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Comunicação e gestão de crises em empresas galegas: estudo da sua evolução nos últimos dois anos
Full text linkEste é um estudo no qual se explora a abordagem de comunicação de crise utilizada pelas empresas galegas classificadas como “altamente poluentes”. Tendo como ponto de partida o Registro Estatal de Emisiones y Fuentes Contaminantes do Ministerio de la Transición Ecológica (PRTR Espanha), foi estabelecido o universo de estudo e analisou-se a atividade comunicativa das 87 empresas sediadas na Galiza, que possuem o maior índice de emissões poluentes (soma de resíduos e emissões do ano de 2016), através da realização de entrevistas em profundidade. Os resultados foram comparados com aqueles que foram obtidos no ano de 2014, na primeira fase do estudo, que incluiu a recolha de informações de 120 empresas. O objetivo deste trabalho foi realizar uma análise da gestão de crise destas empresas e, assim, avaliar a atividade comunicativa do setor, bem como a sua evolução nos últimos anos (2014-2016).This study analysed the communicative approach followed by Galician companies classified as “highly polluting” in crisis situations. Taking as a starting point the Registro Estatal de
Emisiones y Fuentes Contaminantes, dependent of the Ministerio de la Transición Ecológica
(PRTR Spain), the universe under study has been established and the communicative activity of
the 87 companies based in Galicia with the highest polluting emissions index (sum of waste and
emissions, data referring to 2016) has been analysed through in-depth interviews. The results are
compared with those obtained two years ago, in the first phase of the study, when information
was collected from 120 companies (data from 2014). The purpose of the study is to carry out an
analysis of crisis management of this companies and thus be able to assess the communication
activity in this sector, as well as its evolution in recent years (2014-2016).Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia | Ref. UID/CCI/00736/201
No evidence for increased loss of old carbon in a temperate organic soil after 13 years of simulated climatic warming despite increased CO 2 emissions
No full textDetermining the temperature sensitivity of terrestrial carbon (C) stores is an urgent priority for predicting future climate feedbacks. A key aspect to solve this long‐standing research gap is to determine whether warmer temperatures will increase autotrophic activities leading to greater C storage or promote heterotrophic activities that will drive these systems to become C sources. We experimentally addressed this critical question by subjecting intact plant‐soil systems in a UK upland ecosystem to simulated climate warming under natural field conditions. We report the results of a 13‐year field‐based climate manipulation experiment combining in situ respiration measurements with radiocarbon ( 14 C) analyses of respired CO 2 , dissolved organic carbon (DOC), soil and the tissue contents of the dominant soil fauna (enchytraeids). We found that warming during the growing season produced the largely expected increases in ecosystem respiration (63%) and leaching of DOC (19%) with no evidence for thermal acclimation or substrate exhaustion over the whole 13‐year experimental period. Contrary to expectations, we found no evidence to support an increased release of old soil C after more than a decade of simulated climatic change, and indeed, 14 C analyses indicated that warming caused a significant shift towards mineralisation of more recent plant‐derived C inputs. Further support came from the radiocarbon analyses of the enchytraeid tissues, which showed a greater assimilation of the more recent (plant‐derived) C sources following warming. Therefore, in contrast to subarctic ecosystems, our results suggest that changes in C storage in this UK upland soil are strongly coupled to plant activities and that increasing temperatures will drive the turnover of organic material fixed only within recent years, without resulting in the loss of existing old carbon stores.Xunta de GaliciaMinisterio de EducaciónNatural Environment Research Council (UK) | Ref. NRCF01000
Automatic classification of urban pavements using mobile LiDAR data and roughness descriptors
No full textMaintenance of urban road pavements is shown as critical in city management. Mobile Laser Scanning is well-established for achieving geo-reference point clouds and imagery depicting the reality in an accurate and productive manner and intense efforts have been made to implement automatic methods for extracting geometric and semantic useful information. This work shows a method based on evaluating roughness descriptors from mobile LiDAR data to automatically segment and classifies asphalt and stone pavements. The method includes segmentation of 1 m slices from the road, extraction of profiles, evaluation of roughness parameters, and K-means clustering. Among the evaluated roughness descriptors, only arithmetic average of absolute values (between 2.5 · 10−3 m to 4 · 10−3 m for stone and 10−3 to 2 · 10−3 m for asphalt) and root mean squared (between 3 · 10−3 m to 5 · 10−3 m for stone and 10−3 m to 2 · 10−3 m for asphalt) show robust classification. The methodology is tested in three real case studies.Xunta de Galicia | Ref. CN2012/269Xunta de Galicia | Ref. R2014/032Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad | Ref. TIN2013-46801-C4-4-RMinisterio de Economía y Competitividad | Ref. ENE2013-48015-C3-1-
Global Patterns and Controls of Nutrient Immobilization on Decomposing Cellulose in Riverine Ecosystems
No full textMicrobes play a critical role in plant litter decomposition and influence the fate of carbon in rivers and riparian zones. When decomposing low-nutrient plant litter, microbes acquire nitrogen (N) and phosphorus (P) from the environment (i.e., nutrient immobilization), and this process is potentially sensitive to nutrient loading and changing climate. Nonetheless, environmental controls on immobilization are poorly understood because rates are also influenced by plant litter chemistry, which is coupled to the same environmental factors. Here we used a standardized, low-nutrient organic matter substrate (cotton strips) to quantify nutrient immobilization at 100 paired stream and riparian sites representing 11 biomes worldwide. Immobilization rates varied by three orders of magnitude, were greater in rivers than riparian zones, and were strongly correlated to decomposition rates. In rivers, P immobilization rates were controlled by surface water phosphate concentrations, but N immobilization rates were not related to inorganic N. The N:P of immobilized nutrients was tightly constrained to a molar ratio of 10:1 despite wide variation in surface water N:P. Immobilization rates were temperature-dependent in riparian zones but not related to temperature in rivers. However, in rivers nutrient supply ultimately controlled whether microbes could achieve the maximum expected decomposition rate at a given temperature. Collectively, we demonstrated that exogenous nutrient supply and immobilization are critical control points for decomposition of organic matter.Secretaría de Educación Superior, Ciencia, Tecnología e InnovaciónHuron Mountain Wildlife FoundationU.S. Department of Energy (DOE) | Ref. DE-AC05-00OR22725Gouvernement du Canada | Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC)Kent State Universit
Pataqueiras and Radieschen: phraseology of death in German and Galician
Full text linkO obxectivo deste traballo é describir os campos icónicos máis produtivos e rastrexar a ligazón cultural que ten a fraseoloxía do alemán e do galego no campo semántico da morte e buscar converxencias e diverxencias. A partir dunha clasificación flexible de bloques referenciais e dominios fonte, sinalamos diferentes tipos de motivación semántica, nomeadamente, modelos metafóricos, metonímicos e simbólicos.The aim of this paper is to describe productive iconic fields and trace cultural-boundness in Galician and German phraseology within the semantic field DEATH, detecting convergences and divergences. From a flexible classification into referential complexes and source domains, different types of semantic motivation arise, specially, metaphorical, metonymycal and symbolic.Ministerio de Educación y Ciencia | Ref. HUM2007-6219
SWL-LSE: A dataset of health-related signs in Spanish Sign Language with an ISLR Baseline Method
Full text linkProgress in automatic sign language recognition and translation has been hindered by the scarcity of datasets available for the training of machine learning algorithms, a challenge that is even more acute for languages with smaller signing communities, such as Spanish. In this paper, we introduce a dataset of 300 isolated signs in Spanish Sign Language, collected online via a web application with contributions from 124 participants, resulting in a total of 8000 instances. This dataset, which is openly available, includes keypoints extracted using MediaPipe Holistic. The goal of this paper is to describe the construction and characteristics of the dataset and to provide a baseline classification method using a spatial–temporal graph convolutional network (ST-GCN) model, encouraging the scientific community to improve upon it. The experimental section offers a comparative analysis of the method’s performance on the new dataset, as well as on two other well-known datasets. The dataset, code, and web app used for data collection are freely available, and the web app can also be used to test classifier performance on-line in real-time.Agencia Estatal de Investigación | Ref. PID2021-123988OB-C32Agencia Estatal de Investigación | Ref. PRE2019-088146Xunta de Galici
Chiral molecules in action: chemistry of chiral perovskite and perovskite-inspired materials
Full text linkThe emergence of chiral metal halides marks a pivotal advancement in materials science, where structural asymmetry enables unprecedented control over spin-selective transport and polarized light interactions for optoelectronic and spintronic technologies. The introduction of chiral ligands into the metal halide lattice or on the surface of NCs imparts chirality to the corresponding hybrid materials, which adapts the handedness (R or S) of the chiral molecule. The choice of chiral molecule and metal halide type critically influences the crystal structure and dimensionality of metal halide crystals and thus their properties. Despite significant progress, the relationship between structure and chiroptical efficiency remains unclear. Nonetheless, they show great promise for spin filtering, enabling the fabrication of chiral LEDs and photodetectors. Considering these advancements, this Perspective focuses on the chiral-ligand-assisted design, synthesis, and functional exploration of chiral metal halide bulk and nanocrystals, along with the outstanding challenges that need to be addressed in the future.Agencia Estatal de Investigación | Ref. PID2023-147567NB-I00Agencia Estatal de Investigación | Ref. TED2021-131628A-I00Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft | Ref. EXC 2089/1 390776260Xunta de Galicia | Ref. ED431F2021/05Alexander von Humboldt-StiftungUniversidade de Vigo/CISUGAgencia Estatal de Investigación | Ref. CNS2022-135531Agencia Estatal de Investigación | Ref. RYC2018-026103-
Shape grammar approach to 3D modeling of indoor environments using point clouds
No full textAs-is three-dimensional (3D) models of indoor environments are of paramount importance for a variety of applications such as navigation assistance and emergency response. Whereas manual reconstruction of 3D indoor models is a time-consuming task, methods for automatic or semiautomatic reconstruction can achieve a significant reduction of the time and labor required for indoor modeling. This paper proposes a new shape grammar approach for efficient generation of 3D models of indoor environments from point clouds. The shape grammar derives 3D models of complex environments by using a simple primitive and iterative application of grammar rules governed by a production procedure. The method can reconstruct both building elements and navigable spaces along with their topological relations. It produces 3D parametric models with high geometric accuracy and rich semantic content compliant with building information modeling (BIM) standards. Experiments on synthetic and real data sets show the ability of the method to generate highly accurate indoor models with computation times ranging from seconds to a few minutes. The usefulness of the output models in supporting indoor path planning at varying granularities is also demonstrated.Xunta de Galicia | Ref. ED481B 2016/079-
The role of the ECJ as a court of arbitration in the international tax arena: considerations about the ECJ decision in Austria V. Germany, C-648/15
No full text[Inicio] On 3 December 2015 the CJEU was for the first time called upon to solve
a bilateral dispute between two Member States.* The dispute was of a fiscal
nature and between Austria and Germany being the first country the one which
submitted it to the CJEU based on Article 25.5 of the Double Tax Convention
between both countries (DTC), according to which “if any difficulty or doubt
arising as to the interpretation or application of the DTC cannot be removed by the
competent authorities by the use of the mutual agreement procedure f[...] within a period
of 3 years from the date of initiation of the procedure, the States upon application [...]
shall be obliged to refer the case to arbitration proceedings before the EC] pursuant to Art.
273 TFEU”,
The case brought an excellent opportunity to know more about the Court's
position as regards the requirements laid down in Article 273 TFEU allowing the
CJEU to act as a forum for dispute resolutions. So far, there was only a case where
the CJEU had the chance to interpret Article 273 TFEÚ. In its decision in Pringle5%
a preliminary reference case referred by the Irish Supreme Court, the CJEU was
faced with the need to answer several issues related with the compatibility of the
Treaty on the European Stability Mechanism (ESM Treaty)" with EU law, and in
this context, had to interpret Article 273 TFEU, shaping its jurisdictional contours
based on the abovementioned provision. [...