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This study aims to present the results of inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (ICP-MS) determination of economically significant metals including rare-earth elements and Y (REY), Co + Ni + Cu obtained from the Fe-Mn deposits (FMD) of different areas selected along the Atlantic Ocean.

The description of the instrumental part of the analysis was shown in detail, including the choice of the acquisition mode and other settings of the quadrupole ICP-MS Agilent 7700x, which allow to eliminate spectral overlaps as much as possible and to achieve good precision and accuracy of the measurement. The accuracy of the obtained results was controlled by analysis of certified reference materials (CRM) of Fe-Mn nodules of the US Geological Survey – NOD-A-1 and NOD-P-1, as well as the Russian CRM samples of Fe-Mn nodule OOPE 603 (SDO-6) and ore crust OOPE 604 (SDO-7). Statistical processing of the analysis results demonstrated the acceptability of chosen sample preparation technique and ICP-MS tunes for the determination of REY in FMD.

The performed analytical research allowed giving a geochemical characteristic of studied FMD. The precision for the elements to be determined according to the relative standard deviation (RSD) was within 5.0%.

To move away from the subjective visual assessment of the analytical results quality in terms of absence (or presence) of the REE sawtooth distribution, an original objective mathematical method was proposed.

Despite the rapid growth of the World Wide Web in the last several years few studies have appeared in the literature assessing Web sites’ efficacy. This paper provides an original Web Assessment Index, focused on four categories: accessibility, speed, navigability and content. The scoring mechanism is explained and the index is applied to assess the Web sites of all Spanish universities. Finally, conclusions and implications derived from this study are presented.

Recent articles in the business press and academic literature affirm that one of the primary means for achieving competitive advantage through product development is by accelerating the development process. A wide range of advanced technologies and techniques have become available to accelerate the design, engineering and manufacture of new products. However, much attention has been focused on new product development techniques but little empirical research has been conducted to validate these techniques. In this exploratory study, we try to identify those techniques that are more useful to accelerating the product development process. Our findings, based on data from 54 Spanish firms, suggest that some available techniques are not effective in achieving this goal of reducing the time to market. Implications for researchers and managers are discussed.

Critique originated by earlier theorization of environmental accounting, as a way of building environmentalist visibility of business, led Gray et al., to study environmental accounting in the dynamics of organizational change. They concluded that environmental accounting is being used to “negotiate the conception of the environment” by companies that have not significantly changed. In order to investigate whether Gray et al.’s model and conclusions apply to a different cultural context, we have conducted nine case studies in Spain. We found that Spanish organizations are not truly changing their conventional perception of the environment, even in those cases where generalized structural and organizational changes are taking place. Moreover, the use of environmental accounting is coupled with an attempt to negotiate and control the environmental agenda.

This paper aims to analyse the surface evolution of pure recycled titanium subjected to isothermal and cyclic oxidation conditions using dry air as oxidant gas. It is important to mention that the cyclic oxidation behaviour of pure titanium is a process that has been barely studied.

An isothermal and cyclic oxidation reactor was built for these purposes. This installation allows the oxidation of material under the action of any atmosphere and for temperatures up to 1,200°C. For this study, the oxidation behaviour of the material was studied at 850°C and 950°C.

Oxide growth under isothermal oxidation conditions in air follows a parabolic behaviour with an activation energy of 118 kJ/mol, and the oxide phase formed on the surface of the metal was rutile. The cyclic oxidation of the material indicates that oxide is spalled from the surface following linear behaviours; this phenomenon is controlled by the thermal stresses experienced by the samples during heating and cooling cycles.

The material is obtained from the production of electrolytic copper, and during its reprocessing practices at high temperature, it was thought that it could experience some abnormal oxidation. In addition, given that pure titanium is currently used for biomedical application, some surface degree can be given by means of oxidation and subsequent spallation process situation that is found during the cyclic oxidation experiments, which could be a low-cost method to engineer a surface for these purposes.

In this chapter, we analyse the role of women in armed Basque nationalist and separatist terrorist group Euskadi Ta Askatasuna (ETA) from a gender perspective. ETA women were essential agents in the armed conflict, but their image in the mass media and society has been very different from that of their male colleagues (Rodríguez Lara, 2017). Also, their role in the terrorist gang has described a sexually based functional specialisation. In addition, this chapter seeks to contribute to the area of feminist studies on women and political violence. Women's role in one of the most important armed nationalist groups in Europe, ETA, stands as a suitable case study to understand how the mass media (press, journalism), audiovisual content, and social representations of ETA have portrayed these women. The final conclusion of this chapter is that women were not portrayed in the same way as their male colleagues. Women of ETA were doubly penalised because they were women and because they were terrorists.

Considering the potential of Collaborative International Online Learning (COIL) for cross-boundaries interacting and collaborating effectively, this study aims to explore the intercultural awareness of pre-service language teachers after participating in a COIL project.

Following a quantitative research approach and an exploratory cross-sectional method, the authors administered a 13-item questionnaire to unveil the perceptions of 64 future language teachers from Spain after their online experience with counterparts from the USA.

Participants consider that COIL may have enhanced their intercultural and global awareness and equipped them with valuable skills and knowledge for the future, being women more positive than men. Moreover, the results also suggest that those participants who have not traveled abroad consider COIL to be a good opportunity to compensate for the lack of knowledge or experience with other cultures resulting from not having had the opportunity to visit other countries.

COIL needs to be seen as a powerful tool to promote global learning, intercultural understanding and the development of skills among students that will be vital for success in today’s interconnected world. Nevertheless, universities and teacher training centers need to rethink the preparation of future teachers for the increasing demands to prepare students for the requirements of the global world, and to do so, they need to consider that COIL may offer them significant benefits.

This work offers an interesting exploration of teachers’ attitudes toward COIL, providing insights into the potential of online collaboration for developing intercultural awareness.

This paper aims to present a systematic review of the literature on sustainability for the competitiveness of firms to identify the state of the art, significant discussions and new research directions. Recently, due to the negative impacts that traditional and unsustainable practices of companies have caused the Planet (e.g. climate change, sanitary crisis), national and international research urgently calls for the assessment of sustainable practices in firms. However, progress seems slow due to a poor understanding of the necessary changes that companies must make in their specific reality. Competitiveness has remained as firms’ primary strategy to endure. Some have associated sustainability with an increment of costs, sometimes with a negative impact on its competitiveness. Sometimes generating oppositions from stakeholder and institutions regulations, it is important to explore how these behaviors and dynamics of this relationship between sustainability and competitiveness affect the pursued transition to sustainability.

A systematic review of the literature, which is a scientific tool, is used in this research. It allows reliably and accurately analyzing and constructing conclusions from a broad database. The search was leaked over the 10 years, from 2010 to 2019. As a basis, 182 scientific articles were identified and revised based on methodology selection criteria and 51 articles were revised in detail.

This paper identifies critical variables analyzed in the selected articles, sustainability strategies for competitiveness, strategies for sustainability, organizational aspects for sustainability and competitiveness, measurement of sustainability, models, moderating factors for sustainability and new future research directions.

This paper presents state of art about sustainability for competitiveness and identifying key themes and future research directions.

This paper aims to propose future public policy guidelines (FPPG) in sustainable regional development for Guaviare (Colombia) – a territory affected by environmental and social distress – for the year 2035.

Following collective action theory and sustainable regional development literature, a foresight exercise was conducted using site focus groups and semi-structured interviews with local participants to identify future strategic change drivers and the most relevant social actors for the attainment of economic, social and environmental development in the Guaviare through FPPG.

The findings suggest that the development of public policies regarding building consensus around Guaviare’s economic, environmental and social issues, reducing conflict between the region’s cultural and environmental ways, decreasing isolation from the centers of decision-making, increasing the transparency of public institutions and reducing insecurity to attract investments are all crucial to attaining sustainable regional development.

Interdisciplinarity is implicit in the local perspectives on the problem that impedes sustainable development in San José del Guaviare. The paper’s main contribution is the long-term vision that breaks away from the traditional short-termism in public policy guidelines in a Latin American context. Methodologically, the significant contribution is the convergent alignment of specific foresight methods toward public policy guidelines’ analysis and design processes.

The purpose of this paper is to expose the impact of innovation and patent registration, as a strategy that contributes to business success in the current competitive and globalized market conditions.

This paper presents a study on the innovation and contribution of the patent registry in the growth of economic sales of 1,746 companies in the Colombian manufacturing sector, whose applied methodology was a statistical correlation analysis and a binary logistic regression.

The results reveal a positive relationship among incremental product innovations with the achievement of sales success, although it is evident that patent registration negatively influences business success as a factor in innovation.

This study allows organizations to understand the importance of developing innovation processes and patent registration as a competitive factor that drives sales growth and success.