Football's coming home ? digital reterritorialization, contradictions in the transnational coverage of sport and the sociology of alternative football broadcasts.

This article critically utilizes the work of Manuel Castells to discuss the issue of parallel imported broadcasts (specifically including live-streams) in football. This is of crucial importance to sport because the English Premier League is premised upon the sale of television rights broadcasts to domestic and overseas markets, and yet cheaper alternative broadcasts endanger the price of such rights. Evidence is drawn from qualitative fieldwork and library/Internet sources to explore the practices of supporters and the politics involved in the generation of alternative broadcasts. This enables us to clarify the core sociological themes of ‘milieu of innovation’ and ‘locale’ within today's digitally networked global society

Improving Ontology Recommendation and Reuse in WebCORE by Collaborative Assessments

In this work, we present an extension of CORE [8], a tool for Collaborative Ontology Reuse and Evaluation. The system receives an informal description of a specific semantic domain and determines which ontologies from a repository are the most appropriate to describe the given domain. For this task, the environment is divided into three modules. The first component receives the problem description as a set of terms, and allows the user to refine and enlarge it using WordNet. The second module applies multiple automatic criteria to evaluate the ontologies of the repository, and determines which ones fit best the problem description. A ranked list of ontologies is returned for each criterion, and the lists are combined by means of rank fusion techniques. Finally, the third component uses manual user evaluations in order to incorporate a human, collaborative assessment of the ontologies. The new version of the system incorporates several novelties, such as its implementation as a web application; the incorporation of a NLP module to manage the problem definitions; modifications on the automatic ontology retrieval strategies; and a collaborative framework to find potential relevant terms according to previous user queries. Finally, we present some early experiments on ontology retrieval and evaluation, showing the benefits of our system

Development of the Information Society in Czech Republic, Poland and Slovakia

The article is presenting facts about the politics carried on the EU concerning development of the information society in Czech Republic, Poland and Slovakia - countries that in 2004 became members of the EU. Enlargement of the EU structures allowed for more dynamic development of these countries in the information society context. The situation of each country was presented by indicators describing the household and the community situation in information society. Indicators was gained from Eurostat system. The universality of these indicators lets to the assessment of the level and dynamics of development in relation to the EU average. Comparison of Poland and its southern neighbors allows also to observe changes that occur and may allow better progress in this field.Artykul prezentuje dane na temat prowadzonej w UE polityki w zakresie rozwoju spoleczeństwa informacyjnego w Czechach, Polsce i Slowacji, które staly się czlonkami UE w 2004 roku. Rozszerzenie struktur unijnych pozwolilo na zdynamizowanie rozwoju tych krajów w zakresie spoleczeństwa informacyjnego. Sytuację poszczególnych krajów zaprezentowano przy pomocy wskażników opisujących gospodarstwa domowe oraz spoleczność pochodzące z Eurostatu. Powszechność tych wskażników pozwala na ocenę dynamiki rozwoju oraz poziomu tego rozwoju w odniesieniu do wartości średniej w UE. Porównanie Polski oraz jej poludniowych sąsiadów pozwolić ma również na dostrzeżenie przemian, które zachodzą i mogą pozwolić na lepszy postęp w tej dziedzinie

Automatic Annotation and Semantic Search from Protégé

Semantic search has been one of the major envisioned benefits of the Semantic Web since its emergence in the late 90’s [1]. Our demo shows a proposal towards this goal. One way to view a semantic search engine is as a tool that gets formal queries (e.g. in RDQL, RQL, SPARQL, or the like) from a client, executes them against an ontology-based knowledge base, and returns tuples of ontology values (resources) that satisfy the query [2]. While this conception of semantic search brings enormous advantages already, our work aims at taking a step beyond this. In our view of Information Retrieval in the Semantic Web, a search engine returns documents, rather than (or in addition to) exact values, in response to user queries. The engine should rank the documents, according to concept-based relevance criteria. The overall retrieval process is illustrated in Figure 1 (see [3] for more details of our research)

"Agglomeration, Inequality and Economic Growth"

The impact of income inequality on economic growth is dependent on several factors, including the time horizon considered, the initial level of income and its initial distribution. Yet, as growth and inequality are also uneven across space, it is also pertinent to consider the effects of the geographical agglomeration of economic activity. Moreover, it would also seem pertinent to consider not just the levels of inequality and agglomeration, but also the changes they undergo (i.e., their within-country evolution) and how these two processes interact with each other. By applying different econometric specifications and by introducing different measures of agglomeration at country level (specifically, urbanization and urban concentration rates), this study analyzes how inequality and agglomeration (both their levels and their evolution) influence economic growth in function of the country’s level of development and its initial income distribution. Our results suggest, in line with previous studies, that while high inequality levels are a limiting factor for long-run growth, increasing inequality and increasing agglomeration have the potential to enhance growth in low-income countries where income distribution remains relatively equal, but can result in congestion diseconomies in high-income countries, especially if income distribution becomes particularly unequal.Agglomeration, urbanization, urban concentration, congestion diseconomies, inequality, growth JEL classification:O1, O4, R1

Catalonia and Spain at the crossroads: financial and economic aspects

In some large European countries, in recent decades, economic globalization has gone hand in hand with a powerful trend to political decentralization (this has been the case in the United Kingdom, France, Italy, and Spain). In Spain, and after years of apparent stability, the relations between Catalonia and Spain are experiencing troubled times. This paper examines particularly the main economic effects of both the staying together and the secession scenarios. Following the introduction, the second section reviews some aspects of the relations between Catalonia and Spain. The third and fourth sections analyse different scenarios with a particular focus on the main issues that the secession scenario raises. The fifth section contains a concluding remark

The role of intergovernmental finance in achieving diversity and cohesion: The case of Spain

The democratic Constitution of 1978 set up a decentralised state in Spain. Since then, the Autonomous Communities (intermediate level of government) have strongly increased their role and currently represent around 25-30% of total public expenditure. Thus, financing autonomous government has become a crucial issue with important financial and political consequences. The present system is mostly based on grants coming from central government, while tax revenue are weak and so it is fiscal responsibility. The financing system can play an important, albeit complementary, role in ensuring cohesion within a decentralised state. On the one hand, achieving a certain level of equalisation in providing public services all over the territory. On the other, permitting that all regions can obtain an appropriate level of self-government. However, it is important to stress that territorial cohesion requires, as previous conditions, a political consensus and the acceptation of a common project among the different regions. Financial problems can become political problems, but rarely political problems can exclusively be solved through financial measures. Hence, we should not demand to the intergovernmental finances what they cannot do

La descentralización de las políticas sociales en el Estado del Bienestar

Este trabajo analiza la problemática que plantea la prestación de las políticas sociales propias del Estado del bienestar en un contexto de federalismo fiscal. Mientras que tanto el Estado del bienestar como los procesos de descentralización han merecido, por separado, una gran atención por parte de la literatura, las implicaciones mutuas de ambas cuestiones han recibido, en cambio, sólo un escaso interés. Sin embargo, la realidad muestra que algunos de los gastos típicos del Estado del bienestar (como la sanidad y la educación) están fuertemente descentralizados. Este trabajo aborda en primer lugar los argumentos a favor y en contra de la descentralización de estas políticas. A continuación se examina el grado de descentralización del gasto en las principales políticas sociales: sanidad, educación y seguridad y servicios sociales. Es importante destacar la confluencia de los distintos niveles de gobierno en la prestación y financiación de estas políticas. En este sentido, el grado de descentralización del gasto no tiene por qué coincidir con el grado de descentralización en la definición de las políticas públicas. Finalmente, se realiza un examen detallado de la problemática que plantea la descentralización de las principales funciones en la experiencia comparada

Energy performance forecasting of residential buildings using fuzzy approaches

The energy consumption used for domestic purposes in Europe is, to a considerable extent, due to heating and cooling. This energy is produced mostly by burning fossil fuels, which has a high negative environmental impact. The characteristics of a building are an important factor to determine the necessities of heating and cooling loads. Therefore, the study of the relevant characteristics of the buildings, regarding the heating and cooling needed to maintain comfortable indoor air conditions, could be very useful in order to design and construct energy-efficient buildings. In previous studies, different machine-learning approaches have been used to predict heating and cooling loads from the set of variables: relative compactness, surface area, wall area, roof area, overall height, orientation, glazing area and glazing area distribution. However, none of these methods are based on fuzzy logic. In this research, we study two fuzzy logic approaches, i.e., fuzzy inductive reasoning (FIR) and adaptive neuro fuzzy inference system (ANFIS), to deal with the same problem. Fuzzy approaches obtain very good results, outperforming all the methods described in previous studies except one. In this work, we also study the feature selection process of FIR methodology as a pre-processing tool to select the more relevant variables before the use of any predictive modelling methodology. It is proven that FIR feature selection provides interesting insights into the main building variables causally related to heating and cooling loads. This allows better decision making and design strategies, since accurate cooling and heating load estimations and correct identification of parameters that affect building energy demands are of high importance to optimize building designs and equipment specifications.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version