"This is not a democracy," Antonio Garcia-Trevijano denounces in the first pages of this book. To confront the great lie that Europe does have democratic regimes, a lie rooted in people's confounding of the liberties they enjoy with the political freedom that they lack, the author builds a realistic theory of democracy to end the false idea that corruption, state crime, and public immorality are democracy's (undesirable) products and not the natural and inevitable fruits of oligarchic regimes. Thanks to a superb review of the events that mark the history of democracy, the author reveals the obstacles that, from the 17th century English revolution, the United States' War of Independence, and the French Revolution, opposed political freedom, deviating old Europe's democratic possibilities toward the current parties' state. There exist important theories of the state and of constitution, but none that can be called a theory of democracy. Antonio Garcia-Trevijano's original theory, a modern synthesis of Rousseau's pure democracy and Montesquieu's political freedom, responds to European need for a theory of democracy as a real alternative to the corrupted parties' regime that was engendered by Western pragmatism during the Cold War.

Bioactive Lipids presents the topic of bioactive lipids from a functional food development perspective. This book explores the potential of dietary lipids to understand how such bioactive compounds can be used in the development of functional foods and nutraceuticals. The book includes case studies to enable readers to understand the potential of several dietary lipids and the possibilities regarding their incorporation into several food matrices. Bioactive Lipids will be a welcome reference for researchers, lecturers and students from the food science and nutrition fields.

The query optimization problem has been widely addressed in Relational Database Management Systems (RDBMS). Many strategies have been implemented to solve this problem including deterministic algorithms, randomized algorithms, meta-heuristic algorithms and hybrid approaches. This book provides a literature review that includes solutions to the join-ordering problem using simulated annealing, genetic algorithms and ant colony optimization. Such methodologies deeply depend on the correct configuration of various input parameters. This book also introduces a new meta-heuristic approach based on the automata theory adapted to solve the join-ordering problem. The proposed method requires only a single input parameter that facilitates its usage respect to other methods. The algorithm was embedded into PostgreSQL and compared with the genetic competitor using random and star database schemas.

Seminar paper from the year 2009 in the subject Economics - Case Scenarios, grade: 1.3, Otto Beisheim School of Management Vallendar, language: English, abstract: This paper analyzes the path that Brazil's economy has taken to reach today's status; the status of a stable economy that shows high potential to meet the challenging expectations that economists set on it. The idea is to source the roots of the economic stability and performance of Latin America's largest country and to highlight the implications it will have in the near and remote future. Chapter 2 focuses on the Real Plan launched in 1994. A set of reforms which transformed Brazil's economy from a protected economy facing four-digit inflation rates into a stable economy capable of competing with developed economies. It discusses the implementation of the Real Plan, its measures and its positive and negative consequences for the Brazilian economy. Furthermore we are going to deal with the recent past of Brazil's economy since the presidential elections in 2002, when the leader of the workers' party Lula da Silva was elected. We focus on the economic policy of the president and its government, whose election has almost led to the default of the Brazilian state because financial markets were afraid that the socialist candidate would pursue a 180 degree turn compared to the neoliberal economic policy of his predecessor. We analyze why Brazil was one of the last countries being affected by the financial crisis and why it was one of the first to leave it behind.