Biofuels Potential in Latin America and the Caribbean: Quantitative Considerations and Policy Implications for the Agricultural Sector

Rising oil prices has led to increased interest to replace domestic demand for liquid fuels for transport (petrol and diesel) with biofuel production (ethanol and biodiesel). One of the pioneers in biofuel production is Brazil, which since the 1970s has established a government program that promotes the production and consumption of ethanol. Currently, Brazil is the leading producer of ethanol in the world and has started also programs for biodiesel production based on soybeans, oil palm and other crops. Other countries in Latin America and the Caribbean have also expressed interest in biofuel production, and have started programs, and in some cases the legislation that promotes biofuel production. However, most of the analysis of biofuel crops has been focused in the major countries such as Brazil and Argentina. As most countries in the region embark in biofuel projects and establish national policies on biofuels, there is a need for a roadmap that looks into the technical considerations that biofuel production will require. Most government policies are driven by politics, and in some cases such as the discussion of food production versus biofuel production, there should be technical analysis of increased production of biofuels. For those reasons, this study offers the first complete assessment of the potential of biofuels in Latin America and the Caribbean for 28 countries in the region, based on 12 agricultural and forestry crops. We first identify the biofuel production potential based on current surplus production, as a catalyst of biofuel production in the region. We then estimate the land requirements based on a 5% replacement of domestic liquid fuel demand, and the suitable available area in each country for such replacement. We also project biofuel production and available land area needed to meet food and nutrition targets for countries in the region to 2025. The results of this study show that the crops with the largest potential in Latin America and the Caribbean are sugar canes and cassava. Based on current production levels the conversion of sugar cane into bioethanol could surpass the 5% mix in more than half of the domestic markets of the countries surveyed. For biodiesel, countries with current surplus production that could be transformed to biodiesel and exceed the 5% mix include Argentina, Bolivia, Paraguay, Costa Rica and Honduras. For land, Latin America, particularly South America may have enough suitable land for production of biofuels, specially sugar cane, soybeans and oil palm, the main crops identified in this study. As for food supply and security and the future production of biofuels to 2025, we find that for major food exporters, there is enough land for both food and energy crop production. However, there are some smaller countries, especially in Central America and the Caribbean that may have to decide whether to import food and produce energy from crops. In term of the effect on prices, we find that increased biofuel production may have important price effects the effect may depend we analyze energy crops, traditional crops or byproducts of biofuel production. Finally, in terms of the impact on agricultural structure and land ownership, the most significant structural changes consist in a higher concentration in production and tenure as well as the establishment of new kind of actors and norms. Policies and institutions should be established that enables small producers to take advantage of increased biofuel production, so they can benefit in terms of employment, income, as means for poverty reduction in rural areas of Latin America and the Caribbean.Biofuels, land availability, price effect, agricultural structure, Latin America, Caribbean, Resource /Energy Economics and Policy, Q42, Q48, Q11, Q15,

Transgresión del principio de seguridad jurídica, una práctica recurrente en Colombia

With an analytical and comparative approach, the study of the principles of legal certainty and judicial independence, will be addressed, which are unknown and circumvented by various sectors of society. In addition, it will be seen that despite enjoying broad regulation and protection in the contemporary legal system, since it seeks to ensure its observance, the recurring transgression of these principles is a reality that generates all kinds of legal conflicts that in the end are transferred to the user primary of justice and the raison d'être of democratic states, the social conglomerate. Situation that leads to thinking about fundamental reforms that integrate a true separation and autonomy of the branches of power.Con un enfoque analítico y comparativo, se abordará el estudio de los principios de seguridad jurídica e independencia judicial, los cuales, son desconocidos por varios sectores de la sociedad. Además, se verá que, a pesar de gozar de amplia regulación y protección en el ordenamiento legal contemporáneo, donde se busca asegurar su observancia, la transgresión recurrente de estos principios es una realidad que genera toda clase de conflictos jurídicos, hacia el usuario primario de la justicia y la razón de ser de los Estados democráticos, el conglomerado social. Esta situación lleva a pensar en reformas de fondo que integren una verdadera separación y autonomía de las ramas del poder

Análisis de la deforestación del Distrito Huabal – Región Cajamarca durante el periodo 2005 – 2020 y su proyección al año 2050 con teledetección

El objetivo de esta investigación fue analizar la deforestación del distrito Huabal – región Cajamarca durante el periodo 2005 – 2020 y su proyección al año 2050 con teledetección, para lo cual se emplearon imágenes del satélite Landsat 8 y Landsat 5, las cuales fueron corregidas radiométrica y topográficamente para su posterior uso, la clasificación de la cobertura se realizó mediante clasificación supervisada usando el algoritmo Random Forest con el cual se permitió obtener la clases de cobertura existentes en el año 2005 y 2020, la proyección al año 2050 fue realizada con redes neuronales artificiales en el complemento Molusce de QGIS 3.12.3 Los resultados indican que en el distrito de Huabal se encuentran las clases de cobertura y uso de suelo Áreas urbanizadas, Pastos, Áreas agrícolas heterogéneas, Bosques, Áreas con vegetación herbácea y/o arbustivo y Áreas sin o con poca vegetación. Para el año 2005 el área boscosa ocupaba el 42.46 %, en el año 2020 un área de 29.56 % y para el año 2050 se estima una proyección del 24.35 % de área boscosa. Se concluye que a través de la proyección futura de la cobertura boscosa al año 2050 ésta será de 2066.11 ha lo cual significa una disminución de 442.37 ha por efectos de la deforestación que a futuro continúa acrecentándose

Agricultural potential in Latin America and Caribbean for biofuels for transport

93 p.The present study presents a general assessment of the productive capacity of Latin American countries for producing biomass1. Biomass can be transformed in secondary liquid energy carriers like biodiesel and bioethanol, fossil fuels substitutes. The document begins with the description of the characteristics of currently used energy crops2 world wide. A specific analysis of Latin American productive conditions was then carried out to determine if the region has the potential to reach, at least, 5% blend levels3. The land availability and energy crop yields for biomass production were also projected for the year 2025, together with two alternative raw materials i.e. waste crops and field residues. Finally, the effects of a demand increase; producer subsidy and price support on energy crop markets were assessed. It was determined that most of Latin American countries could produce sufficient biomass to reach 5% blends. There is land availability for biomass production in 2025 mostly in South American countries. Potentially attainable blends of most Latin American countries for the year 2025, using biomass from agricultural energy crops, are between 30% and 91% for biodiesel, and between 20% and 206% for bioethanol. Blend estimates from forestry biomass are even higher and from residues are much lower. The “price support” measure causes the highest net welfare gain in Latin America countries (1.844 Mill. US$) as well as in the Rest of the World (1.623 Mill. US$) , whereas the demand shift provokes in the Rest of the World a net welfare loss of 761 Mill. US$

Current Applications of Mesenchymal Stem Cells for Cartilage Tissue Engineering

Articular cartilage injuries caused by traumatic/mechanical progressive degeneration result in joint pain, swelling, the consequent loss of joint function, and eventually osteoarthritis. Articular tissue possesses a poor ability to regenerate that further complicates the therapeutic approaches. Mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) have emerged as a promising alternative treatment. Recently, it has been reported that a wide variety of strategies ranging from merely using cells in the injured area to employ biofunctional substitutes in which cells are harmonizing with scaffolding and growth factors to create an engineered cartilage tissue

Event-driven implementation of deep spiking convolutional neural networks for supervised classification using the SpiNNaker neuromorphic platform

Neural networks have enabled great advances in recent times due mainly to improved parallel computing capabilities in accordance to Moore’s Law, which allowed reducing the time needed for the parameter learning of complex, multi-layered neural architectures. However, with silicon technology reaching its physical limits, new types of computing paradigms are needed to increase the power efficiency of learning algorithms, especially for dealing with deep spatio-temporal knowledge on embedded applications. With the goal of mimicking the brain’s power efficiency, new hardware architectures such as the SpiNNaker board have been built. Furthermore, recent works have shown that networks using spiking neurons as learning units can match classical neural networks in supervised tasks. In this paper, we show that the implementation of state-of-the-art models on both the MNIST and the event-based NMNIST digit recognition datasets is possible on neuromorphic hardware. We use two approaches, by directly converting a classical neural network to its spiking version and by training a spiking network from scratch. For both cases, software simulations and implementations into a SpiNNaker 103 machine were performed. Numerical results approaching the state of the art on digit recognition are presented, and a new method to decrease the spike rate needed for the task is proposed, which allows a significant reduction of the spikes (up to 34 times for a fully connected architecture) while preserving the accuracy of the system. With this method, we provide new insights on the capabilities offered by networks of spiking neurons to efficiently encode spatio-temporal information.Consejo Nacional de Ciencia Y Tecnología (México) FC2016-1961European Union's Horizon 2020 No 824164 HERMESMinisterio de Ciencia, Innovación y Universidades TEC2015-63884-C2-1-

Empirical study on the efficiency of Spiking Neural Networks with axonal delays, and algorithm-hardware benchmarking

The role of axonal synaptic delays in the efficacy and performance of artificial neural networks has been largely unexplored. In step-based analog-valued neural network models (ANNs), the concept is almost absent. In their spiking neuroscience-inspired counterparts, there is hardly a systematic account of their effects on model performance in terms of accuracy and number of synaptic operations.This paper proposes a methodology for accounting for axonal delays in the training loop of deep Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs), intending to efficiently solve machine learning tasks on data with rich temporal dependencies. We then conduct an empirical study of the effects of axonal delays on model performance during inference for the Adding task, a benchmark for sequential regression, and for the Spiking Heidelberg Digits dataset (SHD), commonly used for evaluating event-driven models. Quantitative results on the SHD show that SNNs incorporating axonal delays instead of explicit recurrent synapses achieve state-of-the-art, over 90% test accuracy while needing less than half trainable synapses. Additionally, we estimate the required memory in terms of total parameters and energy consumption of accomodating such delay-trained models on a modern neuromorphic accelerator. These estimations are based on the number of synaptic operations and the reference GF-22nm FDX CMOS technology. As a result, we demonstrate that a reduced parameterization, which incorporates axonal delays, leads to approximately 90% energy and memory reduction in digital hardware implementations for a similar performance in the aforementioned task

Variants of global Carleman weights in one-measurement inverse problems and fluid-structure controllability problems

We review some recent results on variants of global Carleman weights and Carleman inequalities applied to singular controllability and inverse problems partially developed in collaboration with the authors in a series of papers. First of all, we explain how we can modify weights to study one measurement inverse problems for the heat and wave equations with discontinuous coefficients in the principal part, in a case of locally supported boundary observations for recovering coefficients in the wave equation and we mention also some recent results for the Sch¨odinger equation. As another important application, we show how time-variable global Carleman weights are applied to study the null- controllability for a Navier-Stokes-rigid solid problem in moving domains

Necesidad de tratamiento ortodóncico en escolares de 12 a 13 años en una institución educativa. Piura 2022.

El objetivo del estudio fue conocer la necesidad de tratamiento ortodóncico en escolares de 12 a 13 años en una institución educativa. Piura 2022. La muestra estuvo constituida por 134 escolares, se usó el índice de necesidad de tratamiento ortodóntico (IOTN) con sus dos componentes. El componente de salud dental (CDS) realizado por los investigadores y el componente estético (CE) es percibido por el paciente. Con respecto al IOTN según el CDS se obtuvo que el 44,03% presentó una leve necesidad, mientras que en el CE presentó que el 88,06% no necesitó tratamiento. De acuerdo al sexo se obtuvo que el CDS presentó sin necesidad de tratamiento, el sexo masculino presentó un 18,66% y sexo femenino 25,37%. Para CE mostró sin necesidad de tratamiento con un 40,30% para hombres y 47,76% para mujeres. En relación a la edad según el CDS se registró una leve necesidad con el 17,91% para los participantes de 12 años y el 26,12% para los de 13 años, El CE presentó sin necesidad de tratamiento con un 38,06% para la población de 12 años y el 50,00% para los de 13 años. Se concluyó que la población estudiada no presentó necesidad de tratamiento ortodóncico