Will democracy improve the distribution of economic welfare? Do dictatorships leave long-run legacies behind? In this paper we explore four Ibero-American countries with some common historical traits, but also different contexts: Spain, Portugal, Brazil, and Chile. The two Iberian nations suffered long periods of autocratic regime in the 20th Century, while our south American cases had relatively

After the tax reform undertaken in Spain between 1977 and 1986, the practical results in terms of progressivity and redistribution were not outstanding. Inequality did not significantly decrease after the transition to democracy, as political economy literature would suggest. In recent times, the system has shown its incapacity to sustain European-level welfare services. But why?This paper analyse

We propose that moral behaviour of artificial agents could (and should) be intrinsically grounded in their own sensory-motor experiences. Such an ability depends critically on seven types of competencies. First, intrinsic morality should be grounded in the internal values of the robot arising from its physiology and embodiment. Second, the moral principles of robots should develop through their in

Spaces in the brain can refer either to psychological spaces, which are derived from similarity judgments, or to neurocognitive spaces, which are based on the activities of neural structures. We want to show how psychological spaces naturally emerge from the underlying neural spaces by dimension reductions that preserve similarity structures and the relevant categorizations. Some neuronal represen

BackgroundThe magnitude of multimodal enhancement in the brain is believed to depend on the stimulus intensity and timing. Such an effect has been found in many species, but has not been previously investigated in insects.ResultsWe investigated the responses to multimodal stimuli consisting of an odour and a colour in the antennal lobe and mushroom body of the moth Manduca sexta. The mushroom body

We present a system-level connectionist model of pupil control that includes brain regions be- lieved to influence the size of the pupil. These include parts of the sympathetic and parasym- pathetic nervous system together with the hypothalamus, amygdala, locus coeruleus, and the cerebellum. Computer simulations show that the model is able to reproduce a number of important aspects of how the pupi

Raw municipal wastewater from a full-scale wastewater treatment plant was physicochemically pretreated in a large pilot-scale system comprising coagulation, flocculation, microsieve and microfiltration operated in various configurations. The produced microsieve filtrates and microfiltration permeates were then concentrated using forward osmosis (FO). Aquaporin InsideTM FO membranes were used for b

Objective: To test whether plasma tau is altered in Alzheimer disease (AD) and whether it is related to changes in cognition, CSF biomarkers of AD pathology (including β-amyloid [Aβ] and tau), brain atrophy, and brain metabolism. Methods: This was a study of plasma tau in prospectively followed patients with AD (n 179), patients with mild cognitive impairment (n 195), and cognitive healthy control

Changes in soil moisture are likely to contribute to future changes in latent heat flux and various characteristics of daily precipitation. Such contributions during the second half of the twenty-first century are assessed using the simulations from the GLACE-CMIP5 experiment, applying a linear regression analysis to determine the magnitude of these contributions. As characteristics of daily preci

Previous studies have suggested that a high intake of sugar-sweetened beverages is positively associated with the risk of a coronary event. However, a few studies have examined the association between sucrose (the most common extrinsic sugar in Sweden) and incident coronary events. The objective of the present study was to examine the associations between sucrose intake and coronary event risk and

In this contribution, a thermodynamically consistent and mathematically canonical modelling framework for the investigation of the cyclic thermomechanical behaviour of Nickel-Titanium shape memory alloy wires is developed. Particular focus is placed on the self-heating of the material subjected to multiple load cycles. The relatively high load rates necessitates the consideration of inertia terms,

Parents react differently after their child is diagnosed with type 1 diabetes, both at onset and longitudinally. The aim of this study was to describe and compare the disease impact on parents, in terms of health-related quality of life (HRQOL), parents’ satisfaction with the care received, and the child´s experience of diabetes-specific family support 2 years after the child’s diagnosis. A furthe

Background: Mild traumatic brain injury (TBI) is associated with substantial costs due to over-triage of patients to computed tomography (CT) scanning, despite validated decision rules. Serum biomarker S100B has shown promise for safely omitting CT scans but the economic impact from clinical use has never been reported. In 2007, S100B was adapted into the existing Scandinavian management guideline

The adiabatic film-cooling effectiveness on a thermal barrier coating surface is investigated numerically. A film-cooling hole with an inclination angle of 35° is placed upstream the deposition configuration. The depositions are arranged on the external wall with three different positions. For no-mist models, the cooling performances downstream the wall are investigated for the blowing ratios of 0

The authors have developed a porous silicon (P-Si) based duplex antibody microarray platform for simultaneous quantitation of the biomarkers prostate-specific antigen (PSA) and human glandular kallikrein 2 (hK2) in serum. Pore size-controlled P-Si surfaces have an extremely enlarged surface area that enables high-density immobilization of fluorescently labeled antibodies by physical adsorption. Au

Parathyroid hormone (PTH) activates receptors on osteocytes to orchestrate bone formation and resorption. Here we show that PTH inhibition of SOST (sclerostin), a WNT antagonist, requires HDAC4 and HDAC5, whereas PTH stimulation of RANKL, a stimulator of bone resorption, requires CRTC2. Salt inducible kinases (SIKs) control subcellular localization of HDAC4/5 and CRTC2. PTH regulates both HDAC4/5

Use of a second harmonic and third harmonic cavity within a klystron to increase efficiency has been studied using particle-in-cell (PIC) code, MAGIC 2D. The six cavity device has a drive frequency of 1GHz, a predicted efficiency of 88%, 39 dB gain and an output power of 833 kW. The preliminary simulation results have revealed indications of bunching with bunch core oscillations. The initial resul

The United Kingdom’s recently updated approach to sustainable drainage enhanced biodiversity and amenity objectives by incorporating the ecosystem approach and the ecosystem services concept. However, cost-effective and reliable methods to appraise the biodiversity and amenity values of potential sustainable drainage system (SuDS) sites and their surrounding areas are still lacking, as is a method