Electronic administration in Spain: From its beginnings to the present

This study presents the basic lines of electronic administration in Spain. The complexity of the Spanish political-administrative system makes such a study challenging, in view of the considerable degree of autonomy and competences of the regional administrative bodies and local agencies with respect to the central government, the former being more visible in the 17 regions of Spain. Nonetheless, the central government maintains a series of legal instruments that allow a certain common framework of action to be imposed, aside from what is put into effect through diverse programs aimed precisely to develop common tools for the regions and municipalities of Spain. After an introduction that provides some necessary background, this study describes the legislative framework in which Spain's electronic administrative system has developed. The data included in the study refer to investment in information and communication technologies (ICT) and the services offered by the different Administrations on the internet; internet access by citizens, homes, businesses, and employees, as well as the interactivity existing with administrations by means of the internet; the origins and rise of various political initiatives of the Central Government involving electronic administration; and finally, the situation of civil service personnel, as catalysts of the success of Information Society in the Public Administration within Spain.     

Analyzing the impact of knowledge management on CRM success: The mediating effects of organizational factors

Customer relationship management (CRM) and knowledge management (KM) have become key strategic tool for all companies, especially in the current competitive environment. Moreover, customer knowledge is an important issue for CRM implementation. Reviewing the literature, we found many studies that analyze the crucial role played by KM initiatives as determinants of the success of CRM. Moreover, we found also diverse studies that show high rates of failure when implementing that strategy, so there is still no integrated conceptual framework to guide companies to their successful implementation. In this paper, with data of 153 Spanish hotels, we examine the relationships between KM and CRM success using a structural equation model. The main contribution is that having knowledge management capabilities is not sufficient for the success of CRM, but there are other factors to consider. In particular, organizational factors indeed impact CRM success and they appear to be intermediaries of the impact of other factors (KM capabilities/technological/customer orientation factors) in the success of CRM (in financial and marketing terms).     

Design and environmental technologies: Does ‘green-matching’ actually help?

This paper investigates whether a green kind of design helps firms increase their capabilities for inventing in the environmental domain and whether it does so more than ‘standard’ design. It also investigates whether the effect of ‘green-matching’ between new design and technologies is conditional on firms’ innovative capabilities, as reflected by their R&D expenditure. We address these research questions with respect to the world's top R&D investors, looking at their intellectual property rights at the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) and proposing an original textual identification of green designs and trademarks. We find that green design increases environmental inventions by top R&D investors, and to a greater extent than non-environmental ones. Standard design also stimulates environmental inventions, but to a lesser extent than green design. The ‘green-matching’ actually helps, but internal innovative capabilities are required to make it effective: a green-tech ‘prize’ emerges from green design, but only once a minimum threshold of R&D expenditure has been reached.     

Technologies in the education of children and teenagers with autism: evaluation and classification of apps by work areas

Education and Information Technologies - Mobile apps represent a resource with great potential for encouraging the development of many skills, given the high number of apps available and the quick...     

Developing an audiovisual notebook as a self‐learning tool in histology: Perceptions of teachers and students

Videos can be used as didactic tools for self‐learning under several circumstances, including those cases in which students are responsible for the development of this resource as an audiovisual notebook. We compared students' and teachers' perceptions regarding the main features that an audiovisual notebook should include. Four questionnaires with items about information, images, text and music, and filmmaking were used to investigate students' (n = 115) and teachers' perceptions (n = 28) regarding the development of a video focused on a histological technique. The results show that both students and teachers significantly prioritize informative components, images and filmmaking more than text and music. The scores were significantly higher for teachers than for students for all four components analyzed. The highest scores were given to items related to practical and medically oriented elements, and the lowest values were given to theoretical and complementary elements. For most items, there were no differences between genders. A strong positive correlation was found between the scores given to each item by teachers and students. These results show that both students' and teachers' perceptions tend to coincide for most items, and suggest that audiovisual notebooks developed by students would emphasize the same items as those perceived by teachers to be the most relevant. Further, these findings suggest that the use of video as an audiovisual learning notebook would not only preserve the curricular objectives but would also offer the advantages of self‐learning processes. Anat Sci Educ 7: 209–218. © 2013 American Association of Anatomists.     

The Smithsonian Folklife Festival and Cultural Heritage Policy in Colombia: A Case Study

As Colombia began to develop its Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH) policy, it signed an agreement with the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage to collaborate on a Smithsonian Folklife Festival of Colombia's national living traditions, to be shown on the National Mall in 2011. This essay addresses the role of the Smithsonian Folklife Center in advocating for a cultural heritage policy grounded in cultural democracy and intercultural dialogue, as well as its collaboration with UNESCO in crafting the 2003 convention for the protection of intangible cultural heritage. We focus on the Center's signature collaborative program, the Smithsonian Folklife Festival, and on our experience with the 2011 Festival program, Colombia: The Nature of Culture. We examine the relationship between the Festival and Colombia's intangible cultural heritage communities, policies, and practices, through intercultural dialogues that contribute to shaping Intangible Cultural Heritage policy from the bottom up.     

Surface tension effects on submerged electrosprays

Electrosprays are a powerful technique to generate charged micro/nanodroplets. In the last century, the technique has been extensively studied, developed, and recognized with a shared Nobel price in Chemistry in 2002 for its wide spread application in mass spectrometry. However, nowadays techniques based on microfluidic devices are competing to be the next generation in atomization techniques. Therefore, an interesting development would be to integrate the electrospray technique into a microfluidic liquid-liquid device. Several works in the literature have attempted to build a microfluidic electrospray with disputable results. The main problem for its integration is the lack of knowledge of the working parameters of the liquid-liquid electrospray. The “submerged electrosprays” share similar properties as their counterparts in air. However, in the microfluidic generation of micro/nanodroplets, the liquid-liquid interfaces are normally stabilized with surface active agents, which might have critical effects on the electrospray behavior. In this work, we review the main properties of the submerged electrosprays in liquid baths with no surfactant, and we methodically study the behavior of the system for increasing surfactant concentrations. The different regimes found are then analyzed and compared with both classical and more recent experimental, theoretical and numerical studies. A very rich phenomenology is found when the surface tension is allowed to vary in the system. More concretely, the lower states of electrification achieved with the reduced surface tension regimes might be of interest in biological or biomedical applications in which excessive electrification can be hazardous for the encapsulated entities.