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A study of the role of urban communities in the development of citizenship & civil society in Spain before & after institution of a democratic regime. Focus is on: community-based solidarity for the development of urban social movements before the 1979 local democratic elections & the resultant rise of voluntary associations; the formal organizations based on consensus politics, eg, political parties & trade unions, that were formed regionally & nationally during the transitional period to democracy; & the civic associations enabling cultural, educational, & leisure activities that have developed during the last decade. Although local governments remain poorly financed, local politics & identities continue to be a significant part of citizen life; however, community action has weakened in the poorest neighborhoods & more recently in developed neighborhoods. 1 Table. Adapted from the source document.

The main purpose of this thesis is to critical analyze two documentary films, "De Panzazo" and "Grain of Sand", both about the educational situation in Mexico and both focusing in the profile of the Mexican teacher and its activities that have helped either to "damage" or to "defend" the educational system. This research aims to question the role of the teacher and the relationship with standard educational practices that serve dominant interests by questioning how are the roles of teachers and their accountability represented in both documentaries, and what is the critical social analysis behind each representation? The work of Teun A. van Dijk in Critical Discourse Analysis is used as the main method and theory of the research that puts into perspective different forms of power control trough the media. The method establishes the use of four categories (Text and Speaker, Context, Meaning, Form and Style and Topics) that allows determining the different ways in where domination and control is established during the discourse of the films. Later on, a comparison between the two films is utilized in order to find the differences of both discourses. The results of the study provides a critical perspective towards one of the films "De Panzazo" in where teachers are represented as "authoritarians", "irresponsible", "well paid professionals" and "failure" providing certain responsibilities are considers "desirable" for teachers such as evaluations to measure their performances that at the end will determine the privatization of the education in Mexico. On the other hand the film "Grain of Sand" provides a different discourse in where teachers are perceived as "social leaders", "political actors", "fighters" and teachers that are "oppressed" by different social, political and economical matters. In conclusion this study reflects the position in where teachers are constantly misunderstood and attacked by mass media, including the production of documentary films that lack to present the other analysis of the Mexican teachers as main contributors of the fight towards the rights of their students, the communities in where they live, and the rights of their own profession.

Surface chemical composition, electronic structure, and bonding characteristics determine catalytic activity but are not resolved for individual catalyst particles by conventional spectroscopy. In particular, the nano-scale three-dimensional distribution of aliovalent lanthanide dopants in ceria catalysts and their effect on the surface electronic structure remains unclear. Here, we reveal the surface segregation of dopant cations and oxygen vacancies and observe bonding changes in lanthanum-doped ceria catalyst particle aggregates with sub-nanometer precision using a new model-based spectroscopic tomography approach. These findings refine our understanding of the spatially varying electronic structure and bonding in ceria-based nanoparticle aggregates with aliovalent cation concentrations and identify new strategies for advancing high efficiency doped ceria nano-catalysts. ; We thank Alex Eggeman for assistance with computational resources, supported by the Royal Society, for memory-intensive calculations. The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Research Council under the European Union's Seventh Framework Program (No. FP7/2007–2013)/ERC Grant Agreement No. 291522-3DIMAGE and the European Union's Seventh Framework Program under a contract for an Integrated Infrastructure Initiative (Reference No. 312483-ESTEEM2).

During most of their life, stars fuse hydrogen into helium in their cores. The mixing of chemical elements in the radiative envelope of stars with a convective core is able to replenish the core with extra fuel. If effective, such deep mixing allows stars to live longer and change their evolutionary path. Yet localized observations to constrain internal mixing are absent so far. Gravity modes probe the deep stellar interior near the convective core and allow us to calibrate internal mixing processes. Here we provide core-to-surface mixing profiles inferred from observed dipole gravity modes in 26 rotating stars with masses between 3 and 10 solar masses. We find a wide range of internal mixing levels across the sample. Stellar models with stratified mixing profiles in the envelope reveal the best asteroseismic performance. Our results provide observational guidance for three-dimensional hydrodynamical simulations of transport processes in the deep interiors of stars.Kepler space telescope observations of 26 intermediate-mass rotating stars (slowly pulsating B-type stars) are analysed to isolate the gravity modes that probe the stars' deep interiors. Internal mixing levels are unexpectedly varied and best reproduced with models incorporating radially stratified mixing profiles. ; We thank the MESA and GYRE code developers for their efforts, public dissemination and training initiatives to make their software so accessible to the worldwide astrophysics community. We thank S. Ekström of the Geneva Observatory for providing mixing profiles from Georgy et al.4 in electronic format. We acknowledge the work of the teams behind the NASA Kepler and ESA Gaia space missions. This work is based on observations with the HERMES spectrograph at the Mercator Telescope, which is operated at La Palma, Spain, by the Flemish Community. This research has made use of the SIMBAD database, operated at CDS, Strasbourg, France, and NASA's Astrophysics Data System. The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement number 670519: MAMSIE), from the National Science Foundation (grant number NSF PHY-1748958), from the KU Leuven Research Council (grant number C16/18/005: PARADISE) and from the Research Foundation Flanders (FWO) by means of PhD Fellowships to M.M. and S. Gebruers under contract numbers 11F7120N and 11E5620N and a senior post-doctoral fellowship to D.M.B. under grant agreement number 1286521N. Funding for the Kepler Mission was provided by NASA's Science Mission Directorate. Gaia data are being processed by the Gaia Data Processing and Analysis Consortium (DPAC); funding for the DPAC is provided by national institutions, in particular the institutions participating in the Gaia MultiLateral Agreement (MLA).