01-02 "Mixed Signals: Market Incentives, Recycling, and the Price Spike of 1995"

Environmental economics assumes that reliance on price signals, adjusted for externalities, normally leads to efficient solutions to environmental problems. We explore a limiting case, when market volatility created "mixed signals": waste paper and other recycled materials were briefly worth an immense amount in 1994-95, then plummeted back to traditional low levels in 1996. These rapid reversals resulted in substantial economic and political costs. A review of academic and business literature suggests six possible explanations for abrupt price spikes. An econometric analysis of the prices of wood pulp and waste paper shows that factors that explained price changes in 1983-93 contribute very little to understanding the subsequent price spike. From the econometric analysis and from other sources, we conclude that speculation, rather than "rational" economic factors, must have played a major role in the price spike. If speculatively driven price spikes can disrupt an environmentally important industry such as recycling, then the surprising implication for public policy is that measures to control or stabilize prices, far from interfering with the market, may actually help to make it more efficient.

Mixed methods in health care research. Paradigms and philosphy

When to use mixed methods is one of the most challenging issues that health care researchers currently face. The predominance of quantitative methods have not been enough to respond to many relevant questions on health care, that need a multiple approach. Mixed methods have been developed to tackle those problems that pose a complex intervention, or have different and more than two interacting components within the experimental and control interventions, and so many other situations. In this conference issues about when to use mixed methods, how to use them and which approaches of mixed methods are available to be used in health care research.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech

Artifact-Aware Analogue/Mixed-Signal Front-Ends for Neural Recording Applications

This paper presents a brief review of techniques to overcome the problems associated with artifacts in analog frontends for neural recording applications. These techniques are employed for handling Common-Mode (CM) Differential-Mode (DM) artifacts and include techniques such as Average Template Subtraction, Channel Blanking or Blind Adaptive Stimulation Artifact Rejection (ASAR), among others. Additionally, a new technique for DM artifacts compression is proposed. It allows to compress these artifacts to the requirements of the analog frontend and, afterwards, it allows to reconstruct the whole artifact or largely suppress it.Ministerio de Economía y Empresa TEC2016-80923-