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Background: The aim of our study was to analyze the effect of socioeconomic inequalities, both at the individual and area of residence levels, on the probability of COVID-19 confirmed infection, and its variations across three pandemic waves. Methods: Retrospective cohort study. We included data from all individuals tested by COVID-19 during the three waves of the pandemic, from March to December 2020 (357,989 individuals). We studied the effect of inequalities on the risk of having a COVID-19 confirmed diagnosis after being tested using multilevel analyses with two levels of aggregation: individuals and basic healthcare area (BHA) of residence (deprivation level and type of zone). Results: Patient profile changed through the pandemic, with a predominance of low-paid employees living in deprived BHA. Workers with low salaries, unemployed and people on minimum integration income or who no longer receive the unemployment allowance, had a higher probability of COVID-19 infection than workers with salaries ≥€18,000 per year. Inequalities were higher in women and in the second wave. The deprivation level of BHA of residence influenced the risk of COVID-19 infection, especially in the second wave. Conclusions: There are inequalities in the risk of COVID-19 confirmed infection, both at individual and area level. It is necessary to develop individual and area coordinated measures in the control, diagnosis and treatment of the epidemic, in order to avoid an increase in the already existing inequalities.

‘Sugar dating’ denominates the dating dynamic in which two persons agree to an exchange of company and, in some cases, sex, for financial assistance. Since sexual services are regularly included in a ‘sugar’ dynamic, it falls into the realm of transactional sex. A ‘sugar’ relationship is ordinarily formed by a younger woman (‘Sugar Baby’) and an older, more affluent man (‘Sugar Daddy’). Despite anecdotal evidence suggesting an increase in the number of British university students participating in sugar dating in the last decade, sugar relationships in the United Kingdom are under-researched. This study offers a pioneering academic approach to sugar dating by locating these transactional relationships in the context of British higher education institutions and the neoliberal precarization of university students in the UK. Among the numerous sugar dating websites that have proliferated in the last decade in Britain, Seeking.com stands out not only for being the most popular platform providing an online, ‘sugaring’ meet-up place, but also for operating as the matrix where the ‘sugar’ discourse is constructed. Through its discursive power, the site produces the Sugar Baby as a subject inasmuch as Sugar Babies and Daddies are subjected and subjugated, through a process of assujettissement. Through semi-structured interviews conducted with ten Sugar Babies, this study analyses how Seeking.com’s discursive power affects the development of their relationships with their Sugar Daddies, how gendered inequalities are reproduced in sugar dating, and how the neoliberalisation of higher education in the UK influences the participants’ decision to sugar date. The data showed that the participants’ entrance into sugar dating was influenced by multiple factors including insufficient student loans, underpaid part-time jobs, and lack of parental support. A postfeminist approach towards femininity and sexuality, aided by a neoliberal mindset of self-responsibilisation, constituted the ideological framework that facilitated participation in sugar dating. This study concludes that sugar dating is informed by a complex gendered transactional dynamic of sex and power whose popularity is favoured by the current ideological and material neoliberal milieu. This context facilitates the sexual and emotional exploitation of Sugar Babies against the background of university students’ increased impoverishment.

In many global South cities, informal hawkers occupy public spaces to earn a living. They often face eviction, resulting in uncertain income and insecure access to workplaces. Inevitably, many vendors nurture a clientelist link with political brokers to cope with their precarious street life. In some cases, vendor groups engage with state agencies to resist eviction and push for social inclusionary policies. While the informal vending literature has examined the strategies and outcomes of various state-vendor relationships, there has been scant scholarly account on the role of intermediaries in the engagement channels. In this paper, I ask: How do grassroots intermediaries facilitate and sustain engagement channels between street vendors and state actors? What role/s do they play in the engagement practices? I draw on the experience of Baclaran hawkers to demonstrate how grassroots intermediaries perform four functions: a) conduit to power structures; b) instrument of control; c) facilitator of social dialogues; d) channel for policy advocacy. I argue that these critical roles reinforce grassroots democratic entanglements where collective action practices contain progressive and regressive democratic elements as well as conflicting motives or routines in a context of acute inequality and informality.

El principal desafío tecnológico relacionado con la Seguridad y Defensa es la identificación de forma rápida y fiable de diferentes aeronaves en vuelo. La identificación no cooperativa de blancos aéreos basada en perfiles en distancia de alta resolución, permite conocer si un blanco es amigo o enemigo sin necesidad de establecer un enlace de comunicación con él. Este artículo presenta la simulación de un sistema de reconocimiento basado en la aplicación de la descomposición de valores singulares a un conjunto de perfiles sintéticos, para extraer sus características principales. Mediante esta técnica, cada blanco se modela como un subespacio, y de esta manera es posible trabajar con la información más significativa en el dominio transformado, reduciendo efectos no deseados como el ruido u otras posibles interferencias. Preprint

In the last few years, there is a great interest in developing an identification system capable to make a reliable classification of aircrafts into different groups (friendly, hostile or neutral). Depending on the context in which these systems are deployed, incorrect identification may lead to serious problems, such as fratricide or engagement of civilian aircrafts. Different techniques have been researched to face this problem, but non-cooperative ones have awakened more interest because they do not require aircraft collaboration. Non Cooperative Target Identification (NCTI) using radar is a complex task, mainly due to the fact that a database of possible targets is needed. To populate this database, Radar Cross Section (RCS) predictions produced by computer simulation seem to be the most feasible way to perform this task, since measurements alone cannot cover the vast range of targets, configurations and required aspect angles. These predictions are typically performed in the frequency domain and a specific processing must be done to obtain both High Resolution Range Profiles (HRRPs) and 2D Inverse Synthetic Aperture Radar (2D-ISAR) images. This paper shows a methodology to face the NCTI task, which use both synthetic HRRPs and 2D-ISAR to achieve an accurate identification. Peerreview