Mechatronics and Robotics (MaR) have recently gained importance in product development and manufacturing settings and applications. Therefore, the Center for Space Emerging Technologies (C-SET) has managed an international multi-disciplinary study to present, historically, the first Latin American general review of industrial, collaborative, and mobile robotics, with the support of North American and European researchers and institutions. The methodology is developed by considering literature extracted from Scopus, Web of Science, and Aerospace Research Central and adding reports written by companies and government organizations. This describes the state-of-the-art of MaR until the year 2023 in the 3 Sub-Regions: North America, Central America, and South America, having achieved important results related to the academy, industry, government, and entrepreneurship; thus, the statistics shown in this manuscript are unique. Also, this article explores the potential for further work and advantages described by robotic companies such as ABB, KUKA, and Mecademic and the use of the Robot Operating System (ROS) in order to promote research, development, and innovation. In addition, the integration with industry 4.0 and digital manufacturing, architecture and construction, aerospace, smart agriculture, artificial intelligence, and computational social science (human-robot interaction) is analyzed to show the promising features of these growing tech areas, considering the improvements to increase production, manufacturing, and education in the Region. Finally, regarding the information presented, Latin America is considered an important location for investments to increase production and product development, taking into account the further proposal for the creation of the LATAM Consortium for Advanced Robotics and Mechatronics, which could support and work on roboethics and education/R+D+I law and regulations in the Region. Doi: 10.28991/ESJ-2023-07-04-025 Full Text: PDF

This article presents a case study—that of militarized high schools in Mexico—as an example of how the militarization of government functions can pave the way to militarism. Over the past few years, the Mexican Ministry of Defense has proposed to state governments the creation of militarized public high schools. This case illustrates how Mexico is moving from militarization—understood as the assumption of government functions by the military—to militarism—understood as the promotion of military interests and values—in Mexico’s security crisis, over the last three administrations. This article offers a public policy analysis to address the implications of militarized high schools. The central argument is that the implementation of militarized high schools has been possible through the normalization and institutionalization of militarization as a public policy response to some of the country’s central problems, enhancing the Armed Forces’ role as a de facto political actor. The analysis contributes to the “militarization and militarism” literature by exploring how the policy-making process plays a role in bridging between the two. The case study presents how policy of promoting a militarized model of education is directly proposed to state governments by Mexico’s Ministry of Defense, thus visibilizing their role as a cuasi independent political actor and positioning their own agenda and values in areas traditionally reserved to civilian authorities. By accepting the Ministry of Defense’s proposals on this matter, state governments are contributing to deepening the country’s constitutional crisis and the undermining of its democratic institutions.

This paper aims to identify whether there are statistically significant differences in the level of perceived achievement of complex thinking competence in a population of Latin American students from different disciplines. The intention is to corroborate or question the academic literature that categorizes certain types of thinking (systemic, scientific, and critical) as characteristic elements of some disciplines. Methodologically, the validated eComplexity instrument was applied to a sample of 370 undergraduate students from a Mexican university. The results showed that the highest means for systems thinking can be found in the disciplines of Engineering, Business, and Humanities, while the highest means for critical thinking can be found among architecture students. However, statistically, the results showed no significant differences upon an overall comparison of all disciplines. In conclusion, the findings of this study prove to be valuable for educational institutions seeking to develop complex thinking in their students, demonstrating that the disciplinary area is not a limiting factor in developing a perception of achievement in a particular competence and its sub-competences.

This research aims to know the stress level of teachers of one of the Santa Catarina Technological University majors and, if it is high, take the appropriate measures to try to reduce it to a safer proportion for teachers, and thus prevent teachers from getting sick or incapacitated very often. It is known to all that if the teacher does not fulfill his obligations, the one directly affected is the student, who will have a poor academic performance. To measure the level of stress, a questionnaire consisting of 23 questions will be applied to the teachers of the cited school, the options that will have to answer those questions are 4: nothing at all, a little, moderately and strongly, with values of 1, 2, 3 and 4 respectively; The answers selected by the teachers will be added and compared with a low, medium and high scale. Subsequently, a relationship of the level of stress against teacher performance will be established through a statistical treatment, where the correlation of these variables will be established by the method of the linear correlation coefficient r of Pearson. Likewise, the equation of the regression line by least squares will also be established with its corresponding graph for analysis.

Como parte de la fase exploratoria de un proyecto más amplio, se analizaron las transformaciones que las políticas de ciencia y educación superior, ligadas a la instauración de un nuevo patrón de legitimación académica en México, han provocado en un segmento del profesorado, específicamente en el que realiza investigación científica en ciencias sociales en los estados del noreste. Las fuentes analizadas fueron, principalmente, entrevistas realizadas a 22 de estos académicos en las que se aborda la forma en que ellos conciben, valoran y se relacionan con estas políticas, así como los efectos que han tenido y las condiciones regionales e institucionales específicas de aplicación. Cuando ha sido posible, las impresiones de los entrevistados son contrastadas con datos construidos a partir de los padrones del Sistema Nacional de Investigadores o con antecedentes empíricos disponibles. Los resultados muestran una visión compartida ampliamente entre los académicos sobre un desarrollo considerable de su campo en las últimas tres décadas, producto en buena medida de las políticas referidas. También es muy extendida la percepción de que se ha entrado en una fase de estancamiento en ese desarrollo. Una de las principales explicaciones que se le dan es el desinterés o la hostilidad hacia su labor en los contextos locales, los cuales no habrían sido revertidos a pesar de su relativo crecimiento y legitimación. Entre las conclusiones preliminares que podemos extraer de estos resultados destacamos que, derivado del carácter exógeno de los impulsos que permitieron su desarrollo en la región, este segmento del profesorado tendría una articulación deficiente con buena parte de las dinámicas y los intereses de las instituciones de educación superior locales.

From a qualitative perspective, we seek to analyze how educated indigenous that emigrated to Monterrey (capital of Nuevo Leon, Mexico) interpret and value, from their own ethnic identity, the audiovisual character of India Maria. We find that, although most of them carry out critical readings that lead them to partially reject India Maria because they consider it discriminatory, in most of them there is an ambivalence, reflecting an identity conflict, so they also enjoy the character and even recognize some similarities between them and the character.

In this chapter, we focus on a specific innovation stream in the area of alternative financial services (AFSs), namely online financial education and awareness-raising targeting vulnerable social groups.

This paper aims to identify the inflection point in financial discourse, the moment of explosion and unpredictability in the 2007–2008 economic crisis, through an analysis of metaphors, and its relation to the concept of jumps in finance. The corpus is formed by articles dating from 2007–2008 published in The Wall Street Journal and related to the movements of the Standard & Poor’s 500 index (S&P500) of the United States. For the purposes of this paper, two texts are analysed: “Traders in Lehman, AIG held out hope – Friday”, and the speech “Four questions about the financial crisis” by Ben S. Bernanke. What is of particular interest is the transformation of unpredictability to predictability, as incorporated in this type of discourse to indicate a predetermined chain of events, chosen from a wide spectrum of possibilities. The theoretical framework draws on Juri Lotman’s views on the concepts of explosion, unpredictability, inflection point and predictability.

In this paper, we report the preparation of terbium(Tb+3) complex 2 (Diaqua-tris(nitrato)-(2(pyridine-2,6-diyl(methyleneoxy))benzaldehyde)terbium(III)) by the mechanochemical route in good yields, which demonstrated to be superior to conventional method in terms of simplicity, reaction time, cost and reproducibility. Complex 2 and its free ligand 1 (2,6-bis[2-formylphenoxymethyl]pyridine) were characterized by UV–Vis and FT-IR spectroscopy, and mass spectrometry. In addition, the complex was structurally characterized by Single-crystal XRD, and thermal analysis. The X-ray structure of complex demonstrates that terbium atom adopts a monocapped square antiprismatic geometry and cocrystallizes with one molecule of ligand in the asymmetric unit. Likewise, the effect of pH on the complex and its ligand revealed that fluorescent intensity is increased under alkaline conditions. In a preliminary study on selected heavy metals, terbium complex showed a good sensitive towards Cu+2 ions at low concentrations with the decrease of emission response.

This article aims to incorporate a proposal of an “evolved” understanding of social rights from the postulates of neoconstitutional paradigm, current in our times. This will be done through the analysis of the arguments against the justiciability of social rights put forward from the positivist paradigm, whose strength will be tested against theoretical arguments of the neoconstitutional paradigm. We conclude that facing this change of paradigm, the positivist arguments have remained obsolete, generating the necessity of a change of perspective in the theory of the social rights.