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Discovering the influences between paintings and artists is very important for automatic art analysis. Lately, this problem has gained more importance since research studies are looking into explanations about the origin and evolution of artistic styles, which is a related problem. This paper proposes to build a multiplex artwork representation based on artistic formal concepts to gain more understanding about the aforementioned problem. We complement and built our approach on the previous notion of Creativity Implication Network. We used the recently proposed MultiRank algorithm to suggest possible explanations of the dynamic of some artistic styles. Our results corroborate some well-known facts about the artists analyzed and give qualitative and quantitative information that show the possibilities and strengths of the proposed framework. We plan to expand our analysis to include more abstract artworks. Ideally, we are going to be able to validate more our results and test how our methodology could be used to generate visual artifacts too.

In this paper, we show an unintended effect of the program Ser Pilo Paga (SPP) that was a flagship program of the Colombian government between 2014 and 2018. It was designed as an intervention in the Colombian Higher Education System (CHES) by awarding, in the steady state, individual funding to about 40,000 students. Every year, 10,000 new students were chosen from the best applicants in the top decile of the population in the entrance exam to higher education in Colombia that also came from families that live under the level of poverty according to a national survey. Our approach, based on an intensive study of the changes in the statistical distributions of the exam scores during these four years, provides evidence of student performance improvements not only of the beneficiaries of the program, but also of the whole student population. This shows that the program opened similar opportunities for all the students, especially for the poorest ones. The program drove a reduction in the gap between students of the upper strata of the population and those of the lowest strata that usually did not access a high quality institution of higher education due to the lack of funding. This result has opened a debate about the optimal way of funding higher education.

Low-and middle-income countries (LMICs) are experiencing a nutritional transition in which the burden of obesity tends to shift towards the lower-socioeconomic status (SES) group. We propose a system dynamics (SD) model for assessing the nutritional stage dynamics of the Colombian urban population by age and SES projected to 2030. This SD model captures the ageing population according to body mass index (BMI) categories and SES. In this model, the transference rates (TRs) between BMI categories by age and SES are estimated using a heuristic based on data obtained from national surveys. The simulation results show that the Colombian population, particularly those aged 20 to 39 years with a lower SES, is moving towards the overweight and obese categories. The TRs for overweight and obese categories in the lower SES group (the mean TR from not overweight to overweight = 0.0215 (per year) and mean TR from overweight to obese = 0.0098 (per year)) are increasing more rapidly than the those in the middle (the mean TR from not overweight to overweight = 0.0162 (per year) and mean TR from overweight to obese = 0.0065 (per year)) and higher SES groups (the mean TR from not overweight to overweight = 0.0166 and mean TR from overweight to obese = 0.0054 (per year)). Additionally, from 2005 to 2010, individuals aged 20 to 39 years had the highest TRs towards the overweight and obese categories (from 0.026 to 0.036 per year and from 0.0064 to 0.012 per year, respectively). The TRs also indicated that children aged 0 to 14 years are moving from the obese to overweight and from the overweight to not overweight categories. These TRs show that the Colombian population is experiencing an SES-related nutritional transition that is affecting the lower SES population. The proposed model could be implemented to assess the nutritional transitions experienced in other LMICs.

We characterize the behavior and the social structures appearing from a model of general social interaction proposed by Sakoda. The model consists of two interacting populations in a two-dimensional periodic lattice with empty sites. It contemplates a set of simple rules that combine attitudes, ranges of interactions, and movement decisions. We analyze the evolution of the 45 different interaction rules via a Potts-like energy function which drives the system irreversibly to an equilibrium or a steady state. We discuss the robustness of the social structures, dynamical behaviors, and the existence of spatial long range order in terms of the social interactions and the equilibrium energy.

The objective of this work is to observe and analyze the conceptual-relation structures in texts written in Spanish, from the perspective of second-order cybernetics. Texts are shaped by the syntactic structure of the sentences they contain. Conceptual-relationships emerge by transforming the text, using a text analysis platform named PAST. The transformation is guided by a set of established rules, permitting to observe a system. PAST can be defined as a powerful operator to transform texts written by the students in a Master's Program class. The platform is introduced as a tool enabling a graph representation of relationships among the concepts in the text. The internal procedure of the platform and the graph construction concerns the linguistic analysis. Although the resulting graphic representation does not follow a formal definition, it reflects an iterative construction to define a topology to create a semantic network. This network only makes sense to the author of the text. In other words, the author (observer), based on the cybernetics of the observing systems, uses a tool that enables him to make a second-order observation of a document that he/she has linearly written. The main epistemological concepts mentioned throughout the development of the proposal are discourse and distinction. The contribution of this work is the application of a methodology that conducts a recursive observation of both the direct and indirect relationships established by the words the author puts together in his/her written discourse. In the discussion of results the next phases of this work are presented.

This paper is focused on reflecting upon a learning process that was developed in the Colombian National Audit Office as part of a project for its institutional change and strengthening. The paper offers a description of the training program carried out for the construction of new practices for auditing and a model for the construction of learning in which it was based. Finally, some general thoughts are presented about how deliberate interventions in a system work in order to increase the capability of the system to construct knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper develops a new discourse of control. The new discourse rejects the view that control is achieved through inspections and information alone, and supports the view that effective control means self-control and effective communications, both being necessary conditions to enable organizations to perform well. In this discourse, corruption is taken to be, among other things, the outcome of fragmentation in communications. Therefore, a movement toward a recursive organization of the State is offered as a way to countering corruption. This discourse was developed during a project for Institutional Change and Strengthening implemented at the Contraloría General de la República (CGR), in Colombia from 1995 to 1998. As part of the discourse we offer a distinction among traditional auditing practices, second-order auditing, and integrated systemic auditing practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]