and images are disseminated, and the speed with which they travel. Neville Bolt investigates how today’s revolutionaries have rejuvenated the nineteenth century ‘propaganda of the deed’ so that terrorism no longer simply goads states into overreacting, thereby losing legitimacy. Ana Polo Alonso finds an elegantly-written and well-researched read, suitable for students of media studies and terrorism

Corporate governance of banks: the current state of the debate.

Since banks are among the most important sources not only of finance but also of external governance for firms, the corporate governance of banks is a crucial factor for growth and development. Despite its importance, this topic has been explored only by a few studies. While some authors support, with different arguments in the course of time, the specificity of banks, other authors, among whom Ross Levine and his co-authors from the World Bank, question heavily the present banking regulatory framework. The debate on the corporate governance of banks has a direct bearing on the current discussions on the future of banking regulatory design: should the regulatory intervention be the most important corporate control mechanism in banking or should regulators focus on introducing incentives for appropriate market behaviour?Financial economics; Corporate Governance; Banking; Regulation and Supervision; Market Discipline; Securities Law

Isolated Horizons and Black Hole Entropy in Loop Quantum Gravity

We review the black hole entropy calculation in the framework of Loop Quantum Gravity based on the quasi-local definition of a black hole encoded in the isolated horizon formalism. We show, by means of the covariant phase space framework, the appearance in the conserved symplectic structure of a boundary term corresponding to a Chern-Simons theory on the horizon and present its quantization both in the U(1) gauge fixed version and in the fully SU(2) invariant one. We then describe the boundary degrees of freedom counting techniques developed for an infinite value of the Chern-Simons level case and, less rigorously, for the case of a finite value. This allows us to perform a comparison between the U(1) and SU(2) approaches and provide a state of the art analysis of their common features and different implications for the entropy calculations. In particular, we comment on different points of view regarding the nature of the horizon degrees of freedom and the role played by the Barbero-Immirzi parameter. We conclude by presenting some of the most recent results concerning possible observational tests for theory