Search results for: latin hypercube sampling

Authors: Eva Wagner, Lucely Vargas

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Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) plays an important role in (large-scale) enterprises’ business strategy in developed and emerging countries. This article approaches CSR in international comparison by examining the CSR reporting of 116 leading companies in Austria, Germany, Colombia and Chile from 2006 to 2010. We have used an independently developed scoring model which analyzes reported CSR-activities using seven dimensions to efficiently assess CSR. The study reveals that there are significant differences in CSR-commitment among countries and regions: German companies, as expected, lead most of the investigated CSR dimensions revealing stronger commitment to CSR than their Austrian, Colombian and Chilean counterparts. Even if Latin American companies lag behind their European counterparts, they exhibit high CSR-performance in the social dimension: corporate giving and philanthropic activities are firmly anchored in the tradition of Latin American companies. This indicates that particular CSR-emphases reflect the political and social circumstances of each individual country.

Keywords: corporate social responsibility, corporate social performance, international comparison

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Authors: José Carlos Rodríguez, Mario Gómez

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This paper analyses innovation trends in Latin America countries by means of the number of patent applications filed by residents and non-residents during the period 1965 to 2012. Making use of patent data released by the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), we search for the presence of multiple structural changes in patent application series in Argentina, Brazil Chile, and Mexico. These changes may suggest that firms’ innovative activity has been modified as a result of implementing a particular science, technology and innovation (STI) policy. Accordingly, the new regulations implemented in these countries during 1980s and 1990s have influenced their intellectual property regimes. The question conducting this research is thus how STI policies in these countries have affected their innovation activity? The results achieved in this research confirm the existence of multiple structural changes in the series of patent applications resulting from STI policies implemented in these countries.

Keywords: econometric methods, innovation activity, Latin America countries, patents, science, technology and innovation policy

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Authors: Maylen Villamanan Alba

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Latin America is marked by its history: conquest, colonialism, and slavery left deep footprints in most Latin American countries. Also, the past century has been affected by wars, military dictatorships, and political violence, which profoundly influenced Latin American popular culture. Consequently, reminiscences of historical crimes are frequently present in daily life, media, public opinion, and arts. This legacy is remembered in novels, paintings, songs, and films. In fact, Latin American cinema has a trend which refers to the verisimilitude with reality in fiction films. These films about historical violence are narrated as fictional characters, but their stories are based on real historical contexts. Therefore, cultural criminology has considered films as a significant field to understand social representations of violence related to historical crimes. The aim of the present contribution is to analyze the legacy of past and historical memory in social representations of violence in Latin American cinema as a critical approach to historical crimes. This qualitative research is based on content analysis. The sample is seven multi-award winning films of the International Festival of New Latin American Cinema of Havana. The films selected are Kamchatka, Argentina (2002); Carandiru, Brazil (2003); Enlightened by fire, Argentina (2005); Post-mortem, Chile (2010); No, Chile (2012) Wakolda; Argentina (2013) and The Clan, Argentina (2015). Cultural criminology highlights that cinema shapes meanings of social practices such as historical crimes. Critical criminology offers a critical theory framework to interpret Latin American cinema. This analysis reveals historical conditions deeply associated with power relationships, policy, and inequality issues. As indicated by this theory, violence is characterized as a structural process based on social asymmetries. These social asymmetries are crossed by social scopes, including institutional and personal dimensions. Thus, institutions of the states are depicted through personal stories of characters involved with human conflicts. Intimacy and social background are linked in the personages who simultaneously perform roles such as soldiers, policemen, professionals or inmates and they are at the same time depict as human beings with family, gender, racial, ideological or generational issues. Social representations of violence related to past legacy are a portrait of historical crimes perpetrated against Latin American citizens. Thereby, they have contributed to political positions, social behaviors, and public opinion. The legacy of these historical crimes suggests a path that should never be taken again. It means past legacy is a reminder, a warning, and a historic lesson for Latin American people. Social representations of violence are permeated by historical memory as denunciation under a critical approach.

Keywords: Latin American cinema, historical memory, social representation, violence

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Authors: Andres Calderon

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In order to avoid detection and punishment, cartels have recruited the help of third parties to organize, execute and disguise the anticompetitive practices cartel members have agreed upon. These third parties may take the form of consultancy firms, guilds or professional advisors that do not perform an economic activity in the market where the collusion takes place. This paper takes a look into how national competition authorities and national legislators have dealt with the emergence of the cartels’ facilitators in Latin America. Following the practice of other jurisdictions such as United States (Toys R' Us, Apple), European Union (AC Treuhand), United Kingdom (Replica Kits, Hasbro) and Spain (Urban, Snap-On), some countries (e.g. Argentina, Chile) in Latin America have started to conduct investigations and find antitrust liability in cartels’ facilitators for helping others to violate their national competition laws. Some countries (e.g. Peru and Colombia) have also amended their legislation to amplify the subjective scope of application in order to include cartels’ facilitators. The Latin American case is one of special relevance because public officials are often prone to promote or indulge agreements between competitors in sectors of political interest. A broad definition of cartels’ facilitator, consequently, could lead to the prosecution of punishment of public officials that may hinder the competitive process.

Keywords: anticompetitive practices, cartel, collusion, competition, facilitator, hub and spoke

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Authors: Mahmoud I. Syam

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Stratified double median ranked set sampling (SDMRSS) method is suggested for estimating the population mean. The SDMRSS is compared with the simple random sampling (SRS), stratified simple random sampling (SSRS), and stratified ranked set sampling (SRSS). It is shown that SDMRSS estimator is an unbiased of the population mean and more efficient than SRS, SSRS, and SRSS. Also, by SDMRSS, we can increase the efficiency of mean estimator for specific value of the sample size. SDMRSS is applied on real life examples, and the results of the example agreed the theoretical results.

Keywords: efficiency, double ranked set sampling, median ranked set sampling, ranked set sampling, stratified

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Authors: Fabianna Bacil, Zenathan Hasannundin, Clovis Freire

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The green transition opens green windows of opportunity – temporary moments in which there are lower barriers and shorter learning periods for developing countries to enter emerging technologies and catch-up. However, taking advantage of these windows requires capabilities in national sectoral systems to adopt and develop technologies linked to green sectors as well as strong responses to build the required knowledge, skills, and infrastructure and foster the growth of targeted sectors. This paper uses UNCTAD’s frontier technology readiness index to analyse the current position of Latin America and the Caribbean to use, adopt, and adapt frontier technologies, examining the preconditions in the region to take up windows of opportunity that arise with the green transition. The index highlights the inequality across countries in the region, as well as gaps in capabilities dimensions, especially in terms of R&D. Moving to responses, it highlights industrial policies implemented to foster the growth of green technologies, emphasising the essential role played by the state to build and strengthen capabilities and provide infant industry protection that enables the growth of these sectors. Overall, while there are exceptions, especially in the Brazilian case, countries in Latin America and the Caribbean should focus on strengthening their capabilities to be better positioned, especially in terms of knowledge creation, infrastructure, and financing availability.

Keywords: Green technologies, Industrial policy, Latin America, windows of opportunity

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Authors: Fernando Seabra, Giulia P. Flores, Karolina C. Gomes

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Trade liberalizations measures, as import tariff cuts, are not a sufficient trigger for trade growth. Given that price margins are narrow, traders and cargo operators tend to opt out of markets where the process of goods clearance is slow and costly. Excess paperwork and slow customs dispatch not only lead to institutional breakdowns and corruption but also to increasing transaction cost and trade constraints. The objective of this paper is, therefore, two-fold: First, to evaluate the relationship between institutional and infrastructural performance indexes and trade growth in container throughput; and, second, to investigate the causes for differences in container demurrage and detention fees in Latin American countries (using other emerging countries as benchmarking). The analysis is focused on manufactured goods, typically transported by containers. Institutional and infrastructure bottlenecks and, therefore, the country logistics efficiency – measured by the Logistics Performance Index (LPI, World Bank-WB) – are compared with other indexes, such as the Doing Business index (WB) and the Corruption Perception Index (Transparency International). The main results based on the comparison between Latin American countries and the others emerging countries point out in that the growth in containers trade is directly related to LPI performance. It has also been found that the main hypothesis is valid as aspects that more specifically identify trade facilitation and corruption are significant drivers of logistics performance. The exam of port efficiency (demurrage and detention fees) has demonstrated that not necessarily higher level of efficiency is related to lower charges; however, reductions in fees have been more significant within non-Latin American emerging countries.

Keywords: corruption, logistics performance index, container throughput, Latin America

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Authors: Khattab Al Qaisi, Nicholas Bowring

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This paper presents the simulation results of the effects of sampling frequency on the total harmonic distortion (THD) of three-phase inverters using the space vector pulse width modulation (SVPWM) and space vector control (SVC) algorithms. The relationship between the variables was studied using curve fitting techniques, and it has been shown that, for 50 Hz inverters, there is an exponential relation between the sampling frequency and THD up to around 8500 Hz, beyond which the performance of the model becomes irregular, and there is an negative exponential relation between the sampling frequency and the marginal improvement to the THD. It has also been found that the performance of SVPWM is better than that of SVC with the same sampling frequency in most frequency range, including the range where the performance of the former is irregular.

Keywords: DSI, SVPWM, THD, DC-AC converter, sampling frequency, performance

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Authors: Neil Bar, Andrew Heweston

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Probability of failure (PF) often appears alongside factor of safety (FS) in design acceptance criteria for rock slope, underground excavation and open pit mine designs. However, the design acceptance criteria generally provide no guidance relating to how PF should be calculated for homogeneous and heterogeneous rock masses, or what qualifies a ‘reasonable’ PF assessment for a given slope design. Observational and kinematic methods were widely used in the 1990s until advances in computing permitted the routine use of numerical modelling. In the 2000s and early 2010s, PF in numerical models was generally calculated using the point estimate method. More recently, some limit equilibrium analysis software offer statistical parameter inputs along with Monte-Carlo or Latin-Hypercube sampling methods to automatically calculate PF. Factors including rock type and density, weathering and alteration, intact rock strength, rock mass quality and shear strength, the location and orientation of geologic structure, shear strength of geologic structure and groundwater pore pressure influence the stability of rock slopes. Significant engineering and geological judgment, interpretation and data interpolation is usually applied in determining these factors and amalgamating them into a geotechnical model which can then be analysed. Most factors are estimated ‘approximately’ or with allowances for some variability rather than ‘exactly’. When it comes to numerical modelling, some of these factors are then treated deterministically (i.e. as exact values), while others have probabilistic inputs based on the user’s discretion and understanding of the problem being analysed. This paper discusses the importance of understanding the key aspects of slope design for homogeneous and heterogeneous rock masses and how they can be translated into reasonable PF assessments where the data permits. A case study from a large open pit gold mine in a complex geological setting in Western Australia is presented to illustrate how PF can be calculated using different methods and obtain markedly different results. Ultimately sound engineering judgement and logic is often required to decipher the true meaning and significance (if any) of some PF results.

Keywords: probability of failure, point estimate method, Monte-Carlo simulations, sensitivity analysis, slope stability

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Authors: Nursel Koyuncu, Nihal Ata Tutkun

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Frailty model is a survival model that takes into account the unobserved heterogeneity for exploring the relationship between the survival of an individual and several covariates. In the recent years, proposed survival models become more complex and this feature causes convergence problems especially in large data sets. Therefore selection of sample from these big data sets is very important for estimation of parameters. In sampling literature, some authors have defined new sampling schemes to predict the parameters correctly. For this aim, we try to see the effect of sampling design in semi-parametric frailty model. We conducted a simulation study in R programme to estimate the parameters of semi-parametric frailty model for different sample sizes, censoring rates under classical simple random sampling and ranked set sampling schemes. In the simulation study, we used data set recording 17260 male Civil Servants aged 40–64 years with complete 10-year follow-up as population. Time to death from coronary heart disease is treated as a survival-time and age, systolic blood pressure are used as covariates. We select the 1000 samples from population using different sampling schemes and estimate the parameters. From the simulation study, we concluded that ranked set sampling design performs better than simple random sampling for each scenario.

Keywords: frailty model, ranked set sampling, efficiency, simple random sampling

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Authors: Muqaddas Javed, Muhammad Hanif

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The generalized multivariate ratio and regression type estimators for population mean are suggested under multi-phase stratified systematic sampling (MPSSS) using multi auxiliary information. Estimators are developed under the two different situations of availability of auxiliary information. The expressions of bias and mean square error (MSE) are developed. Special cases of suggested estimators are also discussed and simulation study is conducted to observe the performance of estimators.

Keywords: generalized estimators, multi-phase sampling, stratified random sampling, systematic sampling

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Authors: G. Sevilla, S. Zapata, F. Giraldo, E. Torres, C. Collazos

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This work describes a framework for teaching of global software engineering (GSE) in university undergraduate programs. This framework proposes a method of teaching that incorporates adequate techniques of software requirements elicitation and validated tools of communication, critical aspects to global software development scenarios. The use of proposed framework allows teachers to simulate small software development companies formed by Latin American students, which build information systems. Students from three Latin American universities played the roles of engineers by applying an iterative development of a requirements specification in a global software project. The proposed framework involves the use of a specific purpose Wiki for asynchronous communication between the participants of the process. It is also a practice to improve the quality of software requirements that are formulated by the students. The additional motivation of students to participate in these practices, in conjunction with peers from other countries, is a significant additional factor that positively contributes to the learning process. The framework promotes skills for communication, negotiation, and other complementary competencies that are useful for working on GSE scenarios.

Keywords: requirements analysis, distributed requirements engineering, practical experiences, collaborative support

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Authors: Simone Belli, Sergio Minniti, Valeria Santoro

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ICTs and technology transfer can benefit and move a country forward in economic and social development. However, ICT and access to the Internet have been inequitably distributed in most developing countries. In terms of science production and dissemination, this divide articulates itself also through the inequitable distribution of access to scientific knowledge and networks, which results in the exclusion of developing countries from the center of science. Developing countries are on the fringe of Science and Technology (S&T) production due not only to low investment in research but also to the difficulties to access international scholarly literature. In this respect, Open access (OA) initiatives and knowledge infrastructure represent key elements for both producing significant changes in scholarly communication and reducing the problems of developing countries. The spreading of the OA movement in the region, exemplified by the growth of regional and national initiatives, such as the creation of OA institutional repositories (e.g. SciELO and Redalyc) and the establishing of supportive governmental policies, provides evidence of the significant role that OA is playing in reducing the scientific gap between Latin American countries and improving their participation in the so-called ‘global knowledge commons’. In this paper, we map OA publications in Latin America and observe how Latin American countries are moving forward and becoming a leading force in widening access to knowledge. Our analysis, developed as part of the H2020 EULAC Focus research project, is based on mixed methods and consists mainly of a bibliometric analysis of OA publications indexed in the most important scientific databases (Web of Science and Scopus) and OA regional repositories, as well as the qualitative analysis of documents related to the main OA initiatives in Latin America. Through our analysis, we aim at reflecting critically on what policies, international standards, and best practices might be adapted to incorporate OA worldwide and improve the infrastructure of the global knowledge commons.

Keywords: open access, LAC countries, scientific publications, bibliometric analysis

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Authors: Armijos-Orellana Ana, González-Calle María, Maldonado-Matute Juan, Guerrero-Maxi Pedro

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Nowadays, the digital economy represents a fundamental element to guarantee economic and social development, whose importance increased significantly with the arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic. However, despite the benefits it offers, it can also be detrimental to those developing countries characterized by a wide digital divide. It is for this reason that the objective of this research was to identify and describe the main characteristics, benefits, and obstacles of the digital economy for Latin American countries. Through a bibliographic review, using the analytical-synthetic method in the period 1995-2021, it was determined that the digital economy could give way to structural changes, reduce inequality, and promote processes of social inclusion, as well as promote the construction and participatory development of organizational structures and institutional capacities in Latin American countries. However, the results showed that the digital economy is still incipient in the region and at least three factors are needed to establish it: joint work between academia, the business sector and the State, greater emphasis on learning and application of digital transformation and the creation of policies that encourage the creation of digital organizations.

Keywords: developing countries, digital divide, digital economy, digital literacy, digital transformation

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Authors: Yeimis Milton, Palomino Pichihua

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The city, like living organisms, originates from codes, structured information in the form of rules that condition the physical form and performance of urban space. Usually, the so-called urban codes clash with the spontaneous nature of the city, with the urban Kháos that contextualizes the free creation (poiesis) of human collectives. This contradiction is especially evident in Latin America, which, like other developing regions, lacks adequate instruments to guide urban growth. Thus constructing a hybrid between the formal and informal city, categories that are difficult to separate one from the other. This is a comparative study focusing on the urban codes created to address the pandemic. The objective is to build an overview of these innovations in the region. The sample is made up of official norms published in pandemic, directly linked to urban planning and building control (urban form). The countries analyzed are Brazil, Mexico, Argentina, Peru, Colombia, and Chile. The study uncovers a shared interest in facing future urban problems, in contrast to the inconsistency of proposed legal instruments. Factors such as the lack of articulation, validity time, and ambiguity, among others, accentuate this problem. Likewise, it evidences that the political situation of each country has a significant influence on the development of these norms and the possibility of their long-term impact. In summary, the global emergency has produced opportunities to transform urban systems from their internal rules; however, there are very few successful examples in this field. Therefore, Latin American cities have the task of learning from this defeat in order to lay the foundations for a more resilient and sustainable urban future.

Keywords: pandemic, regulation, urban planning, latin America

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Authors: Encarnacion Alvarez, Noemı Hidalgo-Rebollo, Juan F. Munoz, Francisco J. Blanco-Encomienda

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Many companies use the technique named as acceptance sampling which consists on the inspection and decision making regarding products. According to the results derived from this method, the company takes the decision of acceptance or rejection of a product. The acceptance sampling can be applied to the technology management, since the acceptance sampling can be seen as a tool to improve the design planning, operation and control of technological products. The theoretical operating characteristic (OC) curves are widely used when dealing with acceptance sampling. In this paper, we carry out Monte Carlo simulation studies to compare numerically the empirical OC curves derived from the empirical results to the customary theoretical OC curves. We analyze various possible scenarios in such a way that the differences between the empirical and theoretical curves can be observed under different situations.

Keywords: single-sampling plan, lot, Monte Carlo simulation, quality control

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Authors: Sarah Ledoux

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This paper analyses the quantitative effects of political content consumption in social media platforms on self-reported ideological preference across the Latin American region. Initially praising the democratic potential of the internet and its social networking websites, digital politics scholars have transitioned their discourse to warning against the undemocratic side-effects it cultivates, such as hate speech, filter bubbles, and ideological polarisation. Holding technology solely responsible for political trends worldwide is an oversimplification of the factors influencing social change. Nonetheless, widespread use of social media in new democracies raises questions on the reproduction of recent trends that have been observed in the US and Western Europe. Through the analysis of ordered logistic regressions on data from the 2018 AmericasBarometer survey, this study examines the extent to which the relationship between the consumption of political content on social media is related to ideological polarisation in Latin America. The findings indicate that there is a close link between consumption of political information on social media, specifically on Facebook and WhatsApp, and ideological positioning on the extremes of the political left- and right-wings. This relation holds when controlling for individual-level demographic and attitudinal factors, as well as country-level effects. These results demonstrate with empirical evidence that viewing political content on social media has a significant positive effect on the likelihood that citizens position themselves on the extreme ends of the left-right ideological spectrum and implies that political polarisation is a phenomenon that accompanies politically driven social media use.

Keywords: Latin America, polarisation, political consumption, political ideology, social media, survey

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Authors: M. J. Park, S. H. Lee, C. H. Lee, O. M. Kwon

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This paper studies a secondary voltage control framework of the microgrids based on the consensus for a communication network of multiagent. The proposed control is designed by the communication network with one-way links. The communication network is modeled by a directed graph. At this time, the concept of sampling is considered as the communication constraint among each distributed generator in the microgrids. To analyze the sampling effects on the secondary voltage control of the microgrids, by using Lyapunov theory and some mathematical techniques, the sufficient condition for such problem will be established regarding linear matrix inequality (LMI). Finally, some simulation results are given to illustrate the necessity of the consideration of the sampling effects on the secondary voltage control of the microgrids.

Keywords: microgrids, secondary control, multiagent, sampling, LMI

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Authors: Michael B. C. Khoo, J. L. Khoo, W. C. Yeong, W. L. Teoh

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The Shewhart Xbar control chart is a useful process monitoring tool in manufacturing industries to detect the presence of assignable causes. However, it is insensitive in detecting small process shifts. To circumvent this problem, adaptive control charts are suggested. An adaptive chart enables at least one of the chart’s parameters to be adjusted to increase the chart’s sensitivity. Two common adaptive charts that exist in the literature are the double sampling (DS) Xbar and variable sampling interval (VSI) Xbar charts. This paper compares the performances of the DS and VSI Xbar charts, based on the average time to signal (ATS) criterion. The ATS profiles of the DS Xbar and VSI Xbar charts are obtained using the Mathematica and Statistical Analysis System (SAS) programs, respectively. The results show that the VSI Xbar chart is generally superior to the DS Xbar chart.

Keywords: adaptive charts, average time to signal, double sampling, charts, variable sampling interval

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Authors: V. A. Vieira, M. P. Sforcini, V. Endo, G. C. Magioni, M. D. S. Oliveira

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The main goal of this paper was evaluate the effect of diets containing different levels of probiotic on performance and milk composition of lactating cows. Eight Holstein cows were distributed in two 4x4 Latin square. The diets were based on corn silage, concentrate and the treatment (0, 3, 6 or 9 grams of probiotic/animal/day). It was evaluated the dry matter intake of nutrients, milk yield and composition. The use of probiotics did not affect the nutrient intake (p>0.05) neither the daily milk production or corrected to 4% fat (p>0.05). However, it was observed that there was a significant fall in milk composition with higher levels of probiotics supplementation. These results emphasize the need of further studies with different experimental designs or improve the number of Latin square with longer periods of adaptation.

Keywords: dairy cow, milk composition, probiotics, daily milk production

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Authors: Besik Goginava

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Several days later after the end of 2008 Russo-Georgian War, Venezuela and Nicaragua formally recognized the independence of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. In 2009-10 both countries established diplomatic relations with self-declared republics. It is a paradoxical fact that after neighboring Russia-Georgian conflict territories were internationally recognized by two Latin American states with ongoing territorial disputes. The Venezuela-Guyana territorial dispute which officially began in the early XIX century became conflict-ridden again in the late 1990s and 2000s. Venezuela has long claimed the land which comprises 40% of Guyana’s current territory. Territorial disputes of Nicaragua include dispute with Colombia over Caribbean Islands, with Costa Rica over the San Juan River and maritime dispute with Honduras. Based on historical and analytical research methods the purpose of this paper is to establish the relationship between the recognition of Abkhazia and South Ossetia by Venezuela and Nicaragua and Venezuela’s territorial dispute with Guyana, as well as Nicaragua’s with Colombia, Costa Rica and Honduras. The objective of the study is to investigate the factors that led Venezuela and Nicaragua to formally recognize Georgian conflict territories and how could their own territorial disputes affect on their decision.

Keywords: Latin America, Georgia, Venezuela, Nicaragua, Abkhazia, South Ossetia

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Authors: Mahdi Fakheri, Mohammad Mohsen Mahdizadeh Naeini

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This paper addresses an understudied aspect of U.S. foreign aids between the years 2000 and 2020. Despite a growing body of literature on the impacts of U.S. aids, the question about how the United States uses its foreign aids to change developing countries has remained unanswered. As foreign aid is a tool of the United States' foreign policy, answering this very question can reveal the future that the U.S. prefers for developing countries and that secures its national interest. This paper will explore USAID's official dataset, which includes the data of foreign aids to the Middle East, Africa, Latin America, and Southeast Asia from 2000 to 2020. Through an empirical analysis, this paper argues that the focus of U.S. foreign aid is evenly divided between institutional and non-institutional (i.e., slight enhancement of status quo) changes. The former is induced by training and education, funding the initiatives and projects, making capacity and increasing the efficiency of human, operational, and management sectors, and enhancing the living condition of the people. Moreover, it will be demonstrated that the political, military, cultural, economic, and judicial are some of the institutions that the U.S. has planned to change in the aforementioned period and regions.

Keywords: USAID, foreign aid, development, developing countries, Middle East, Africa, Southeast Asia, Latin America

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Authors: Ernesto Ghini

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Workplace accidents are an unfortunate reality. However, they are also predictable and avoidable. We conducted research into a variety of legislation covering lone working, and conducted a study into the use of connected technology and how it can help improve the safety of lone workers in Latin America. We implemented quantitative research into regulations coupled with case study research into a real-life scenario that demonstrated the benefits of technology, and discuss our findings in this paper. Connected safety solutions can improve the bottom line, delivering significant return on investment in terms of improved efficiency and the avoidance of cost associated with worker injury. And, most importantly, such solutions, as demonstrated through our research, make the difference between life and death in time-critical incident situations.

Keywords: ione worker, legislation, technology, connected safety, connectivity

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Authors: Marc Arthur Bien Aimé, Julio da Silveira Moreira

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This study examines the political speech in Haiti over the course of the decade 2011-2021, focusing on the speeches of the presidents Michel J. Martelly and Jovenel Moïse and their impacts on their awareness collective. In using a qualitative approach, we have analyzed the speech of the president pronounced in response to the political instability of countries, as well as interviews with a group of 20 Haitians living in Port- Au-Prince. Our results put in evidence their complex relationship between politics, awareness collective, and the influence of the powers imperialists. We show that the situation in Haiti's disastrous social and political situation is driven by personal political interests and the absence of a state political project. Moreover, the speeches of the president’s analysis are meaningless, transforming concepts such as social progress and justice in simple words. This political rhetoric contributes to the domination symbolic of the population of Haitian. This study is also linked to the theme “Constitutions, processes democratic and critical of the state in Latin America,” emphasizing the importance of analysis of political speech to understand the complexities of the democratic process and criticism of the State in their Latin American region. We suggest future research to deepen our understanding of these political dynamics and their impact on public policies and developments of the constitutions throughout Latin America.

Keywords: political discourse, conscience collective, inequality social, democratic processes, constitutions, Haiti

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Authors: Zs. Csanádi, A. Szabó Nagy, J. Szabó, J. Erdős

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The main objective of this study was to assess the annual concentration and seasonal variation of benzo(a)pyrene (BaP) associated with PM10 in an urban site of Győr and in a rural site of Sarród in the sampling period of 2008–2012. A total of 280 PM10 aerosol samples were collected in each sampling site and analyzed for BaP by gas chromatography method. The BaP concentrations ranged from undetected to 8 ng/m3 with the mean value of 1.01 ng/m3 in the sampling site of Győr, and from undetected to 4.07 ng/m3 with the mean value of 0.52 ng/m3 in the sampling site of Sarród, respectively. Relatively higher concentrations of BaP were detected in samples collected in both sampling sites in the heating seasons compared with non-heating periods. The annual mean BaP concentrations were comparable with the published data of different other Hungarian sites.

Keywords: air quality, benzo(a)pyrene, PAHs, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons

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Authors: A. D. Abdellatif, A. N. Ahmed, M. E. Abdelaziz

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The main purpose of this paper is to design a double acceptance sampling plan under the time truncated life test when the product lifetime follows an exponentiated transmuted Weibull distribution. Here, the motive is to meet both the consumer’s risk and producer’s risk simultaneously at the specified quality levels, while the termination time is specified. A comparison between the results of the double and single acceptance sampling plans is conducted. We demonstrate the applicability of our results to real data sets.

Keywords: double sampling plan, single sampling plan, producer’s risk, consumer’s risk, exponentiated transmuted weibull distribution, time truncated experiment, single, double, Marshal-Olkin

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Authors: Brindusa Grigoriu

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Inscribing itself in the field of the history of multilingual communities with a focus on the evolution of language didactics, our paper aims at providing a pragmatic-interactional approach on a corpus proposing to scholars of the international scientific community a relevant text of early modern European literature: the first romance in French, The Conte of Flore and Blanchefleur by Robert d’Orbigny (1150). The multicultural context described by the romance is one in which an Arab-speaking prince, Floire, and his Francophone protégée, Blanchefleur, learn Latin together at the court of Spain and become fluent enough to turn it into the language of their love. This learning process is made up of interactional patterns of affective relevance, in which the proficiency of the protagonists in the domain of emotive acts becomes a matter of linguistic and pragmatic emulation. From five to ten years old, the pupils are efficiently stimulated by their teacher of Latin, Gaidon – a Moorish scholar of the royal entourage – to cultivate their competencies of oral expression and reading comprehension (of Antiquity classics), while enjoying an ever greater freedom of written expression, including the composition of love poems in this second language of culture and emotional education. Another relevant parameter of the educational process at court is that Latin shares its prominent role as a language of culture with French, whose exemplary learner is the (Moorish) queen herself. Indeed, the adult 'First lady' strives to become a pupil benefitting from lifelong learning provided by a fortuitous slave-teacher with little training, her anonymous chambermaid and Blanchefleur’s mother, who, despite her status of a war trophy, enjoys her Majesty’s confidence as a cultural agent of change in linguistic and theological fields. Thus, the two foreign languages taught at Spains’s court, Latin and French – as opposed to Arabic -, suggest a spiritual authority allowing the mutual enrichment of intercultural pioneers of cross-linguistic communication, in the aftermath of religious wars. Durably, and significantly – if not everlastingly – the language of physical violence rooted in intra-cultural solipsism is replaced by two Romance languages which seem to embody, together and yet distinctly, the parlance of peace-making.

Keywords: multilingualism, history of European language learning, French and Latin learners, multicultural context of medieval romance

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Authors: Adriana Piatti-Crocker

Abstract:

Drawing on archival documentation, digital platforms, academic journals, and reports, this research will explore the diffusion of a protest movement in Latin America. Starting in Argentina in 2015, this paper will explain how the hashtag #NiUnaMenos (“Not One Woman Less”), created to combat violence against women and girls, led to the spread of a regionwide movement. A year after its introduction, hundreds of thousands of activists mobilized on the streets of major cities in Latin America. Movements arose to protest against specific circumstances and contexts under the hashtag #NiUnaMenos, but the main goal of all of these protests was to fight against misogynist violence. Moreover, unlike previous social movements, the use of social media, such as Facebook, Instagram, Whatsapp, and Twitter, changed the depth and scope of these protests and led to an unprecedented speed in helping transmit their messages, strategies, identities, and goals.

Keywords: social protests, #NiUnaMenos ( Not one woman less), diffusion of social protests, protests and mysoginist violence

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Authors: Negar Riazifar, Nigel G. Stocks

Abstract:

This paper proposes strategies in level crossing (LC) sampling and reconstruction that provide high fidelity signal reconstruction for speech signals; these strategies circumvent the problem of exponentially increasing number of samples as the bit-depth is increased and hence are highly efficient. Specifically, the results indicate that the distribution of the intervals between samples is one of the key factors in the quality of signal reconstruction; including samples with short intervals do not improve the accuracy of the signal reconstruction, whilst samples with large intervals lead to numerical instability. The proposed sampling method, termed reduced conventional level crossing (RCLC) sampling, exploits redundancy between samples to improve the efficiency of the sampling without compromising performance. A reconstruction technique is also proposed that enhances the numerical stability through linear interpolation of samples separated by large intervals. Interpolation is demonstrated to improve the accuracy of the signal reconstruction in addition to the numerical stability. We further demonstrate that the RCLC and interpolation methods can give useful levels of signal recovery even if the average sampling rate is less than the Nyquist rate.

Keywords: level crossing sampling, numerical stability, speech processing, trigonometric polynomial

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Authors: Syed Ali Taqi, Muhammad Ismail

Abstract:

A comparative study of estimators of population means in two phase sampling in the presence of non-response when Unknown population means of the auxiliary variable(s) and incomplete information of study variable y as well as of auxiliary variable(s) is made. Three real data sets of University students, hospital and unemployment are used for comparison of all the available techniques in two phase sampling in the presence of non-response with the newly generalized ratio estimators.

Keywords: two-phase sampling, ratio estimator, product estimator, generalized estimators

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